Lessons from the Pope Protest

Now the Pope has gone home, the left needs to rediscover the courage of its convictions.

The atmosphere amongst the liberal left in the aftermath of the Pope's state visit to Britain calls to mind the uncomfortable eye-avoidance that takes place after someone suddenly turns the lights on at an orgy. Yes, we had a lot of fun, and we probably got rather carried away, but we're not overly keen to discuss it the next morning and we might well hesitate before leaping into any more messy entanglements with gay rights, feminism and anti-state activism.

The protest itself was a joyful chorus of self-congratulatory liberal paralysis. As bagfuls of naughty blown-up condoms floated up into an azure Piccadilly sky, central London thundered with the sound of twenty thousand broadly centre-left Britons failing to make up their minds about why they were there. Some of the printed-out slogans bemoaned the extra public expense of lugging the Popemobile around the country; some complained about homophobia, others about the oppression of women, but never too impolitely. There was, in fact, a horrific delicacy about this collective mumble, as if to make any real, overarching complaint about regressive state and religious indoctrination would be, well, a little tasteless.
'It's fantastic that there's a protest," said queer theorist James Butler, who I met in the crowd, "but it's telling that the only thing being chanted with any enthusiasm is 'Pope Go Home!' That sentiment seems less about creating real change than registering a formal objection while retaining the status quo."

Well, the Pope has now gone home, as he was always planning to. Hurrah. Well done us. Unfortunately, homophobia, misogyny, bigotry, intolerance and abuse have not gone home with the Pope.

The impulse towards egalitarianism and collective rationality that nominally brought twenty thousand liberals to Piccadilly last week should not now be permitted to disperse like incense in an empty church. It's vital that the left remembers that for many of us, there was more to this demonstration than the chance to stand around central London wearing pink paper mitres and making unhelpful jokes about men in dresses.
Even more dispiriting than the silly-hat brigade was the peevish fixation, by way of speeches, slogans and placards, on the cost of the Papal visit. Even Peter Tatchell and the Secular Society chose to focus attention on the twelve million pound bill to the state, in this new age of austerity, seemingly in order to rally the disparate strands of popular anti-papism into one miserly chorus of public annoyance.

This type of shoddy reasoning panders entirely to the clunky conservative line on the necessity of public sector cuts, and implies that, in this instance, liberal Britain would have been entirely happy to host the anointed head of an organisation which has covered up institutional child-rape, opposed women's rights and promoted homophobia across the globe if only it hadn't been so jolly expensive....[read the rest at New Statesman]

Does Simon Jenkins shit in the woods?

... I feel that the best response to the careening unexamined prejudice of the esteemed Mr Jenkins' latest article on Comment Is Free is a line-by line takedown.

The pope is right and ­Harriet Harman is wrong.

I'm on tenterhooks, Simon, please explain.

I might prefer the ­opposite to be the case but, on the matter in hand, Voltaire's ­principle should apply. The ­Roman Catholic church may be a hotbed of religious prejudice, indoctrination and, somewhere in the United Kingdom, social division.

...and sexual discrimination, intolerance and ugly homophobic dogma.

But faced with Harriet Harman's equality bill and her utopian campaign to straighten all the rough timber of mankind, the pope's right to practise what he preaches needs defending.

Last I heard, it wasn't Harman who was anxious to straighten out her constituents.

The pope's complaint, in his outspoken announcement yesterday of his visit to Britain in September, is that Catholics are being denied an important human right: to decide their own employment criteria

Extremely original interpretetion of human rights, Simon, well done.

...for those working in churches and schools or applying to Catholic adoption agencies. The particular issue is homosexuality. Regarding homosexuals as unsuitable may be outdated, even odious, but it does not require the state to force private institutions to employ those whose character or habits they regard as not for them.

Regarding homosexuals as unsuitable is outdated, and it is odious, and 'freedom of speech' is no defence against bigotry and intolerance. Last I heard, it was beneath our ambition as a country to tolerate recalcitrant, ugly prejudice in any part of our infrastructure - and the Catholic church is a huge part of our national infrastructure, operating as it does as a sanctioned educational provider.

An idiot objection is that anyone who defends a pope is defending the comprehensively indefensible. Certainly I disagree even with the terms in which Pope Benedict expressed his dissent. I do not believe that denying him an aspect of his religious freedom is "contrary to natural law" or even inherently "unjust". No one, as the pope implied, is "disputing the gospel's right to be heard".

Oh noes! They be stealing my right to an unassailable dogmatic platform!

I deplore the attitude of the Catholic church to homosexuality...

Glad you got around to saying that, Simon, because I was wondering if you were about to imply that rampant, institutionalised Catholic homophobia is irrelevant to the debate, and suggest that forbidding gay people to work in one's institutions or benefit from one's services is just another harmless example of'free speech'.

That is beside the point. It might be comfortable for liberals simply to grant the pope the "human right" to express his views and no more. But a truly free society is not like Solzhenitsyn's Soviet asylum, where freedom of speech is permitted only to those safely certified and incarcerated in prison. Tolerance must be shown not just to an opinion but to the personal and group behaviour that results from that opinion.

...oh.

That the pope might support the suppression of abortion clinics does not justify Harman's suppression of Catholic adoption agencies. But then I have little doubt that if Harman were a Catholic she would be stamping out clinics with the most draconian of powers.

Because she's an eeeeevil feminazi, OMG.

The avowedly socialist drift of her bill is "not only to build a new economic order but a new social order", a social order of her own devising.

Women's rights, racial and sexual equality, protection for the elderly, the disabled and the poor might not be interesting to you, Simon, but then hopefully we won't be living in a world run almost exclusively by people of your particular age, gender, race and social and sexual demographic for much longer. Till then, just you carry on believing that Harriet Harman invented feminism all by herself just to piss you off.

People with such ambition are usually intolerant of others, and often dangerous.

Women with any ambition are nearly always seen as dangerous.

The cabinet of which Harman has been a member for a decade has promoted and subsidised faith schools, allowing them to do what she is banning the Catholic church from doing – that is, use religion as a tool of human discrimination. Many people regard the consequence of faith schools as more widespread and communally divisive than the hiring practices of the Catholic church. Why is Harman doing nothing to end them?

Except that Catholic schools are faith schools. Do you want to ban all faith schools, Simon, or just the non-Christian ones?

There are still large numbers of Britons who are uncomfortable with those whose behaviour diverges from what they see as traditional norms. These conservatives have swallowed much this past half-century, as authoritarianism has been steadily eradicated by liberal legislation on homosexuality, abortion, divorce and free speech.

How terrible for them. My heart bleeds, it bleeds, just like a terrible cunt, which coincidentally, Simon...

Occasionally the liberalism has looked more like intolerance, as over smoking and aspects of "hate speech". Indeed to some people, liberalism's onward march has seemed more like a jackboot in the face.

All liberals R Nazis!!*$!

Harman is one of those Labour ministers whom no one would describe as a defender of liberty. Her campaign against domestic violence stands to her credit, but she cannot walk down a street without screaming for a policeman to find out what the world is doing and telling it to stop.

...the screeching, hysterical bint with her horrible ladybits all over the nice Deputy Leader's seat.

British liberalism has had a good half-century, but has begun to lurch into the intolerance it purports to oppose. It should loosen up and acknowledge that some communal space must be allowed the old illiberalism.

Communal space, perhaps. Unilateral control over the education of children or the provision of adoption services, no.

In reality, 11 Catholic adoption ­agencies out of 480 were hardly a monument to bigotry. A celibate Catholic chaplaincy or a Christian school headship is hardly a knife at the heart of social equality, any more than a men's club

Those harmless men's-only clubs that, until recently, helped to keep all women from positions of power for centuries.

or some miserable smokers loitering outside an office block (on whose freedom the ­government also wants to stamp).

This whiny attempt to curry favour with the chain-smoking wingnut libertarian contingent of Guardian readers just makes me want to stub out a fag in your face, Simon.

The ailing Catholic church, like most hallowed institutions, does much good work, and it does bad. But the bad is not an incarnation of such evil as to merit state persecution, as if this were still the 17th century.

Oh woe, the poor Catholic Church, with its insignificant, persecuted 1.3bn adherents. The poor Catholic Church, one of the biggest enforcers of punitive ideology and state-level persecution of anyone who happens to be a little bit different. Who will protect it?

Day of the Dead

[written on the tube home from the Trafalgar Square vigil. Photos from BLTPicons are here - let me know if you'd like me to link to your photos of the event!]

Tonight was the second vigil I have attended in six months for a man murdered on the streets of London. The first, Ian Tomlinson, was a victim of police brutality at the G20 protests - an innocent bystander and family man who did nothing to provoke the violence he met at the hands and batons of those who were meant to protect and serve him. The second, Ian Baynham, 62, died in hospital on October the 13th after homophobes attacked him in Trafalgar square. Ordinary citizens, out walking in the heart of their own city, minding their own business; blameless men brutalised by a thuggish state and a society simmering with repressed rage and unthinking prejudice against anyone a little different.

Tonight, thousands of us have gathered in Trafalgar square, the site of the attack, for a candlelit vigil against hate crime. When I arrive, the square is packed, humming, glowing with little lights; St Martin in the Field Church has donated hundreds of candles, and organisers with great hair and horrible hi-vis tshirts are handing them out. The atmosphere is somewhere between a riot and a state funeral, an undercurrent of anger punctuating the speakers' every sentence with low howls of protest. This should not still be happening.

"We're here to stop violent hate-crime," says one teenager, his arm around his girlfriend. "I've been bullied in the street, and so have my friends," cuts in a lady with an orange crew-cut and fiery eyes. "It seems to be getting worse". She is right: in the past few years, homophobic hate-crime in the UK has risen by almost 20%.

Suddenly, a hush gathers in the flickering half-light. A list of names is read out: all the victims of homophobic hate crime in the past ten years, predominantly in London. On the steps a choir begins to sing, something soaring low and beautiful with a deep beat that might be drums, or clapping hands, or centuries of frustration and forgiveness. Looking around me I see people with their eyes closed, soaking in the music and the sense of sacredness, people embracing; a man with his arm around his wife, the light from their candles deepening the lines in their faces. Two middle-aged women are kissing softly; a boy of about twenty holds hands with another boy, quiet, listening. A teenage couple dangle their feet in the fountain, holding each other.

The year is turning. Today is Samhain; Hallowe'en parties are going on across the capital. For countless centuries, people in Britain have gathered at this time of year to burn offerings for dead friends and relatives. Tonight we're lighting candles of protest for those who were taken from us because of ignorance, violence and prejudice. Tonight we are here to make a reckoning; to celebrate our solidarity and diversity and stand together in the face of fear.

Outside the square, police cars drone away across London, but the choir's song rises above the idiot howling of the sirens. Noone can quite make out the words, but it's something about love.

Nelson's column burns like a pagan pyre with three thousand little lights of protest. London mourns its dead.