A couple of observations coalesced into something approaching a feeling of foreboding this morning.
I came home from St Petersburg yesterday evening, very tired, passport-clutching, shuffling my way to the front of the weary immigration queue, not very here-and-now to be honest. So I forgot that on top of my bald head was a flat cap, worn both to protect myself from the freezing temperatures of the Russian weather I’d just left behind, as well as to signal Hey! I’m into indy jangly guitar type pop music to anyone interested. These semiotic signifiers, eh! I handed my passport over to New Labour’s frontline of border protection, a young woman resplendent in the toy-uniform designed by John Reid to give the impression that some sort of control is maintained over the country’s porous borders.
-- Could you take your hat off, please?
-- Oh, sorry, yes of course.
But here’s the thing. As I’m pulling the cap off, I look at her properly. Her entire head is wrapped up in a Muslim scarf, with only her eyes, nose and mouth visible: no forehead, no scalp, no chin on view. Fair enough. But my head is practically naked by comparison. I wonder, and I don't know, but if I had a headscarf on, would I have had to remove that? We look at each other a bit, then share a giggle. She can read my mind very easily.
Get home and first things first, you know, been away all week, let’s have some proper tea and get in the bath, two things which rarely function correctly Abroad. I don’t know what non-UK countries do to their tea, but it’s never quite right, and everyone is fixated on showers, aren’t they, no chance of, ah, deep cleaning. So I’m in the bath and pop on Any Questions, featuring BJ, Mayor of this fine city. Questions come up about the pope’s view of condoms. He’s against them, because they apparently spread sexual disease, which is best avoided by never having sexual intercourse with anyone. Boris finds this demented. So do I. There’s quite a gap between a message of It’s generally better to pairbond faithfully, and to practice continence in all things, and Barrier methods spread disease, don’t you think?
Never mind, haul carcass into bed, tea-ed up, freshly laundered body, sleep the sleep of the just-ish, wake up, Radio 4 hurrah, paper review, and a Muslim ‘cleric’ is calling for homosexuals to be stoned to death. Buggeration. I wanted to pop out and do some shopping this morning, have a wee swim, maybe get a haircut - it’s going to be a nuisance if I end up being stoned to death instead.
I’m still sleepy and it’s all getting muddled up in my head. But something seems to have happened to the Britain I grew up in. Sometimes it's illegal to cover your head, unless you're religious, in which case it's your inalienable right. A man who is claimed by his fan base to be one of the most intelligent men ever to lead his religion makes a claim contrary to the laws of material science, and there’s not much of a fuss (perhaps because it’s only the latest of in a string of bizarre outbursts). And another bloke gets all over YouTube to call for a mass public stoning of some citizens of whom he disapproves, yet if I write anything as a response which could be interpreted as hateful then I could be prosecuted for hatecrime.
Religious people have this automatic get-out clause to free them from the consequences of their, or their fellow adherents’, words and actions. Either My conscience makes me act thus: therefore you cannot criticise. It’s strange this, because when gay people say My love is as real to me as yours is to you the religious tend to reply Ha! Like a man who would love a donkey, as though this is analogous, in anything but a contemptible sense. No-one ever says to the religious, when they are using their conscience as an excuse, Maybe mass murderers feel they are following their conscience. Should we refrain from asking them to disengage from their acts of unkindness?.
Or they say You can’t judge my (universal) religious theory from the actions of those people over there who adhere to it (even though this seems a bit of a contradiction with the universal claims made for the theology). It’s always an extreme unrepresentative element of the religious who (metaphorically) do the stoning. The reasonable religious folks get on with more reasonable things, like banning barrier contraception.
But what about secular liberals. Rightwing pundits claim that liberals control the media, the language we use, the thoughts we can hold etc etc. Yet my experience of all this political correctness is that it works in favour of anti-liberal forces: no-one will prosecute any Muslim who calls for the death of homosexuals, and nor do I hear any Anglican or Catholic christian leader standing up to it. I am against all hatecrime legislation: my point is that even those who support it, deploy it selectively; and that the rightwing critics of it miss the point, because it is against liberals that these laws are applied, not conservatives.
What if I exercised my own freedom of secular conscience? And reacted as follows:
- People who work for the state should refrain from covering their face while interacting with the public. (This includes the fashion for balaclava-ed cops at Liverpool Street station by the way. For goodness’ sake. Liverpool Street).
- If you believe that preventing infected sperm from entering another human body will increase. rather than decrease, the spread of a virus, then you are at best being unhelpful, and your comments on any other matter of fact should be judged accordingly.
- Wanting to stone people to death is too far from the established norms of our tolerant society. If you feel like this you should train yourself to keep your abhorrent views to yourself, the way that unruly infants learn to keep their mouths shut in a classroom.
None of my wishes will come to pass and in fact, I will bet, most readers of this website, whether they're on the left or the right, will think I'm off the scale of acceptability on at least one. The sense of foreboding I have is because the anti-liberal forces are winning. I’ve yet to hear a single Anglican or Catholic leader, for example, react negatively to the death-to-gays demands from Muslim clerics. Why not? Could it be that they have decided that Islam is the dominant religious force in Britain, and that they’d sooner seek accommodation for their own strand of monotheism, than attempt to represent the cultural traditions of the country which gave their faith institutional succour?
Just asking, like. Off for a swim now. Before the stoning squad turns up.
