Hold Your Nerve, Cameron. History Will Deal With The Dinosaurs.

David Cameron must be applauded for his admirable stance on equal marriage.

On 20 May and 21 May 2013 equal marriage sustained another fierce parliamentary attack, but despite the best efforts of “traditionalists” the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill thankfully passed successfully through the House of Commons.

I’ve argued before that Cameron deserves real credit for his position on equal marriage. He must have known it would go down badly amongst “traditional grass roots Tory voters” (which is polite code for “Tories who don’t like gay people or certainly not enough to believe they should have identical legal rights to straight people”) but his commitment to this crucial piece of equalities legislation doesn’t seem to be faltering.

Cameron is a former PR man and he’s often criticised for merely “re-branding” the Tory party (and often doing a rather poor job even of that). Of course, it’s perfectly possible that the entire equal marriage project is simply one step on the road to brand detoxification and that Cameron doesn’t care less about the rights of gay people. He might even hate gay people for all we know. We can never know for sure what motivates a politician – whether it’s personal beliefs or political pragmatism or a bit of both – but in many cases a politician’s personal motivations will effectively be irrelevant as long as the final result is good.

In choosing to go to war on equal marriage with his own party and some Tory voters, and at this point in time, Cameron has shown some serious leadership and he’s shown he’s also pretty serious about equal citizenship rights and/or reforming his party.

He has chosen to fight this battle during an economic crisis, thereby giving his opponents the simple opportunity to argue the UK faces far greater challenges than the matrimonial arrangements of its citizens. (Notice the curious choice here: we must either fix our economy or discuss legal equality – we can’t do both. Why not?)

He has chosen to fight this battle when he is weak politically. Cameron is so weak he didn’t even secure a parliamentary majority for the Tories in the 2010 general election. He is the Prime Minister of a coalition government; there’s no Blair-like first term majority here.

He has chosen to fight this battle when his leadership is being subjected to another significant stress test: Europe.

He has chosen to fight this battle when Nigel Farage’s UKIP are waiting to pounce like rabid vultures.

He has chosen to fight this battle when he’s trying to convince another set of vultures – religious institutions – to assume the responsibilities of the state by providing services to the public under the smokescreen of the “Big Society”.

The hypocrisy of the Conservative party is at times quite a sight to behold – and I say that as someone who has generally voted for them in the past. This is the party that often argues for a “small state”, against the perils of a “nanny state”, and from a libertarian perspective for stronger rights and freedoms of the individual, free from the evil clutches of bloated bureaucracies. How on earth are those ideas compatible in any way with bigoted opposition to equal marriage and swivel-eyed support for a pointless, morally bankrupt, homophobic and misogynist established church? Cameron once said, “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.” That was a nice soundbite for a Tory conference but there’s also some truth in that statement.

Tory hypocrisy on equal marriage manifests itself in other ways. We’re told this legislation has no democratic legitimacy on the (correct) basis it wasn’t in the Tories’ 2010 election manifesto. It was, though, in the party’s equalities manifesto which was published just before that election, and that surely gives equal marriage a good degree of democratic legitimacy. Or at least some legitimacy rather than none. Can we expect Tory opponents of same sex marriage not to pursue any policy in the course of a parliament unless it was set out in their election manifesto? I doubt it.

Finally, while we’re on the subject of democratic legitimacy, let’s remember that arguments against equal marriage are almost exclusively religious in nature and that they’re supported by the formidable, privileged, ruthless, unearned, unaccountable and discriminatory power of religious institutions. But that’s one form of democratic illegitimacy you won’t hear many Tories complaining about any day soon.

***

You can follow The Re-Enlightenment on Twitter @REnlightenment and you can sign up for email notification of new articles on this blog’s home page.

I’m in the Huffington Post!

Well sort of.

This week the impressive Ali A Rizvi had an excellent piece in the Huffington Post in which he quoted one of my blog posts at some length.  This was Rizvi’s follow-up to his previous post in which he described himself as an “atheist Muslim”, and he was questioned so much about that description of himself that he decided to explore the idea in more detail. As it happens that was a subject I had also considered myself, and I’m honoured that my sentiments struck a chord with Rizvi and that he gave me such a generous nod in his most recent post.

Just to clarify, though, and not that it changes any of the arguments anyway, I’m not a Muslim atheist as Rizvi assumed I was. I’m just a standard ex-Christian atheist. That said, I am occasionally tempted to convert to Islam and then immediately leave, just to feel an even greater sense of solidarity with my ex-Muslim and atheist Muslim friends.

In fact I don’t often describe myself as an atheist anyway. I feel I shouldn’t have to. That’s because it should be irrelevant to how I live my life and how I’m treated by the state and others. I consider myself incredibly privileged to live in the UK with its de facto secularism because by and large for me being an atheist generally is irrelevant. I wrote a post about the word atheist, and how and why I avoid it, here:

But for many people being an atheist is far from irrelevant to how they live their lives. Take just two recent stories as examples.

Last week an estimated 70,000-100,000 people dosed up to the eyeballs on a high octane cocktail of neat religion and intolerance went on the rampage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, calling for the death penalty for atheist bloggers. Sadly I didn’t hear strong condemnation from the UK government. Strangely, our “Minister for Faith” Baroness Warsi called for “restraint on all sides”. Restraint on all sides? Do you remember the hoards of atheists calling for death to Muslim bloggers? I certainly don’t.  Perhaps when she says “restraint on all sides” what Warsi actually means is, “people shouldn’t use their freedom of speech to criticise or even disagree with Islam”.

Religion thrives on false equivalence: exercising free speech to discuss, criticise or even mock Islam is considered the same as inciting the murder of actual human beings. You need to remember this is the same Baroness Warsi who is rather chummy with the thugs at the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC, similar to the sound a pig makes), who call for a global blasphemy law.

And today is International Imad Day, to give support to the 22-year old Moroccan Imad Iddine Habib who has set up the Council of ex-Muslims of Morocco.  This is the first ex-Muslim council to be established in a country that has Islam as the state religion. Predictably and depressingly, Imad has gone into hiding because of threats against him.

We atheists really should stop being so aggressive.

If only there were a nice peaceful religion out there for us.

Anyone care to name one?

***

You can follow The Re-Enlightenment on Twitter @REnlightenment and you can sign up for email notification of new articles on this blog’s home page.

Sharia: Cameron Can Kill Multiple Birds With One Stoning

Establishing that women suffer when religion and law collide is like establishing that excrement emits an unpleasant odour.

On Monday 22 April BBC’s Panorama examined the fundamental incompatibility of women’s rights and religious legal systems in their excellent programme, “Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Councils”.

For those of us who were already concerned about sharia councils there was nothing particularly new in this programme – though of course it’s always deeply unsettling to see human rights being infringed, especially in the name of a supposedly moral belief system.

A classic moment from the Panorama programme was when the undercover journalist, posing as a user of the sharia council, told the “judge” that her husband was beating her. The judge asks, “severely?” Then, displaying all the hallmarks of a sensitive, highly-trained legal professional he asks whether there was anything she had done to provoke her poor husband’s unavoidable actions – be it her cooking, seeing her friends, generally not being a good wife. You get the idea.

Without the insulating protection that only religion can provide, every mentally sound human on planet Earth and probably many unsound ones too would immediately and effortlessly conclude that sharia councils have no place whatsoever in a civilised society, other than perhaps in a museum or a horror movie.

But throw religion into the equation – and one religion in particular – and naturally everything is turned on its head.  Vulnerable women are undeserving of legal protection; bullies become victims; those who speak out are part of the problem rather than part of the solution; condemnation is followed by the word “but”; the well-intentioned desire to give women from ethnic minorities the same rights as white women is a form of racism; infringement of women’s fundamental and hard-won rights is Feminism 2.0; and the language of human rights is used to justify the infringement of human rights.

That’s what religion does: it creates a dizzy, topsy-turvy world. It’s literally insane. You do have to admire it sometimes.

But surely it’s ok because there are “moderates” who will unequivocally condemn these sharia councils, right? Well not really. The role of the moderate seems to be ensuring criticism is moderate, and unfortunately their most pressing concern is often to defend Islam rather than actual human beings, even when those human beings happen to be their co-religionists. The result of these intellectual shortcomings is that so-called moderates tell us this is not “the real Islam”.

Yes, that’s right: Muslim women, married to Muslim men, being coerced ever so subtly or not subtly at all to drink an unholy Islamic legal cocktail that is neither mediation nor arbitration, seeking Islamic divorces under sharia “law” in sharia “courts” in front of sharia “judges” – is not real Islam. Well I reckon it’s pretty bloody real to the women involved. Shit doesn’t get much more real than that.

As the camera pans across to reveal a beautiful sunset and a fine sandy beach, riding to the rescue on her ethnically diverse stallion we see the dashing figure of Baroness Warsi, who reassures her Twitter followers that the government in which she is “Minister for Faith” will not tolerate this – though inexplicably the same government will not support Baroness Cox’s Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill which is designed to cut the balls off sharia and other putrid religious legal systems. It would be funny if it were not so shameful.

And this is the very same Baroness Warsi, lest we forget, who demonises secularism and uses live secularists as target practice, failing to grasp (even as a lawyer herself) that only a secular legal system and secularism generally can provide the appropriate mechanisms to protect desperate women who are having their legal rights bulldozered in the name of “religious diversity”. The noble baroness fails to understand that when you apply the concept of religious diversity to human rights you end up with diversity of human rights rather than diversity of religion.

As for Mr Cameron his failure to back the Cox Bill demonstrates either a complete disregard for the rights of Muslim women or a profound lack of political intelligence, or probably a mixture of the two.  Even if he couldn’t care less about the rights of women with dark skin he is too dumb to realise he could at least use this issue to kill a number of political birds with the same stone:

1. He could portray sharia councils as a symptom of “Broken Britain”.

2. He has spoken before about the failure of multiculturalism. Sharia is the textbook example to offer.

3. Leaping to the defence of women’s rights could show the Tory party is “women-friendly”.

4. Leaping specifically to the defence of Muslim women’s rights could show the Tory party is “ethnic women-friendly”.

5. He could throw a dirty bone to the Christian Right, who would be dumb enough to salivate over that bone and incorrectly interpret it as a sign that we are once again a “Christian country”, in the same way savages might interpret something falling from the sky as a message from their god.

6. He could portray himself as a strong leader, stamping down on the out-of-control, unaccountable and menacing institutions that are sharia councils.

I don’t really care about Cameron’s motivations and political dividends for dealing with sharia councils; I just want the end result to be that human rights are protected. The right result for the wrong reasons is still the right result.

I’m fed up of secularists like myself playing the role of punch bag, especially when we’re so often the ones who generally have the solutions to these problems. (Secularism is also what enables a female Muslim like Sayeeda Warsi to sit in the House of Lords.)

Foolish individuals like Cameron and Warsi forget that secularists vote, too.

Some secularists have even voted for the Conservatives in the past.

But now they’re not so sure.

***

You can follow The Re-Enlightenment on Twitter @REnlightenment and you can sign up for email notification of new articles on this blog’s home page.

Boston Bombing: Why I’m Hoping It Wasn’t Islamic Terrorism

I touched on this subject after Anders Breivik’s orgy of violence in July 2011. Here goes again.

I’m hoping it wasn’t Islamic terrorism…

Because it won’t be condemned unequivocally.

Because politicians and commentators will search for excuses for terrorism. And rest assured: they will find them.

Because cold-blooded murderers will transform effortlessly into victims by being called “martyrs”.

Because everyone will get the blame. Apart from the terrorists.

Because everything will be the cause. Apart from religion.

Because everything will be criticised. Apart from Islam.

Because when societies are unable or unwilling to discuss the root causes of a problem they ensure that problem won’t go away, and that it gets worse.

Because Muslim “scholars” and their supine, western civilisation-hating “liberal” apologists will mock us by saying Islam means “peace” (whilst buildings are still smoking) when some us already know it means “submission”.

Because everyone who talks openly and frankly will be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Because everyone who talks openly and frankly will be labelled intolerant, aggressive or supremacist – when these are adjectives best applied to blood-thirsty terrorists who seek to murder innocent civilians.

Because so-called moderates will condemn the bombing – well, sort of – before menacingly adding the word “but” and then erroneously connecting the bombings to “western aggression against Muslims”, conveniently or rather deliberately forgetting that a Muslim generally has his or her rights infringed by other Muslims, in the name of Islam and in so-called Muslim countries.

Because commentators will draw false parallels between bombs which inadvertently, tragically, kill civilians and those which are deliberately intended to kill civilians.

Because commentators will contrast the low media coverage and high bodycount of sectarian bombings in the Middle East with the high media coverage and low bodycount of a bomb in an American city – as though it is the West that plants sectarian bombs in Baghdad fruit markets.

Because if you don’t blame perpetrators there is no-one else to blame except the victims, their families and every human being who values freedom.

***

You can follow The Re-Enlightenment on Twitter @REnlightenment and you can sign up for email notification of new articles on this blog’s home page.

Cristina Odone Loses the Plot (Again)

Your beliefs are silly but mine aren’t. Ner ner ner-ner ner.

I’ve written previously about the hopelessly confused and incoherent Telegraph blogger Cristina Odone.

As readers will recall, in response to the brutal “honour” killing of the Bradford schoolgirl Shafilea Ahmed by Ahmed’s own parents, Odone suggested a solution to these problems might be more Muslim faith schools.  I remarked that such faith schools are highly likely to increase the suffocating isolation that girls in Shafilea’s desperate position already find themselves trapped in.

Odone’s brainwave of treating marginalisation with more marginalisation also had an unpleasant stench of blaming the murder victim: if only Shafilea had been a docile, obedient little Muslim girl, diligently studying the Koran in a locked madrassa, then perhaps she might not have succumbed to intoxicating and hedonistic infidel pursuits such as the shameful quest for personal freedom and the selfish desire to select her own partner rather than outsource that decision to her parents, and maybe she’d still be breathing today.  Who the hell did Shafilea think she was?  A white girl living in a western liberal democracy?

Odone is at it again.  She has responded angrily to a front page story in the Daily Mail which was cynically designed to infuriate and misinform Christians like herself.

The crux of the Mail’s bile was this: legal rights that Christians have are also available to non-Christians such as Druids, vegans or Greens, which is therefore an “insult to Christians”.  Scandalous, obviously: what is the country coming to when all its citizens have identical rights? For a first-class, surgical dissection of the ridiculous Mail piece, see this post from Darren Newman.

Odone observes:

“In other words, the tenets of Druids, vegans and greens are on a par with those of Christianity and the world religions.”

That’s right. The law treats all beliefs equally – by not making a judgment on the actual beliefs themselves. The law cannot and must not make a judgment on the quality of beliefs. The sole concern of the law is ensuring human beings don’t suffer discrimination for holding those beliefs and that any manifestation of those beliefs doesn’t infringe the lawful rights of other human beings.

Odone goes on to say of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the organization whose guidance for employers triggered the Mail story:

“[The] EHRC…will now be obliged to extend its special pleading to Jedi warriors and other joke “religions”. What a nightmare for employers this will turn out to be.”

To me, all religions are a joke (some are deadly funny), but that’s not the point. The point is: that doesn’t stop me from advocating identical legal rights for their followers and non-followers alike – something which Odone is clearly unwilling to do.

As for the “nightmare for employers” which Odone prophesizes, I simply ask some questions. Who is generally causing this nightmare for employers?  Who is generally bringing cases to the courts pleading special legal treatment?  Who is generally complaining ad infinitum in the pages and webpages of the Daily Malice and Daily Theocraph about a loss of historic privilege and the arrival in its place of an increasingly humane and level playing-field? Druids, Jedis, and followers of other “joke” religions? Or followers of Christianity and “the world religions”?

Odone has written previously of how she is “outraged” by the blatant discrimination against Catholics that is legally woven into our constitutional tapestry, as Catholics are forbidden from being the head of state (and until recently the head of state wasn’t even allowed to marry a Catholic).

I share completely Odone’s outrage at these indefensible theocratic stains on our precious democracy, and I would gladly stand shoulder to shoulder with her in extinguishing fully all genuine forms of religious discrimination such as this.

So come on, Cristina (may I call you Cristina?), how about we both campaign for disestablishment of the Church of England?  Or perhaps, on balance, you can live quite happily with deeply embedded constitutional discrimination against Catholics in exchange for the bountiful privileges that having an official state religion brings you, and perhaps you would rather expend your efforts arguing that Druids, vegans and Greens should have fewer rights than followers of “world religions”?

Now that really is a joke.

***

You can follow The Re-Enlightenment on Twitter @REnlightenment and you can sign up for email notification of new articles on this blog’s home page.

Cameron and Religion: Payback Time

“Please forgive me, for I have sinned. As the democratically-elected leader of a democracy I have tried to ensure identical legal rights for all citizens.” – David Cameron, Prime Minister

In two of my recent blog posts, on Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals for press reform and equal marriage, I’ve managed to say some rather nice words about David Cameron.

On both these issues I’ve argued Cameron deserves credit for his leadership. He has taken a considerable battering in the form of enemy fire from his political opponents on Leveson and friendly fire from his own party on equal marriage.

It was only a matter of time before my cheerleading for Cameron had to stop, and in fact at the very end of my equal marriage post I displayed my shrewd skills of political tea-leaf reading by predicting he would have to throw a large hunk of meat to the religious lobby as a form of appeasement.

It was always going to be difficult for Cameron to push for legal equality for homosexuals without having to grovel to his religious friends shortly afterwards. And so the inevitable has happened: at an Easter reception in Downing Street Cameron has said his government is not only committed to Britain’s links with the Church of England but that it wants to:

“stand up and oppose aggressive secularisation that can sometimes happen in our society.”

It seems as though this act of reassurance to religious leaders, complete with the now-trademark demonization of secularism and secularists, will be a regular fixture in the Downing Street diary. I wrote about last year’s almost carbon-copy Easter egg party here.

As always the examples of this alleged “aggressive secularisation” are not entirely compelling, which is possibly why Cameron felt the need to temper his slur by saying it “sometimes happens in our society”. Maybe that’s the relatively uncommon usage of the word sometimes to mean “not very often”. Or “never”.

Referring to the National Secular Society’s successful council prayers judicial review against Bideford Town Council (which I discussed here), Cameron tried to encourage his guests to ignore the judgement of a democracy’s competent court:

“We’ve sent out a very clear message to aggressive secularists…We changed the law so that people can go on saying prayers before council meetings.”

The legal effect of the Localism Act, the supposed change in law to which Cameron is referring, is yet to be tested. In any case, it’s a sideshow which misses the point.

There was no problem and there remains no problem with prayers before council meetings.  Bideford Town Council ran into choppy legal waters because prayers were a formal agenda item for meetings. The council rejected two perfectly reasonable compromises, either of which would have avoided litigation: prayers to be said before the meeting, on council premises; or a period of silence at the beginning of the meeting where the religious and the non-religious could all gather their thoughts as they wished.

But then, politicians and religious leaders often have a near-vampiric reaction to inconvenient obstacles like facts and honest debate, hence Cameron’s failure to describe the events in Devon accurately and his dishonest suggestion now that the Localism Act reverses the High Court’s decision.

Of course the key issue that has angered many religious groups, and the driving factor behind this hideously undignified act of prime ministerial grovelling, is equal marriage. You might have thought that religious groups, for so long the tormentors of homosexuals and the architects of the tallest hurdles to their legal equality, might have finally displayed a humble dose of “love thy neighbour” on this essential point of human rights.

But no, as bullies so often do they have managed to portray themselves as the victims on same-sex marriage, both during the passage of the Bill and now in their expectation that they’re owed something in return.

The legal assurance of a “quadruple legal lock”, which not only excuses the Church of England from the tiresome obligation of performing same-sex marriages but actually specifically forbids them from doing so, wasn’t enough for the Church, and funnily enough (even though it isn’t really funny) not allowing the Church of England to perform same-sex marriages unnecessarily infringes the religious freedom of those within the Church who happen to support such unions.

I’m no fool. I understand the general nature of politics. The Prime Minister can’t give everyone what they want and he has to keep as many people on his side as possible. I get that.

But what does it say about power-seeking religious leaders with a dreadful track record of supporting human rights that they need to be appeased by our Prime Minister because he had the temerity to introduce legislation giving legal equality to those who have historically had their rights infringed by religious leaders, even though the legislation went to very reasonable (and indeed excessive) lengths to protect the Church of England?

And what does it say about a Prime Minister who will so readily grovel for his sin of pursuing equality before the law?  Even in the brutally unforgiving jungle of political realism, is that something for which the United Kingdom’s democratically-elected leader ought to repent? Ever?

***

You can follow The Re-Enlightenment on Twitter @REnlightenment and you can sign up for email notification of new articles on this blog’s home page.