16, pregnant and middle class – What the papers don’t say
Do the Tories really want to pick a fight over the issue of teenage pregnancies?
The reason I ask is not just because of the Tory’s latest statistical debacle; although it has to be said that their inability to get a decimal point in the right place hardly inspires confidence in a party that has aspirations of becoming the next government and taking over the running of the economy.
Last year, I put together a (popular) article that sifted some of the facts about teenage pregnancy from the media-driven fiction.
With an election in the offing, and the Tories already threatening to turn this issue into a political Aunt Sally, yet again, its seems to me to be about the right time to revisit this issue again and look at what the evidence has to say rather than what the Daily Mail would like you to believe.
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Liberals/Media to blame for Catholic child abuse
A senior German Bishop has responded to the latest child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church by suggesting to a local daily newspaper that the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s was at fault for abuse by priests.
According to German news website ‘The Local‘, Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsberg, told the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung that “The so-called sexual revolution, in which some especially progressive moral critics supported the legalisation of sexual contact between adults and children, is certainly not innocent,” before adding that the media was also at fault.
The article from which these comments are taken can be viewed in slightly mangled English via Google Translate, which gives this version of the Bishop’s remarks
Bishop Mixa emphasized in these “heinous crime” was the “so-called sexual revolution, certainly not innocent.”We have seen in recent decades, especially in the media, an increasing sexualisation of the public, which also promotes abnormal sexual preference rather than limited,” said Mixa.”Especially progressive morality critics had” even the legalization of sexual contact between adults and minors required.
If anyone come up with better translation then the original German language version of this article is here and please do feel free to post your efforts in comments.
The Bishop was commenting on a scandal that engulfed an elite Catholic school in Berlin at the beginning of the year, which kicked off, in January after a former priest who’d taught at the school between 1975 and 1983 admitted to forcing boys into having sex.
Canisius College, which is operated by the Jesuits, has since admitted that systematic sexual abuse did take place during this period and that it undertaken by at least two priests, although one is reported to have denied having had any part in such activities.
In keeping with previous scandals of this kind, these admissions have opened up a sizeable can of worms for the Catholic Church. It’s now thought that more than a hundred former pupils of Canisius have either contacted lawyers, or the school itself, with complaints of sexual abuse, while the Jesuits have issued an apology and admitted to covering up case of abuse at schools in Berlin, Hamburg, St. Blasien, Goettingen and Hildesheim.
The worldwide Jesuit order has also confirmed the existence of similar cases in Spain and Chile.
Earlier this month, Der Spiegel published a report which suggested that at least 10 church employees in Germany are currently facing accusations of sexual abuse and that at least 94 clerics and church laymen have been suspected of abuse since 1995, only 30 of which were prosecuted due to legal time constraints on pursuing cases.
Clearly, the Bishop is hoping that the timing of these cases, which date from the mid to late 1970s and early eighties, will lend some credibility to his efforts to blame clerical involvement in acts of schoolboy buggery on the media and on the liberalisation of wider society.
This is, however, entirely at odds with the evidence of abuse that emerged as a result of similar scandals in both the US and Irish Republic.
In the US, the John Jay report found evidence of sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church dating back as far as 1950, whiles Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), which published its finding only last year, uncovered evidence of systematic abuse in Ireland’s state funded but church-run reformatory and industrial schools stretching back to the 1930s. CICA found that sexual abuse, ranging from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence, was endemic in boys’ institutions through the entire period covered by the inquiry, although not so in girls’ schools, where the main risks of sexual abuse came from predatory male employees/visitors and from outside placements.
More importantly, in terms of Bishop Mixa’s comments, much of the evidence, from Ireland in particular, dates from a time long before the ‘swinging sixties’ and the so-called ‘sexual revolution’, leaving him- and other members of his church – desperately short of a cop out.
A model for Christian atheism
Sigmund Freud, that ever-controversial figure, is more known for his views on the unconscious and the Oedipus complex than for his theological work, but indeed, as time spent in his house, now museum, in North West London will reveal, a lot of his efforts and interests were devoted to religious symbols, figurines, artworks and texts.
From as early as childhood Freud viewed religion as merely a fantasy based entirely upon a childish wish fulfilment, this view most explicitly stated in his work of 1927 entitled The Future of an Illusion where he made clear that though many childhood wishes were unlikely, they were not impossible.
Freud held this particularly negative view of religion up until 1935 when an evident sea-change became apparent in his manner. In private correspondence Freud started to acknowledge the intellectual qualities of God on thought and enquiry, after all the speculation of an absent property had immense benefits for abstract contemplation.
Freud’s understanding of the concept of God changed from illusion to promoting sapience. Rather than bogging one down with idle introspection, the concept permitted investigation.
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The Pope and gay adoption
There’s an old joke about the Pope’s attitude to contraception, attributed variously to Irish comedian Dave Allen or the Italian-American community at large. The punchline runs: ‘If he doesn’t play the game, he shouldn’t try to make the rules.’
I am inescapably reminded of the quip after reading about the intervention of the world’s most prominent former Hitler Youth into current UK debates about employment equality and gay adoption.
Well, New Labour in office has been adamant about its wish for ‘dialogue’ with ‘faith communities’, so it can hardly feign surprise when a religion with over 4m adherents takes it up on the idea.
I’ve heard it said that Catholic adoption agencies do good work, frequently finding homes for severely handicapped kids that are the hardest to place.
But why have specifically Catholic adoption agencies in the first place? Aren’t they a throwback to the days when knocked-up Catholic schoolgirls needed somewhere to dump the unfortunate sprog before getting carted off to the nearest Magdalene Laundry?
The Church Taliban get their way again
contribution by Bob Piper
When Tony Blair and his small band of ‘New’ Labour modernisers swept into power in 1997 they had all sorts of wild and wonderful plans for Britain. In one area though, Tone and the Gang were decidedly conservative in their promises.
Despite all the pledges to ‘modernise’ Britain, our democracy was still going to contain an outdated and illogical second chamber. The ‘modernisation’ of the House of Lords was simply going to remove the rights of hereditary Peers. That was it.
All the rest of the stuff on the House of Lords was the usual Blairite flim-flam about having a wide-ranging review of possible further change.
And so it came to pass, that 12 years later, an attempt to introduce measures to prevent the Church discriminating against gay and transsexual people in employment floundered in the wake of opposition from the Christian Taliban and old duffers appointed on the basis of political patronage and grace and favour appointments.
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Homophobic former Archbishop speaks out on immigration
George Carey, Archbisop of Canterbury until 2002, has written in today’s Times< , in which he just stops short of calling for Christians to be given priority in a migration point system.
The article echoes what he already said yesterday on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.
The former Archbishop and current member of the Balanced Migration Group followed a template that we’ve recently seen far too often from the usual suspects: a) if you talk about immigration you are branded a racist b) if you want to stop the BNP from growing you need to “seriously address the concerns” c) Britain is a Christian country.
To which the answers are:
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How Anjem Choudhary uses the media
Anjem Choudary is brilliant at professional media trolling. He knows exactly what to say, what to do and who to talk to, and also when to do it.
As strokes of genius go, nothing is more likely to wind up the nutters outside of his own clique than a half-baked supposed plan to march through Wootton Bassett, which may as well be our current Jerusalem, a holy place which cannot in any way be defiled, such is how it’s been sanctified both by the press and politicians.
As for his rather less amusing supposed plan for “sending letters” to the families of those bereaved through the current deployment to Afghanistan, urging them, according to that notoriously accurate source, the Sun, that they should embrace Islam “to save [themselves] from the hellfire”, it seems more likely that this would only be through the “open letter” which appeared on the Islam4UK website, which is currently 403ing.
Calling for a sense of perspective is of course a complete waste of time. It doesn’t matter that Islam4UK, the umpteenth successor organisation to Al-Muhjarioun.
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New polls show Britain becoming more liberal
January 2010 sees the publication of the result of the National Centre for Social Research’s 26th British Social Attitudes study.
As a bit of teaser for the main report, NatCen has released a snapshot of this year’s findings which makes for very interesting reading – or should that be depressing reading, if you happen to be a social conservative.
As a confirmed secularist one of the more cheering aspects of the study’s findings is that religious belief is declining rapidly. In 1983, only 34% said that they did not belong to any religion. In the new study that’s risen to 46% and the study appears to support the view that the decline in the prevalence of religious belief is primarily a function of generational changes in attitudes:
These changes reflect deep-rooted differences between the generations, with older generations (who are the most religious) dying out and being replaced by younger (less religious) ones.
This doesn’t appear to indicate a corresponding rise in number of people who identify themselves as atheists, although it appear that membership of no-god squad now exceeds the number of people who are certain that god exists, although the figures given by Andrew Brown seem to be a bit garbled.
Having given the figures for non-believers and people who have no doubts about the existence of their favourite sky-fairy as being 18% and 17% respectively, Brown goes on to note that:
If you ask whether people believe in God, identify with a religion and attend services, the figure in Britain is only 25%, as opposed to the 31% who do none of these things…
Which seems to indicate that 31% of people do not believe in god, in addition to not identifying with a religion and not attending services.
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The most bigoted candidate in Britain?
If you were at all under the impression that Nick Griffin is the most viscerally unpleasant and bigoted individual to have yet announced his intention to stand for election to parliament at the next general election then think again and allow me to introduce you to Richard Carvath, the self styled ‘independent PPC’ (i.e. nutter with £500 to burn) for the new constituency of Salford and Eccles, which Hazel Blears is due to contest.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that Carvath may have been, at one point, a member of the Conservative Party, but was expelled early in 2008 for being ‘too right-wing’ for even the Tories to tolerate (see Arthur Allen’s comment on this post) and it’s because of an appallingly bigoted attack on the Tories newly selected candidate for Salford and Eccles, Matthew Sephton, that Carvath has come to my attention. Sephton is, it appears, gay and makes no secret of his sexuality, all of which has prompted Carvath to comment on his selection, on his own blog, in the following, utterly reprehensible terms:
[UPDATE - Cllr Iain Lindley (Conservative PPC for Worsley and South Eccles) has cleared up the question of Carvath's membership of the Tories by confirming that he did apply for membership of the party in 2008 but his application was refused]
The Conservative Party has just selected homosexual Matthew Sephton as their candidate for Salford and Eccles.
As a rival [and pro-heterosexual!] candidate I welcome Matthew to the contest for Salford and Eccles.
Matthew’s own blog is heavy with pro homosexual pervert content: see here, here and here…
…
I very much doubt that the vast majority of the Salford and Eccles electorate will want to be represented by a prominent homosexual activist – and one who neither lives nor works in the constituency.
If the sole choice on offer was between Sephton and Carvath then I think even I’d vote Tory.
Even Dan Hannan opposes the ban on minarets
Is it still committing heresy to link favourably to right wing Tory MEP Daniel Hannan? Ah well, I was never going to be invited to the Cool Kids’ table anyway:
The decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets strikes me as regrettable on three grounds.
First, it is at odds with that other guiding Swiss principle, localism: issues of this kind ought surely to be settled town by town, or at least canton by canton, not by a national ban.
Second, it is disproportionate. There may be arguments against the erection of a particular minaret by a particular mosque – but to drag a constitutional amendment into the field of planning law is using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut.
Third, it suggests that Western democracies have a problem, not with jihadi fruitcakes, but with Muslims per se – which is, of course, precisely the argument of the jihadi fruitcakes.
Hannan’s last point is surely the most important. Whilst there may have been a few Swiss voters who voted for the ban solely out of aesthetic antipathy, I suspect they were somewhat outnumbered by people who voted because they are suspicious, wary or even scared of their Muslim countrymen.
If a number of amateur bloggers can speculate that fear of Muslims led to this vote, you can be pretty sure that Swiss Muslims have gotten the message, too. And therein lies the problem; othering often leads to more marginalisation, segregation, exclusion, distrust and bitterness than existed before. Those are pretty ripe conditions for political and religious extremism to fester, and so the proponents of the ban are actually succeeding in compounding a problem they supposedly wish to reduce. So they’re either dishonest or deeply daft.
I’m not going to claim that there’s some silver bullet for achieving greater social & cultural integration, and I’m not going to pass myself off as any kind of expert about extinguishing militant theism. But I do know that neither of those aims are going to be achieved by winning small-minded & petty restrictions on what religious buildings look like.
Against the ban on minarets
contribution by Left Outside
Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets. More than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons – or provinces – voted in favour of the ban.
In Switzerland a referendum on any new piece of legislation can be held if the sponsor collects 100,000 signatures from the citizenship in the 18 months following its introduction. The opposition Swiss People’s Party have earned the ire of the Government by introducing the Bill to ban Minarets this way. There democratic credentials of this referendum seem clear, after all this was no close run thing, more than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons voted “yes.”
Yet despite all this, banning one particular sort of building seems spectacularly undemocratic. When it is accompanied by a rise in Islamophobic violence, it seems down right authoritarian.
Guthrum over at Old Holborn is managing to do a great disservice to Libertarians everywhere by holding up this as an example of democracy in process.
Bizarrely he concludes with “The people told the Government, not the other way round” when in fact what has happened is the “the people told some other people to stop doing “that”.” Moreover, they told them to do it by co-opting the massive repressive potential of the state.
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The divine mission of UKIP’s new leader
Congratulations to Lord Pearson, newly elected leader of the UK Independence Party. He has already hit the headlines this morning by revealing that the party offered to disband, or stand down for this General Election at least, if David Cameron had pledged a retrospective referendum on Lisbon, which is quite an interesting day one secret plot revelation for a leader just elected by his members.
Though little known on the left, Pearson is admired and liked by several Tory Eurosceptics, as Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie testify.
The most interesting profile of Pearson that I have seen was an admiring profile God’s Eurosceptic, published in the Sunday Telegraph back in 1997 when he was first promoting a private members’ Bill to get Britain out of Europe.
Lord Pearson certainly does “do God” – and claims a personal connection with the Almighty which is more direct than any political leader, certainly since Gladstone, after a religious experience in which he believes a messenger from God appeared to him while he was being operated on to have varicose veins removed in 1977.
Pearson says that the experience has led him to dedicate his life to the fight against evil – represented by the European Union, bureaucracy, socialism and Islamism.
Pearson believes that Ukip should highlight Islamic fundamentalism as just as important a threat to the British way of life as the European Union. (Did the forthcoming UKIP result on Friday influence David Cameron’s unexpected decision to raise Islamism and Hizb-ut-Tahir’s alleged involvement in schools at PMQs on Wednesday?)
Pearson has already sought to give a high profile to the issue, bringing Geert Wilders to Parliament. But Pearson has seemed somewhat confused in insisting he makes a distinction between Muslims and Islamists, which was certainly not easy to discern in his recent comments about comparative birthrates which are very much of the ‘Enoch was right’ school, evoking very directly Powell’s fear of an alien element having ‘the whip hand’ in Britain.
Lord Pearson’s own outspoken views about Islam were recorded in Washington DC last month. Asked how much time Britain had before losing control of its cultural identity he said: “What is going to decide the answer to that is the birthrate. The fact that Muslims are breeding ten times faster than us. I do not know at what point they reach such a number that we are no longer able to resist the rest of their demands . . . but if we do not do something now within the next year or two we have in effect lost.”
He later insisted that his remark was directed at Islamists. “One is talking about the violent end of the spectrum,” he said.
Friends and foes might agree that we may be hearing a lot more from Lord Pearson.
We’re marching against Islamists
contribution by Shaaz Mahboob
I was a little shocked – and delighted – to find Inayat Bunglawala announcing that he is going to organise a counter-demonstration to Anjem Choudary‘s group Islam4UK, which is planning to call for the implementation of their version of sharia law at a rally on Saturday 31 October.
My organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), had been working closely with likeminded British Muslim and non-Muslim democrats in planning a demonstration to coincide with Anjem’s anti-democracy march and protest against freedom.
Last week a Facebook group was also set up to float the idea and ignite people’s interest. We had planned to make a formal announcement on Monday, but it makes sense, in the circumstances, to bring that announcement forward.
Our counter-demonstration is based on our belief in, and commitment to, those liberal values that define the British state, including legal and constitutional equality for all, equal rights for women and minorities, and religious freedom, including the right to be free of faith. We are turning out to defend all of these virtues of a secular democracy that Islam4UK so despises and daydream of taking away from the British public.
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Whatever happened to ‘God will provide’?
When a Religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its Professors are obliged to call for help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
The great enlightenment scientist and political philosopher Benjamin Franklin wrote those words in a letter to a friend, Richard Price, in 1780 as part of a commentary on an attempt, by preachers in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to obtain a stipend from the state that would, had their efforts not failed, have been funded from general taxation.
That Franklin felt compelled to make that particular remark tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the mindset of organised religion. The letter to Richard Price was written only four years on from the Declaration of Independence and a full three years before the American War of Independence reached its conclusion and yet what else do we find other than that, during this tumultuous period of history, the number one priority of the clerical classes of Massachusetts was that of getting their grubby hands on a portion of the public purse.
A little over two hundred years on and things remain much they same as they were in Franklin’s day. Several of the Church of England’s most obscenely ostentatious monuments to medieval vanity are looking a little the worse for wear these days, and its prelates want us to pick up the tab for the repairs to the tune of some £200 million over the next ten years.
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The global spread of Christianity
The Muslim-obsessed Daily Mail is currently making a big deal out of a recent report claiming that “almost one in four people in the world are Muslim”.
“The project”, the article continues, “presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For example, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon”.
Accompanying the “revelation”, Paul Dacre’s paper is also sporting a picture of a group of ladies wearing black niqabs, the equivalent of sticking a picture of an Orthodox monk onto an article about “Christianity”.
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How the tabloids feed right-wing extremism
contribution by 5 Chinese Crackers
The relationship between tabloid reporting and the increase in the BNP’s popularity is an interesting one to look at. We know tabloid nonsense gets churnalised over on the BNP’s website, we know the party advertises and sells Melanie Phillips’ book via its website, and we know the policy of attacking Muslims rather than any other group is based on the prominence of negative stories in the news media, so it seems the tabloids are at least contributing to an environment where far right ideas may seem more attractive to some.
But does tabloid coverage cause people to vote for the BNP, or are the tabloids merely reflecting a rightward shift in public opinion? Let’s take the English Defence League to drum up support for an upcoming event in Manchester.
The video’s a bit rubbish, and amounts to a series of still images juxtaposed against each other to stirring music. Rumbold at Pickled Politics has pointed out the pisspoor crusader imagery, but there is a series of 22 images in the video that are of particular interest to this article.
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The rising tide of xenophobia on our streets
Yesterday two groups were planning a demonstration in Harrow, London: Stop Islamisation of Europe and the English Defence League. Their aim was clearly to incite some trouble given they had deliberately chosen the newly open Harrow mosque as the venue on the aniversary of 9/11.
Up to 1,500 people were expected according to some but in the end about 20 showed up. The counter-demonstration by United Against Fascism on the other hand was massively boosted by text messages circulating among Muslims calling on them to defend the mosque.
But with the ‘enemy’ failing to materialise, inevitably some elements of the counter-demonstration ended up throwing things at the police. To be sure, there were many people from the mosque trying to keep the crowd calm and telling them to go home.
But I think yesterday’s event was pyrrhic victory.
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What we accept when we accept individual freedom
There is a natural tension between social conservatism and social liberalism, and not one that can be broken down on the usual left-right or Labour-Conservative axis.
Thus there are many socialists opposed to supercasinos, lap dancing clubs and 24 hour drinking, on the grounds that such activities are both detrimental to working class communities and carried on for private profit.
I happen think that attitude is wrong, and that the left should back the right of adults of all classes to engage in gambling, voyeurism and prodigious alcohol consumption if they elect so to do, irrespective of whether we approve personally.
At the same time, I acknowledge that the red puritan stance is a legitimate opinion with a traditional base in Britain’s ‘more Methodist than Marxist’ labour movement.
There is a similar cleavage on the political right. From the outside, it looks mostly an age thing. Thatcher’s children tend to be of the ‘let it rock’ school, extending the logic of the free market into the personal sphere. Yet at the same time, the Cameroons see no contradiction in harping on about ‘Broken Britain’.
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Denying the right to opt out of religion
The Archbishop of Wales has come out against people being able to opt out of religious services at school.
Barry Morgan thinks that prayer offers pupils the opportunity of “recognition, affirmation and celebration of shared values”, and people should not be allowed to opt out of our shared values, particularly if they don’t share them.
He made the statements as Wales followed England in allowing over 16s to opt of religious service as part of their school day. I should point out that if you’re under 16 you’re still forced to sit through prayers, et al, even if you have firm convictions in another direction, like atheism.
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We need to tolerate the extremists
David Cameron packed what he himself described as ‘a really trashy novel’ for his 10-day holiday in France. By contrast, my choice to read on Brighton beach last week was rather more serious.
Ed Husain’s ‘The Islamist’ is controversial autobiographical account of the author’s involvement with the Islamist far right in Britain, and ends with a call for some of the organisations at that end of that spectrum to be subject to suppression by the state. Tony Blair is berated for offering such a pledge in 2005 and then not making good on it.
That line of thinking probably appeals to quite a wide range of opinion. It is unlikely that the English Defence League and Casuals United – the self-professed football hooligans who staged a demonstration against Muslim extremism in Birmingham on Saturday – have drafted anything resembling a detailed statement of coherent political philosophy. But no doubt they would favour a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroon.
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» Cambridge student demo: policeman punched student in the face
» An ode to David Cameron
» Why the student protests are unlikely to backfire despite the coverage
» She is free now, but the justice system still fails raped women
» Why Nick Clegg offers a recycled vision of society
» We need to reclaim the true ideals behind civil disobedience
» Why Ireland should default on its debts and start afresh
» How Labour could regain the initiative again on immigration
» Irish bankers: a modest proposal
» Is Nick Clegg ditching his own principles on inequality?
» Guess what? Ireland drank neo-liberal magic potion and it failed
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