Tuesday Toss
Take me to the magic of the moment/On a glory night/Where the children of tomorrow dream away/In the wind of change
Militant secularisation, the first
“Militant secularisation is taking hold” shrills Tory Party chairman Sayeeda Warsi, and incredibly, this is something that’s meant to worry us. In the mental world she inhabits, separation of church and state is not something essential to any coherent, democratic democracy, but a sad sign of decaying values. In a speech in Rome, where she’ll be accompanied by six ministers – at fuck knows whose expense – she will say as follows: “You cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you should or could erase the spires from our landscapes”. Well, this rather contradicts the accusation that we’re already in the grip of murderous atheism, and a history lesson might reveal that these Christian foundations have spent some several hundred years well-extracted. She will fail to explain the relationship between religion and spires. And obviously there’s more: “spirituality is suppressed divinity downgraded and where in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury faith is looked down upon as the hobby of oddities, foreigners and minorities.” Or put another way, people have chosen what works best for them – but of course Syeeda knows better. And finally: “we need to give faith a seat at the table in public life”. Does anyone have any idea how that might work? Who is faith, and how might he, she, it, or they resolve things? Now, this column is not keen on the boringness or boorishness of Richard Dawkins and ilk; to fail to notice the positive capacity of religion is to do so on purpose. But the suggestion that it’s crucial to the existence of everyone, and that it should be involved in any kind of legislative purpose, is so frighteningly archaic as to be fucking typical of this government.
DH
Where’s it all gone?
People like sport, oddly more than they hate having their money stolen. So it is that the London Olympics will be considered a success: attention will be diverted from the regular misery of existence and entertaining things will happen – but that won’t alter the fact that £9.3bn of its cost is on us, money effectively transferred directly into the pockets of the various vesteds. We’ve discussed the ticketing carve-up before, though it turns out to be more vicious than imagined – as it always is. The new wrinkle, though, explained in Channel 4′s Dispatches programme, is that permits for the Olympic lanes – instituted in the first place to whisk suits around London in their chauffeur-driven cars, an expediency crucial to the success of the games – are also for sale. It’d be easy to blame it all on Sebastian Coe, for he be a monstrous cunt, but that’s too easy – there are so many monstrous cunts involved in this mess who are also worthy recipients of your hatred. The Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger – all it evokes now is a punishing course of ferocious dry-bumming.
DH
Alex also wrote something on militant secularisation
It seems a bit rich that the sexist Sayeeda Warsi should be allowed to give her opinion on anything (listen to her defend her choice as ‘chairman’ rather than ‘chair’ and feel your brain dribble out of your ears), but she’s chosen today to sound off about militant secularisation in this country. That’s the militant secular drive that has forced Jerry Springer: The Opera to close because it made fun of a fictitious Jesus (fictitious as it’s in a play, there’s not enough will in the world to explain why the ‘real’ Jesus is also fictitious). That’s the militant secularisation which forced the closure of a Sikh play because it challenged Sikh traditions. That’s the militant secularisation that tried to kill an editor in Islington for considering publishing anti-Muslim work. That’s the militant secularisation that has Bishops in the House of Lords and funds faith schools leading to segregation of children. If that’s militant secularisation, then the godless are severely underarmed.
AN
