Some European countries (England) have laws that curtail freedom of speech to protect religious groups from criticism. There is a BBC an article that a Polish Court convicted a prominent journalist of insulting a foreign head of state. He compared the Pope to Brezhnev. I haven’t been able to get the offensive text. He may have meant that the Pope is isolated and dependent on the Vatican bureaucacy and a few personal assistants, and losing touch. That argument has some merit.
The head of State was the Pope who is the head of state of the Vatican City, which is a separate state under International Law. Poland doesn’t seem to have laws that specifically protect the Catholic Church and other religious groups from hate speech or other lesser forms of criticism. However I am not sure how those laws might apply to criticism of the Pope or his performance in the Vatican.
Category: Liege & Lief
Swedish Preacher
My previous post, devoted to the Westboro Baptist Church’s bizarre interpretation of the Indian ocean disaster, refers to a case in Sweden in which a Pentecostal Minister was charged with the criminal offence of hate speech against gays and lesbians for a sermon preached in his own church. I had trouble getting a clear factual story on the Web, because most of the Web sites that mention it are either devoted to the interests of religious groups, or devoted to gay pride issues. Each side has its own stories and both contain mistakes and legal inaccuracies. The coverage in the online edition of Christianity Today was clear and informative. It also played a minor part in a story about the cultural war between religion and liberalism in Europe in Time Magazine.
Behzti and Mr. Bean
The Behzti story has been in the news from England for the last few weeks. It evokes one of the themes of the movie Bend it Like Beckham, as second generation Sikhs come into conflict with their families as they make their own way in British society, but there are no happy endings here. Behzti is a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a younger Sikh woman, which was being staged at the Birmingham Repertory Theater. The play is set in a gurdwara (temple) and has a scene of sexual abuse by a Sikh priest – a rape scene. Conservative religious Sikhs protested. At first the protests were small but they escalated to protests by hundreds, with protesters storming the theater on December 18. By December 21, the play had closed and the playwright had gone into hiding after receiving death threats. Some Sikh leaders condemned the death threats.
Ukranian Orange
With orange having been his campaign colour in the Ukranian presidential election, and the emblem of resistance to the fraudulent election results, creative voices in the world media have tried to find an ironic symmetry in the news that medical tests confirm that Victor Yushchensko ingested dioxin. The Daily Express claimed that he had been poisoned with Agent Orange. The news that high levels of dioxin were found in tissue samples tends to cut through some of the confusion and speculation in the media and the scientific community.
Irony Week in Ottawa
Rick Mercer is a supercilious prick, but he can be very funny. (Or should I say he is funny and can be a prick?) I wonder if he writes his own lines.
Tonight in the opening segment of his self-named CBC show he commented on George W. Bush’s visit to Ottawa, which includes a visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, “it must be irony week in Ottawa.”
Indeed, with the looting of the museums of the cradle of civilization during the American invasion of Iraq … Perhaps not the point Mercer was making but heh…
Reality-Based Community
I began to see bloggers identifying themselves as part of the Reality-Based Community in the last couple of days. It’s an ironic response to a remark by a White House staff member who dismissed the the Reality-based community when he was talking to a journalist in 2002. Most of the proud members of the Reality-Based community are using it as evidence that the Bush team is wrapped up in its own rhetoric – its own separate reality, if you please. Some are using it as evidence that the Bush team is being run by religious zealots who reject science and reason.
I think this remark tells us that the people in the White House like being positive and pro-active and optimistic and supportive and team players, and that they have their own private code for talking about people on the outside.
Moralizing Liberals
A few days after 2004 American elections, I am tired of the commentary coming from the propaganists and leaders of both of the dominant factions. Republicans, barely restraining their glee at winning, talk insincerely about reaching out to liberals and healing. Liberals talk about how illiterate and stupid fundamentalists were tricked by propaganda, funded by corporate interests, into electing a hollow and stupid person to the most powerful position in the world. Some liberal leaders and propagandists are trying to distance themselves and the Democrats from the Sorry Everybody (Sorry, slow link) project and other distasteful expressions of the disappointment of Senator Kerry’s supporters, although they share the sentiment.
Some leading American liberals have been saying that the Democrats failed in the federal campaigns because the Republicans appealed to “moralism”. This discourse has a couple of variations. There is a pragmatic assessment of the factors that swayed voters, and there is a more theoretical attempt to explain that Republican voters are attracted to moralism, because they are influenced by the views prevalent in their communities – meaning rural and suburban communities, and faith communities. Some liberals imply that it was unfair for the Republicans to appeal to those values and that is wrong for voters to decide political questions on religious and moral grounds. Some liberals are concerned that their attacks on the religious right are reinforcing the claim of the religious right that the Republicans have received a clear mandate for a socially conservative agenda.
It is confused, messy discourse. There is confusion between electoral strategy and the principles – if we can talk about firm principles – of political ideology. Liberal ideologists would like to see the Democratic party, as the instrument of their ideology, succeed without becoming too conservative. They are involved in a project of making liberalism more appealing to the voters, without giving up on the principles they espouse. They are also engaged in the great liberal sport of trying to understand why the masses don’t embrace liberal values and liberal politicians, which usually leads to criticism of the masses, and criticism of the role or religion and religious leaders in forming public opinion.
I heard Robert B. Reich (liberal Democrat, economist, lawyer and writer, politician – Secretary of Labour in President Clinton’s first cabinet) answering a call from one of the hosts of the CBC Radio One program “As it Happens” within a couple of days after the election. His main points were much the same as those posted in the online version of The American Prospect. His online article (published November 4, 2004) The Moral Agenda contends that President Bush and the Republicans campaigned with more moral conviction, which made Mr. Bush a more convincing candidate. He argues that the Democratic party should be committed to liberal values and passionate about those values. He is resigned to the fact that the Democrats won’t find their majority by appealing to the religious right, and I suspect that Professor Reich would be appalled at having to engage with them. The institutional Christian churches in America, including the unaffliated and independentl churches, are socially conservative. Liberal radical Christians devoted to the social justice message in the Bible are an embattled minority. The liberal cause will not get the support of the majority of chuched-up Americans in the foreseeable future. The churches are a relatively cohesive and organized demographic entity. Their members influence and reinforce their own community values. The Democrats can’t connect to those communities. I don’t foresee the organization of liberal churches – that’s an oxymoron in modern America – or any similiarly committed and coherent communities on the liberal side. It isn’t that hard to find good theological reasons for Christians to support liberal policies on social justice issues, but those arguments simply don’t have any traction with social conservatives. Social conservatives join their churches to be respectable and maintain their status. The expect and demand to to hear a message that supports their life choices. If they aren’t comfortable, they move to a church that respects their values. Their pastors aren’t dumb, and their churches have evolved into the institutional churches of the American right.
Professor Reich is a committed philosophical liberal wants to move to the left instead of to the center. After leaving Clinton’s Cabinet, criticized Clinton and “Third Way” politics (see also Margaret Weir’s paper “The Collapse of Bill Clinton’s Third Way” – warning this link goes to a .pdf document). He has said harsh things about the Republican party’s relationship to the social conservative movement – a movement dominated by Christian fundamentalists (which now includes both Protestant evangelicals and ultramontane Catholics). In articles like “The Religious Wars” (December 2003) and “Forget the Sweet Talk” he argued that the Republican leadership has been promoting division on social and moral issues and effectively driving the culture wars to divert attention from their economic agenda, their collective personal corruption and their intellectual failures.
The Republican focus on those issues was good politics, but it was not a phony issue. There was a fundamental difference in the way the major political parties addressed the politics of personal freedom and personal identity. The Republican message was that Americans are free to enjoy the good life, and free to support their churches, but should also be engaged in supporting their country and in promoting the good of the community. Their message was principled, ethical, communitarian, charitable, with a sense of duty to the nation and a sense of mission. It was patriotic. It was noble. Reich was right to point out that those general messages are packaged with an agenda that is free market, libertarian, devoid of any sense of conscience or social responsibility. The Republicans talk a strong game on morality, but their policies tend to release the wealthy and the powerful from moral and legal obligations. They managed to hide the business interests that they serve behind the cloak of religion and patriotism.
The Republicans seem to have been the better communicators and propagandists this time around. It is tempting for liberals to avoid self-critical reflection on their ideology and policy by arguing about propaganda and electoral tactics, or by complaining about the power of the churches.
Politics is a complex system and that rational debate on values is open-ended. I respect his commitment and his willingness to keep talking, keep debating, keep fighting. I am pleased that Professor Reich, unlike other liberals, is not openly criticizing the voters for their values. I think he is right when he says the Democrats need a better moral picture. On the other hand – and he doesn’t seem to get it – the liberal politics he promotes are electorally handicapped. Americans, whether or not they are religious, like to feel that they are right. They like the idea that they are good people living in a great country. They instinctively like the idea that truth, justice and democracy are objective, real, and living in America.
Liberals almost admit to being incapable of making firm moral choices – everyone if free to do what they want and no one should judge anyone else’s choices. Liberals talk the politics of non-judgmental, value-free inclusion, which means balancing the demands of many groupsfor public resources and public recognition. Liberal balancing becomes a dance among interest groups. Liberal tolerance becomes a flirtation with cults, fads and kooks. Liberal Democrats come across as silly, self-absorbed, condescending and narcissistic. It is simply propaganda – liberal Democrats say yes to every request – the have promiscious in their relationships with identity and issue interests.
Liberal ideologists have become too absorbed in their own rhetoric. It has been difficult for them to talk passionately about a firm and clear vision of social justice, as the successful Democrats did in earlier eras. Reich is right – the modern Democrats are not very passionate, or at least not very convincing at looking passionate. His idea that liberals should be more passionate about their liberal values is intriguing, but I can’t figure out which, among many sets of values respected by Democrats, he wants to promote.
Save the Mosquito
People who get mad about using chemicals to kill mosquitos.
Winnipeg has built itself at the junctions of the Assiniboine, the Seine, the LaSalle Rivers and other tributary streams and creeks with the Red River of the North. It sits at the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, at the low point of a flood plain. This contributes to the fertility of the soil, and to the presence of hundreds of thousands of sloughs, dips, melt ponds and other bodies of standing water which nurture the reproductive capability of the mosquito.
When the warm breezes of summer warm the breeding ponds of insect world, Winnipeg resorts to spraying the insecticide Malathion. When the spray trucks roll, the Greens start to write letters to the editor, to caucus, and ultimately to blockade. Last year it was a few streets. This year, it was the City yards where the trucks are loaded. Last year it was impromtu drama. This year it was civil disobedience and organized protest, resolved by arrests and criminal charges.