Conscientious Compassion

Making Space for Religious Conscientious Objection

What happens when religious rights and LGBT rights conflict?

Today, the Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples because doing so would violate her religious conscience, was released from jail after six days' incarceration for contempt of court.

Mrs Davis was jailed for violating a Federal Court order that required she issue marriage licences to same-sex couples, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that state-level bans on same-sex marriage are illegal. Mrs Davis refused to issue the licences, and refused to permit her deputies to issue them as a compromise. 

On 31 August, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant her stay request, Mrs Davis made the following statement, clarifying her position with regard to same-sex marriages and her religious conscience:

"I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God's definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision. For me it is a decision of obedience. I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God's Word."

Kim Davis's predicament has led to a stark polarisation of views. Many people with strong religious beliefs, and certainly all, or almost all, of those who are opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds, regard her treatment as a fundamental breach of her civil rights; whereas the bulk of the LGBT community and its allies, including, it seems, the U.S. legal establishment, share the perspective that Kim Davis's refusal to issue or to authorise the issuing of the marriage licences is a breach of the civil rights of same-sex couples.

This issue, and the crisis it has caused for some people of religious belief, is not one that is restricted to the U.S.A. As I write this in the United Kingdom, there are registrars here who, for reasons of religious conviction, have found themselves to be unable, in good conscience, to marry same-sex couples, who have had a legal right to a civil marriage since March 2014. Indeed, this is an issue that will be relevant to any country where same-sex marriage is legalised. 

When the news of Kim Davis's incarceration was broken on Thursday, there was near-unanimity in the LGBT community in welcoming the decision and condemning her for refusing to sign the marriage licences. It appeared to most of those who supported the decision to be a black-and-white issue: there was a law, and Kim Davis was refusing to comply with it, and it was as simple as that. Parallels were drawn by way of example with other circumstances where most people would regard it as totally unacceptable for a public employee to discriminate against same-sex couples in the provision of goods and services. In the LGBT community, and in the pro-LGBT community, there has been very little sympathy for her.

Kim Davis was faced with a "Heaven or Hell decision"

My own view is that there is an empathy lacuna in evidence here. This is, in a sense, understandable, given the misrepresentation of gay and lesbian people and of our relationships that so many adherents of fundamentalist religious beliefs assert as accurate, and given the fact that such adherents have also historically made great efforts to impede LGBT equality, and indeed continue to do so. A measure of Schadenfreude, and an unwillingness on the part of many to go that extra mile in examining the issue of Kim Davis's predicament with a more open heart and mind, are hardly surprising. The opposition to and vilification of homosexuality by religious fundamentalists have caused immense suffering to LGBT people, and continue to do so. There is no appetite in the LGBT community at the moment for putting down the pitchfork.

At first hand I have experienced this kind of religious homophobic harm, when, as a gay teenager, I got involved in an evangelical Christian church, and I have written about my experience of major clinical depression that resulted from it. When I was younger, and angrier, I would certainly have had no truck with the complaints of religious fundamentalists of the kind that Kim Davis is making, and I would have rejoiced at her being sent to jail. 

Same-sex marriage is also an issue of great importance to me, and I joined in with the U.K. campaign to support our Prime Minister in his attempts to change the law. 

Yet it seems to me that the LGBT community, and our friends, would do well to remember the maxim, "Grace in defeat; generosity in victory." In the liberal West, at least, the LGBT community has been immensely victorious in terms of the gains made on the road to equality, and the transformation that has come about in the past two decades with regard to combating homophobia. There is more to be achieved, but a great number of positive things have happened.

However, there can be, or so it seems to me, a mean-spiritedness in large sections of the LGBT community when dealing with those who, for whatever reason, have not been allowed by their psyche to take this liberal and enlightened journey with the rest of their society. As a community, we are often failing to deal with others in a spirit of psychological flexibility and generosity; we are failing to recognise that kind, good-hearted people with strong religious beliefs, who harbour absolutely no ill-will towards LGBT people, and who might be the very people who would step in to help us as individuals if we were in some kind of crisis, might not support same-sex marriage, but that this does not imply they "hate" gay people. 

(This accusation of "hating" gay people is one that I have seen levelled against Kim Davis on social media, and that is commonly used against those who oppose same-sex marriage. Hyperbole that disapproving of same-sex marriage implies hatred of gay people is a paradigm example of the kind of warped thinking that gets generated by strong negative emotions. Having said that, there are also certainly some religious adherents who do show marked hatred towards LGBT people and our relationships.)

We are locked in a situation where religious fundamentalists look at gay people and gay relationships through a distorting lens of inflexible, literalistic belief in their holy books, and fail to see things as they really are; while, in return, many LGBT people look at people such as Kim Davis through a distorting lens of anger, and similarly fail to see things as they really are. People are so often prisoners of their beliefs or of their belief systems, yet people are not identical to their beliefs. This is an illusion that narrows perception, and obscures the beauty in the other person, their kindness, their willingness to help in situations of crisis, their own struggles with dogmatic religious beliefs, perhaps also including struggles with what they think they are required by their religion to believe about homosexuality. 

This ossification of the other person into a set of aversive beliefs only serves to encourage delusion: a delusion of one-dimensionality and of permanence; of the other person only consisting of their homophobic religious beliefs, and nothing else, and of the other person being incapable of positive change, of being incapable of modifying their position over time as a result of calm persuasion and of their own experience: including the experience of meeting gay people who impress them, and meeting gay couples whose love contradicts their false beliefs. 

LGBT equality has progressed immensely in the West

The LGBT community has come such a long way in the liberal West in terms of wider social acceptance and legal equality. However, now is the time for the really challenging work: reaching out to those who have negative religious beliefs about homosexuality, and gently trying to change their hearts and minds. This isn't done by shouting them down, by vilifying them, by distorting the perception of them as complex human beings, by demonising them as people. It is instead achieved by demonstrating generosity of spirit, by engagement, by breaking down barriers and stereotypes, by acknowledging the good, and the potential for even more good, in other people: even in people who disagree with us.

This paradigm of generosity has a lot to do with forgiveness: showing good will and generosity towards someone who has harmed us in some way, and recognising their humanity, recognising the fact that they too are someone who struggles and suffers; whilst still continuing to disagree with them. One significant aspect of forgiveness is that its benefits are bidirectional: and forgiving other people for their wrongdoing - which does not mean excusing it - can make it so much easier for us to forgive ourselves, and to be generous to ourselves. Especially where there is a lot of anger and resentment to be healed, as is the case among gay people, who have been, and continue to be, appallingly misrepresented and harmed by people with dogmatic, inflexible religious beliefs.

The LGBT community could certainly benefit from a little more introspection and self-criticism. During my thirty years as an LGBT activist, I have gained the impression of increasing inflexibility, intolerance and dogmatism in respect of what opinions members of the LGBT community at large, and of the wider community, are permitted to express. Opposition to same-sex marriage is just one example - even though both President Obama and the UK LGBT equality campaign "Stonewall" were once opposed to same-sex marriage: a fact that now seems to have been airbrushed out of the LGBT collective psyche. Supporting the Conservative or Republican Party, or the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP opposed same-sex marriage) are further examples of behaviour that generally receive little tolerance from the LGBT community. 

Even "judging" someone else for their "lifestyle" seems to have become something that will provoke challenge from the collective LGBT consciousness these days: stating that someone with HIV should always wear a condom if he has casual sex, or saying he should always disclose his HIV status to a potential sexual partner, is apparently being "judgemental", and not acceptable. Criticising a section of the LGBT community that frequents the gay club scene for using illegal drugs that harm their own health, bolster the criminal drugs industry, and cause them to make bad decisions with regard to safer sex, is also "judging" people, which apparently we are not allowed to do. The maxim seems to be, "If it's gay, it's ok." I regard that as very far from acceptable; and I am convinced that, far from avoiding "judgements" about behaviours that exist, or are even prevalent on the gay commercial scene, it is crucial for the LGBT community to be self-critical, and judgemental towards its own flaws, if it is to grow and mature as a properly nurturing and supportive community. 

So, while the mean-spiritedness and blinkered vision towards religious adherents who oppose LGBT equality is understandable, in the sense that fundamentalist religion has done so much to cause suffering to LGBT people, this same mean-spiritedness and blinkered vision is a toxin that will continue to damage the LGBT community itself if it is not addressed and processed. We need to mature, to expand, to recognise our strengths and weaknesses, and to strive to continue improving, so that we can, as a community, serve ourselves and one another better, and serve the wider social community better. This development also requires a greater degree of generosity and sophistication in dealing with cases such as the predicament of Kim Davis.

There is scope for generosity in victory

Kim Davis's situation seems to be similar to the plight of some registrars in England, Scotland and Wales who officiate at same-sex marriages as registrars. Unlike the registrars, Kim Davis was elected as a clerk, and cannot simply be dismissed. It seems that impeachment would be the only way to remove her, which would be a complex, expensive and time-consuming business. It seems unlikely she will ever agree to issue the licences and comply with the court order, given that this is such a serious matter of spiritual conscience for her. The compromise for which she is asking is that her name and title do not appear on the licences for same-sex couples that are issued by her deputies, and it remains to be seen whether this compromise is accommodated. I, for one, am not holding my breath.

Allowing the licences to be issued without Kim Davis's name or title on them seems to me to be a reasonable accommodation, but the Zeitgeist is proving to be opposed to making any accommodations at all to religious conscientious objectors when there are changes in the law of the kind represented by same-sex marriage. It should be borne in mind that, prior to the introduction of same-sex marriage, whenever people sought employment as registrars, or sought election as clerks, there seemed to be no likelihood that the law would ever change to allow same-sex couples to marry. They accepted the office or employment in good faith, with an understanding of working conditions that were later to change very significantly. In a sense, where religious conscientious objectors are concerned, their contracts have changed in a way that has made it impossible for them to continue doing their job, which some would say comes close to the concept of constructive dismissal.

So many people are saying that Kim Davis should either agree to authorise the licences, or else resign; but both options are ones that are punitive. She has explicitly made clear the theological significance of authorising the licences:

 "It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision."  

This statement gets to the nub of the matter. Most fundamentalist Christians believe that they will be punished for wilful wrongdoing of which they do not later genuinely repent, by being consigned to Hell. For mainstream Christians (i.e. the majority), Hell is a place of spiritual alienation and separation from God; however, for so-called "Bible-believing" Christians, hell is a place of eternal physical and mental torment, where people are literally burned alive in a lake of fire for eternity without dying. This is a thoroughly ugly and evil belief, and it is an insult to any loving God to suggest He would be capable of such psychopathic cruelty; but the fact remains that so-called "Bible-believing" Christians do believe this. That is where they are, and on this issue, it is important that they are met where they are. So in effect, a large number of people are expecting Kim Davis to do something that she believes will result in her being tormented for eternity in a lake of fire. No wonder she isn't very enthusiastic about that.

The far less harrowing alternative would be for her to resign. But even this would result in a punitive outcome for her (albeit far less punitive than eternal combustion), where she will lose her livelihood and her income; and this would result directly from the conditions under which she sought office having changed dramatically since she was elected, to the extent that she can no longer accept them. 

A complex human being exists behind dogmatic beliefs

Many would assert that resignation would be an appropriate resolution to this issue. Instead, Kim Davis is trying to protect her livelihood, and trying to make a point on behalf of others who might find themselves in a similar situation. A credible case can admittedly be made for denying religious conscientious objectors any accommodations in these circumstances, and that case is being made by some of Kim Davis's critics. I have heard the argument that, following the legalisation of inter-racial marriage in the U.S.A., we would not have regarded accommodations for clerks who opposed it as appropriate. However, I think a stronger case can be made for accommodations for existing clerks and registrars whenever same-sex marriage is introduced in a country, given that, when they originally committed themselves to their office or their employment, they did so in the belief that marriage would only ever be defined as between one man and one woman. It surely must be possible to make arrangements for such people with religious conscientious objections to cede same-sex marriages, or involvement in same-sex marriages, to another colleague who did not object to them, and to avoid their name appearing on any same-sex marriage licence.

Even if we believe that LGBT civil rights must always trump religious civil rights when they conflict, there is still surely no need for us to fetter our discretion, and there is always room for that generosity in victory to which I referred earlier. Why should we be as rigid, inflexible and legalistic as the religious fundamentalists whose beliefs and behaviour we are criticising? The important thing to remember about forgiveness and generosity is that they do not need to be deserved, and that they are nonetheless always within the gift of a person to bestow if he chooses to do so. Forgiveness and generosity are moral gifts that enhance both the receiver and the giver, and they recognise the common humanity and the common fallibility of both parties. 

Any accommodation need not necessarily extend beyond existing clerks and registrars, so that anyone seeking any such position in the future would need to commit beforehand to obeying the law with regard to the marriage of same-sex couples. A flexibility offered to existing officials and employees would not mean an excessive sacrifice, yet it would ease the transition at this time of radical readjustment in history. It would simply enable existing clerks and officials to continue in their jobs until retirement, or until the end of their term in office. If a clerk who opposed same-sex marriage wanted to stand for re-election, he would need to sign a declaration that he would honour the ruling of the Supreme Court if re-elected.

One detail that the LGBT community, and the LGBT-friendly community, should usefully bear in mind, is that many fundamentalist Christians have LGBT children too, and that many fundamentalist Christians become more liberal, flexible and sophisticated in their beliefs as time progresses. A small olive branch could go a long way towards preventing a further hardening of hearts, which could in turn help the LGBT children of religious dogmatists who harbour prejudices about gay people and gay relationships. 

Forgiveness is also a gift to the one who gives it

In fact, after so much success, challenging stereotypes, misconceptions and prejudices in dogmatic religious communities may be the next great challenge for the LGBT community to face. Much progress has been made in terms of equal rights legislation and social acceptance of gay people in the community at large, and trying to change the minds of dogmatic religious communities might be the really hard work that represents an aspect of how further progress is going to be made with the elimination of homophobia. We see religious dogmatists writing about the "Gay Agenda" and the "Gay Mafia"; and when we fail to act in the expected way, when we fail to respond to these communities in a way that displays inflexibility, harshness and an unwillingness to compromise, we succeed in making a small contribution towards undermining those prejudices. Yet when we behave as expected, we hand propaganda to the adversaries of LGBT equality on a plate, and confirm their prejudices. 

The propaganda that has been provided to religious opponents of equality in the Kim Davis case is very powerful indeed: to the extent that, by sending this lady to jail because her job has changed unexpectedly and she is now expected to violate her religious conscience, she has been made into a religious martyr. This will only serve to entrench anger, resentment and prejudices, and will encourage more Christians who oppose same-sex marriage to follow suit.

Do same-sex couples really want the name on their marriage licence of a person who opposes their marriage, and who doesn't want their name to be on it? And where registrars in the UK and elsewhere are concerned, do same-sex couples really want to be married by a person who opposes their marriage, and is only officiating under duress? Is this really something that they want to be a part of their special day?

Islamist cruelty towards LGBT people

Furthermore, compared to the unspeakable atrocities carried out against LGBT people in Islamist states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, and by Islamofascist fanatics such as ISIS, doesn't a request by a clerk or a registrar to follow their conscience by opting out of involvement with same-sex marriages amount to very small beer? Should we not be reserving our outrage and fury for those who hang, imprison and flog gay people, and for those who commit the unspeakable cruelty of throwing gay people from high buildings, or stoning gay people to death?

It is, in my view, a great pity that transitional measures have not been put in place to spare people with religious conscientious objections the agony of choosing between losing their livelihood and acting in a way that they believe will result in eternal torment. There is a very important place for generosity in victory, for forgiveness, for compassion, and for attempting to see the humanity and the potential for growth in a person that exist beyond their religious legalistic inflexibility and ignorance. If the LGBT community wants society to be better, it needs to model the kind of values that will bring positive transformation about; and to do that, it first needs to be willing to identify its own shortcomings, and work to correct them.

© Gary Powell, 2015

Iran Deal Betrays Gay Iranians

Why gay people should be at the forefront of opposing the Iran Nuclear Deal.

The Nuclear Deal emboldens Iran's repressive, fanatical regime 

In today's Times piece, "The Iran deal makes a terrible war inevitable," (31 August 2015), Melanie Phillips makes the case that the US and the UK have not prevented Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, and that, instead, they have only delayed it. She also draws attention to the staggering claim by Philip Hammond - the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs - that "Iran was a “normal country” and “not a regimented, disciplined society under the thumb of an authority.”


Mrs Phillips's assertion, "Normal? This is a regime which jails, tortures and hangs dissidents and gays," is absolutely correct; and this is a shaming fact for the liberal Left and the appeasing Right, who are rejoicing at the reckless act of surrender that is represented by the Iran Deal.

Islamist Iran's persecution of LGBTs

In fact, the betrayal of Iranian gay and lesbian people (and other dissidents) by those bolstering the power of Iran's religiofascist orthodoxy is an utter disgrace, and it is a marker of how many pseudo-progressives are prepared to betray their apparent principles for the sake of appeasing an Islamist state with clear nuclear ambitions, that the championing of LGBT fundamental rights in Iran (i.e. the right not to be imprisoned, tortured and executed for being gay), and the exposure of atrocities inflicted by its state on Iranian gay people, are being left to social conservatives such as Melanie Phillips, who has expressed her objections to homosexuality in the pages of The Times and elsewhere. What an irony those false friends of gay people, those pseudo-progressives and short-term pragmatists, have allowed to unfurl.

I was recently reminded of this paradoxical phenomenon when watching an interview by the American social conservative and television host, Sean Hannity, when he repeatedly tried to press a grossly homophobic Islamist sympathiser to answer the question whether gay people should be stoned to death. On the world stage, today's best friends of gay and lesbian people have turned out to be the conservative Right. What an irony: but thank goodness the conservative Right are speaking out, and what a relief that must be to Iranian dissidents and gay people, if they ever get to know about it.

Let's remember hanged dissident and LGBT Iranians.

The triumph of same-sex marriage in the West has no meaning to the young gay Iranian being hanged for homosexuality. When exposing the extreme homophobia of the Iranian regime and other Islamists, it is conservatives such as Melanie Phillips who are taking by far the most important stand against the persecution of gay people in Iran --- and not President Obama, the architect and arch-proponent of the Iran Deal, notwithstanding the latter's intervention to support legalisation of same-sex marriage across the USA. 

The liberal Left and the appeasing Right, including those in the Western gay community (for whom same-sex marriage seems to be a much more important headline than Iranian gay people with their heads in Islamist nooses or gay Muslims being thrown from high buildings by ISIS) who support the Iran Deal with its fillip to Iran's nuclear ambitions, are betraying not only Iranian gay people and Iranian dissidents by empowering their cruel, terrorist government: they are also betraying the external enemies of Iran, including ourselves, who are now much more likely to find ourselves exposed to nuclear blackmail at some point in the future at the hands of an execrable Islamist state or of its terrorist allies. 

© Gary Powell, 2015

Tim Farron on gay sex morality

My piece for PinkNews, published on 10 August 2015:

Comment: Tim Farron’s silence on the ‘sinfulness’ of gay sex is not good enough

CIA torture and mediaeval cruelty.

No more CIA torture: mediaeval cruelty belongs to the Islamists.

Today's Times (15.12.14) carries a piece by the socially conservative journalist, Melanie Phillips, entitled, "A painful truth: ‘torture’ can be morally right," with the strapline, “There are moments when, to save innocent life, you may have to dole out rough treatment.” The piece refers to the Report of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which censured the CIA for the brutal treatment inflicted upon detainees in the years 2001- 2006, and which was referred to by government officials as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Mrs Phillips makes a number of points in her article, such as the fact that the Republicans published a “106-page minority report listing example after example of the Democrats’ sloppiness, exaggeration and politicised cherry-picking,” and that the minority report criticised the Democrats for making errors in presenting “ambiguous or unsupported allegations as fact.” Furthermore, the Republicans claimed that “the decision not to interview key witnesses [...] led to significant analytical and factual errors,” and they challenged the Democrats’ claim that “aggressive interrogation yielded only false or no information,” as well as the flawed methodology used to produce the report, “which excluded information gathered by aggressive interrogation that corroborated or clarified scraps of previously obtained but unappreciated intelligence.” (Quotations are from Mrs Phillips’s article.)

I would not be at all surprised if there were some truth, or even a great deal of truth, in the above objections presented in the Republicans’ minority report. However, even if these “enhanced interrogation techniques” did lead to useful information that resulted in the capture of terrorists and the prevention of planned terrorist acts, the two most salient questions are, “When do ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ become torture,” and “Can torture ever be justified, even when it prevents the suffering and deaths of the innocent?”

In her article, Mrs Phillips defends the actions of the CIA and the interrogation techniques for which they are censured by the Senate Select Committee Report. However, she does not refer to the techniques as “torture”, and when she does refer to “torture” in her piece in respect of the interrogations, she muffles the term in inverted commas. No. Instead of “torture”, the techniques were merely “rough treatment,” "aggressive interrogation" and "limited ill-treatment," according to Mrs Phillips. It was a long time ago that I read George Orwell’s 1984, but let me try that one with the word “murder”: perhaps “co-human neutralisation” will hit the mark?

The interrogation technique used by the CIA that I regard as most repulsive is so-called “waterboarding”. If you would like to see a short demonstration of what Mrs Phillips is condoning, here is one carried out on a US Army Veteran and activist who volunteered to be waterboarded on the campus of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. The waterboarding to which he was subjected is very mild and controlled compared to that inflicted on Guantanamo detainees.

By no stretch of the imagination am I a bleeding-heart, woolly liberal on issues of defence, national security, or the West using its military might to challenge Islamofascist states, which represent one of the greatest human evils on our planet. However, torture is unacceptable in any circumstances. Even if it were an effective means of obtaining information, which is highly questionable, it is always morally wrong. As much as I agree with most of what Melanie Phillips writes about the threat of Islamism, the vilification of Israel, the threat of a nuclear Iran, and the wretched attitude of appeasement towards religiofascist states and agitators, it is when I read pieces such as the one published today, and those that reveal her irrational, blinkered and deeply-entrenched homophobia, that I seriously wonder whether Mrs Phillips's human empathy and compassion genes have suffered some kind of fatal and irreparable malfunction, if indeed they have ever featured on her DNA at all.

Throughout history, those who have sanctioned or carried out torture have believed they were justified in doing so, whether that justification derived from a belief in the rightful supremacy of a certain religion, of a certain political ideology, of a specific dictator, or of a specific moral code. Whoever carries out judicial torture, whether in the USA or in ISIL, whether today or tomorrow, will always be all too able and eager to provide a similar, eloquent justification for their unconscionable actions, and their conviction of moral justification for doing so will be no less deeply felt than that of anyone who supports the views Mrs Phillips has expressed.

The crucial thing about drawing a red line where torture is concerned, and declaring it to be evil, inhuman and utterly unacceptable in any circumstances, is that this approach pulls the rug out from absolutely everyone who might be convinced their own reason for torturing is legitimate because it is exceptional. The grey area that apologists for CIA torture are trying to create is one that will increasingly be filled across the globe by the most abject and unimaginable human misery at the hands of those who are delusionally convinced they inhabit the moral high ground.

If we start to justify torture in certain circumstances, even by prettifying it with the euphemisms ““rough treatment,” "aggressive interrogation" and "limited ill-treatment" in the tradition of Orwellian Doublespeak that redefines “X” as “not-X” for the purpose of winning an argument, then we open very dangerous floodgates. Any despot or sadist, any fundamentalist religiofascist, any political tyrant, will be able to craft a justification along the same lines. It doesn't need to be a credible one. It just needs to be clever, so that he can claim to have a case that is comparable to that of the CIA torturers, and argue vehemently for its legitimacy. That will lead to more torture of the innocent, of those who dare to protest against tyranny, as well as of the guilty. 

At the moment, there is a great deal of consensus globally that torture is always wrong. It is not a universal consensus by any means, but it has still created a degree of taboo that leads most repressive states to deny that they are carrying it out, rather than to admit to or advertise it brazenly. Progressive states are also capable of imposing, and sometimes willing to impose, sanctions for such human rights abuses. That developing consensus is based on a prohibition of torture under any circumstances.

If progressive states open a loophole through which to pass electrodes and burning irons, then this developing consensus will be undermined.

A further salient factor that needs to be considered is that if a Western state engaged in the War on Terror tortures Islamist and suspected Islamist detainees, not only does that State lose its moral authority by doing so: it also encourages Islamists to treat Western detainees they capture in battle, or kindnap, in the same way. There is therefore a potential causal relationship between the USA torturing a detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and as US or UK hostage or captive being tortured by Islamists in retaliation. In October 2014, John Cantlie, who was kidnapped by ISIL and is still in captivity, reported that ISIL had waterboarded captives who had tried to escape: "Some of us who tried to escape were waterboarded by our captors, as Muslim prisoners are waterboarded by their American captors." There is the theoretical possibility that this statement was made under duress; though given the ruthlessness of his captors, if the idea had entered their minds at all, it would be hardly surprising if they had carried out this atrocity, as reported.

As well as encouraging Islamofascist militants to torture captives and hostages, the very fact that the USA is seen to be carrying out torture does nothing but fire up the hatred of the West in Islamofascist states and subcultures, and it shores up the propaganda that is being peddled by Islamist preachers and recruiting sergeants. 

Mrs Phillips presents the case for justifying torture in some circumstances – yes, waterboarding is still torture, Melanie Phillips, and even if you were Chief Wordsmith at the Ministry for Truth, it would still be torture. But if torture has compelling merit as a means to a very important end, then why should torture be restricted to unlawful combatants? Why should it not be legitimised in the UK's legal system in general if a detainee is withholding information whose non-disclosure could lead to the deaths of many people? And how many people would need to be under threat of murder for it to be justified? What if it were only one person? Would that one person's life not be worth saving by means of torturing someone with essential information? Why not torture the mother of a serial killer who is on the run, and who is likely to kill more people, if the police are convinced she knows where he is?

This is surely not the kind of society that decent, compassionate people want to live in. It is an Orwellian nightmare. If the West compromises its values to this appalling degree as a result of the War on Terror, then the Islamists will have succeeded in destroying the beautiful and compassionate values of our liberal nations that they hate so much, as well as our aspiration as civilised people to become even better than we are. They will have been victorious in delivering us to the world of the Middle Ages in which they still wallow.

At the end of her article, Mrs Phillips writes, “Our enemies are laughing at the Senate report."  I think not. Islamists thrive on demonising the USA. It is their lifeblood. They are therefore hardly likely to welcome a report from a large group of the USA's most senior politicians that opposes cruelty towards and maltreatment of Islamist detainees (and of those innocent people who are merely suspected of belonging to this category). On the contrary: such a report, based on the fundamental Western values of compassion, justice and human decency, completely undermines the hateful, toxic Islamist propaganda that fuels the zealous fury and hatred of successive generations indoctrinated into a cruel religiofascist ideology, and exposes as false its warped blanket misrepresentation of Western people and Western values.

Living up to the cruel identity that the Islamists are trying to impose on us does nothing but play into their hands, and into the hands of their recruiting sergeants. Islamists may choose to remain in the Middle Ages. We must not join them there.

© Gary Powell, 2014

This blogpost is based on comments I made today on the Times Online under Melanie Phillips’s article.

LGO Cabinet Office Submission 7.10.14

Local Government Ombudsman Watch submission for meeting of 7 October 2014 at the Cabinet Office with Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP and Mr Robert Gordon CB.

Gary Powell, founder and former director of Local Government Ombudsman Watch.

“Governance Review of the Local Government Ombudsman Service” (November 2013) by Mr Robert Gordon.

Mr Gordon’s report is available at http://bit.ly/1cdzedL.

In point 10, Mr Gordon presents the following as one of the two key questions that represented the terms of reference for his report:

“Does the current structure and governance of the Local Government Ombudsman Service (as provided in statute and as operated in practice) encourage or inhibit the provision of a redress service which meets the generally accepted principles of good complaint handling?”

An investigation into the probity and impartiality of the LGO, considering the evidence provided to the select committee by users of the LGO “service” and published in the select committee report he was directed to read, was therefore clearly a part of Mr Gordon’s remit.

Mr Gordon refers to having had “40 meetings” in order to prepare his report (point 6) and having consulted “a wide cross-section of expert opinion” (point 9): yet his list of “acknowledgments” in Annex C consists of 37 individuals, many of whom work for the LGO, and not one of whom represents citizens who have used the LGO service at first hand and who have campaigned for reform or abolition of the LGO. LGO Watch has existed since 2003. Its two directors, Trevor R Nunn and I, have both had extensive evidence published by the CLG Committee and its predecessor, the ODPM Committee, in their reports following LGO enquiries since 2005.

The terms of reference of the Review include an instruction that Mr Gordon “will have regard to the report of the CLG Select Committee on the work of the Local Government Ombudsman,” (the report referred to being the 3^rd report, published in July 2012);  to “the external evaluation chaired by Richard Thomas, Chair of AJTC, following the recommendation of the CLG Select Committee”; and to “all other information and material available to him which he considers relevant, such as staff survey results.”

In the 2012 CLG Committee report http://bit.ly/Oh8opL, there was extensive damning evidence published that had been submitted by users of the LGO “service” http://bit.ly/Nhb0j7, including detailed submissions from the current director of LGO Watch, Mr Trevor R Nunn http://bit.ly/QSFhGR as current director of LGO Watch, and evidence from me http://bit.ly/MWMxnq informed by my experience as the previous director of LGO Watch.

There was therefore an excellent opportunity for Mr Gordon to learn from the published experiences of people who had actually used the LGO service, and who had been researching the LGO for several years and campaigning to expose its serious faults, and to include reference to our evidence in his report. Yet he did not do so. So we have here yet another report on the LGO where the experience and evidence of actual complainants and members of the public are brushed under the carpet; disregarded; treated as though they are of no value. Treated as though they do not exist.

The continued tendency of those charged with conducting “independent” reviews of the LGO to ignore, or even, in the case of Dr Kirkham – more about him later -  to flagrantly misrepresent the evidence of campaigners and complainants, reflects nothing less than an attitude of contempt towards members of the public who are revealing truths that are uncomfortable to a self-interested section of the political and civil service establishment.

The CLG Committee’s “Fifth Report” on the LGO.

Since Mr Gordon published his report, the CLG Committee has published a further report on the LGO http://bit.ly/1oHwXeJ. (Although it is published as the “Fifth Report”, and Mr Gordon’s report comments on the Third Report, I have been unable to confirm the existence of any Fourth Report, and no mention is made of it on the List of Reports from the Committee during the current Parliament http://bit.ly/1tnRg25.)

I had provided three detailed submissions for this enquiry that were published by the CLG Committee, even though the online publication of the Fifth Report lists them, refers to them as being “published written evidence”, yet does not link to them, so that anyone reading the report and wishing to read these (and other) evidence submissions would have a very hard time finding them http://bit.ly/1vBpBO1. As was the case with my submissions for the 2005 and 2012 reports, I provided incontrovertible evidence that demonstrated the LGO’s institutional pro-council bias and moral corruption, including this time a submission based on the damning LGO staff satisfaction survey that had been leaked to LGO Watch, and a submission demonstrating that the “Independent External Review” had in fact been largely carried out and drafted by a longstanding pro-LGO propagandist, Dr Richard Kirkham, who had been known to LGO Watch since 2005.

These three submissions can be read here:

http://bit.ly/1rHcl9U

http://bit.ly/1pJ9Q2z

http://bit.ly/1BCjomJ

Dr Richard Kirkham is the person who wrote an article in 2005 after the LGO had begun to come under scrutiny, entitled, “A Complainant's View of the Local Government Ombudsman.” This was a strongly pro-LGO article, with a very odd title. It was odd because Dr Richard Kirkham gave no indication in his article that he had ever been a complainant to the LGO, or that he had interviewed any complainants to the LGO in order to inform his article. He also made no reference to the evidence of widespread dissatisfaction on the part of complainants to the LGO, as evidenced by the MORI polls carried out by the LGO themselves, which were even damning after the LGO had been allowed to remove, at their complete discretion, 10% of the sample selected for interview by MORI.

Dr Kirkham also failed to accurately represent the substance and detail of the complaints submitted by Mr Nunn and by myself. All this, yet he decided to call his article “A Complainant’s View”. Yet Dr Kirkham was appointed by the LGO to be a member of the three-person team carrying out the so-called “Independent External Review” into the LGO. Not only that, but Dr Kirkham was described in the report as having undertaken the “bulk of the research and drafting of this Report for which his colleagues are most grateful." (p4). Please do note that, despite this review purporting to be “independent”, the LGO were allowed to appoint their own reviewers.

One of my submissions to the CLG Committee was based on the damning leaked 2012 staff survey. When LGO staff completed this survey, they believed that the results would not be made available to the public, and would only be circulated internally. The results were so shocking that a member of LGO staff leaked the report to LGO Watch. What their own staff said about the LGO as an institution, and about their senior management, is contained in the link above. When the LGO was questioned at the subsequent CLG Committee Oral Evidence Session, the Chair of the CLG Committee was clearly far more concerned about the report having been leaked than about the pitifully low level of confidence their own staff had in the LGO.

Loyalty to the LGO versus loyalty to the Nation’s citizens and taxpayers.

In 1995, when Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield’s report was published recommending abolition of the Local Government Ombudsman, it was regarded as politically incorrect to disparage ombudsmen, and Sir Geoffrey’s recommendations were unable to prevail in such a climate. My experience as director of LGO Watch led me to the conclusion that nothing has changed.

Where the LGO is concerned, a loyalty that leads to the suppression and misrepresentation of compelling evidence is a misplaced loyalty indeed. Furthermore, this kind of loyalty represents a profound disloyalty to the citizens of this country who are paying for a service that undermines their attempts to gain justice. The “political correctness” that has protected the LGO for so long is egregious, and indeed is just as egregious as the kind of “political correctness” that in recent years has protected criminals in Rotherham despite numerous complaints and significant evidence having been presented to authorities that did not want to listen.

The symmetry between the Rotherham phenomenon, where complaints and evidence were ignored again and again by the relevant authorities, and the LGO phenomenon, where the same thing has happened, is striking. Such is the ability of powerful institutions with significant resources at their disposal to bury serious and justified complaints, to sideline conscientious complainants who present compelling evidence, and to hide bad practice behind a fog of Kafkaesque subterfuge. It is my belief that the seriousness and extensiveness of the harm and injustice caused over a long period of time by LGO maladministration and bias may well be at least as serious as the harm and injustice suffered by so many children in Rotherham. Just in respect of the potential gravity of cases covered by the LGO’s remit, one only needs to remind oneself that the LGO is responsible for investigating complaints about adult social care.

It is my belief that the reaction of the general public to the Rotherham scandal, and to the way institutions ignored serious complaints of wrongdoing, represents a turning-point in the consciousness of the good people of this land, where the sense of resignation and hopelessness with regard to having one’s complaint against a powerful institution properly considered and responded to, is giving way to a sense of outrage at how we are being let down by certain institutions, and then by secondary institutions that are supposed to be monitoring the primary institutions and putting the injustices right.

The Local Government Ombudsman comes under the spotlight.

The LGO was first subjected to an inquiry by the predecessor to the CLG Committee, the ODPM Committee, in 2005.

The 2005 ODPM Committee Report on the “Role and Effectiveness of the Local Government Ombudsmen for England” is available online here:

http://bit.ly/18uL5FB

The content of the evidence provided by LGO Watch is summarised here:

http://bit.ly/1iAwmaZ

The effect of LGO pro-council bias on human lives.

The text of Mr Gordon’s report avoids any mention of the experience and evidence of complainants to the LGO published in select committee reports since 2005, and his report fails even to give any hint of the human misery and profound injustice that the LGO, with its current ethos, has caused and is causing. Associated with every episode of serious maladministration carried out by the LGO, whether through indifference, negligence, incompetence or blatant bias, is a human being who has the potential to be seriously harmed by that maladministration.

When I was director of LGO Watch, I used to receive e-mails from people who had clearly been caused serious injustice by their local authority, and then again by the Local Government Ombudsman who had given that authority a clean bill of health despite compelling evidence of maladministration with serious injustice. I had people telling me they were so desperate that they were seriously considering suicide, having run out of options. The LGO having unjustly found in favour of the council had only served to make matters worse, as the council could then refer to the finding in order to close the complaint and provide false vindication of what they had done to that citizen. The degree of callousness I witnessed that was meted out by the LGO to decent and very vulnerable people was absolutely appalling.

There is something distinctly Orwellian about the way the Local Government Ombudsman institution spends taxpayers’ money spinning its way out of difficulties, and how sections of the British establishment seem to be keen to keep a lid on the evidence of systemic maladministration, incompetence and dishonesty at the office of the LGO that has been exposed over the past decade by LGO Watch and others. This Orwellian character extends to those who wish to preserve the LGO’s status quo, and simply tinker about with the edges instead of abolishing the institution and replacing it with one that properly serves good citizens and taxpayers, rather than discriminating against them. It also extends to the reviewers who are unlikely to expose uncomfortable truths when that entails rocking the boat and upsetting their colleagues.

This is something I do not say as an iconoclast, or some kind of hot-headed, anti-establishment radical overstating his case. I am a political activist in the Conservative Party and, in many respects, a “conservative” with a small “c” as well. I am a patriot, and am proud of the degree of freedom, justice and democracy that the people of this country enjoy. On the whole, I am someone who supports the status quo; but I remain unwilling to see a rotten and corrupt taxpayer-funded institution betraying my fellow citizens, and betraying the fundamental British values of decency and justice: a betrayal that, far too often, has enjoyed the collusion of the very people who have the power to end this injustice.

Corruption at the Local Government Ombudsman’s office.

During the meeting at the Cabinet Office of 24 July this year, I outlined some of the evidence of serious systemic maladministration and corruption at the LGO’s office. The detail of this shocking maladministration, dishonesty and corruption can be read in the CLG Committee’s reports via the links above. None of the pre-2013 evidence in the above links was referred to in Mr Gordon’s report, and the existence of LGO Watch, now over ten years old, did not even get a single mention in it.

MORI customer satisfaction polls.

Those present at the 24 July meeting will have heard me talk about the LGO’s own MORI Customer Satisfaction Poll in 1999. The LGO was allowed, at its own discretion, to remove 10% of those initially selected for telephone interview by MORI.  Even then, the survey revealed a 73% complainant dissatisfaction level with its service. 61% of complainants expressed themselves to be ‘very dissatisfied’ with the final outcome of their complaint. Roughly 50% of those whose complaints had been upheld reported dissatisfaction with the outcome. This evidence was in the 2012 CLG Committee report, but Mr Gordon has made no mention of it.

The Local Government Ombudsman’s “Independent” External Review.

I have already referred above to the role of Dr Richard Kirkham as a key propagandist for the LGO who took over the bulk of the work for the LGO’s so-called “Independent External Review”. In 2012, the CLG Committee instructed the LGO to carry out an Independent External Review of its service. The LGO was however allowed to appoint its own reviewers, which was surely not a measure that inspires confidence in objectivity and impartiality. One of the three reviewers appointed was Dr Richard Kirkham.  Dr Kirkham, an academic at Sheffield University, was already as long ago as 2005 identified by LGO Watch as the LGO’s most enthusiastic non-employee propagandist, to the extent that LGO Watch set up a page on its website dedicated to Dr Kirkham in 2009. Yet Mr Gordon refers to this “Independent Review” uncritically throughout his report.

Where in his article Dr Kirkham did refer to evidence that we, as complainants, had provided to the ODPM Committee, he did so selectively, completely ignoring the detailed analysis of, and commentary on, the MORI Customer Satisfaction Survey that we had provided to the Committee, and ascribing to us views that we had clearly not expressed and did not hold.

Dr Kirkham’s 2005 article was a whitewash, and a model exercise in constructing straw men and ignoring inconvenient evidence. In Dr Kirkham’s own words from his 2005 article: “There has never been any serious allegation that the LGO act in any other way but according to the highest standards of public conduct.” (ibid., p 388). Dr Kirkham wrote this after reading the LGO Watch submissions to the ODPM Committee, and in full knowledge of the devastating results of the LGO’s own MORI Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

Staff Satisfaction Survey

One of the above links leads to a submission where I exposed what the LGO’s own staff had to say about them in their 2012 Staff Satisfaction Survey http://bit.ly/1CJydGk. Staff were informed the results were only for internal circulation, but a member of their staff leaked them to LGO Watch. The LGO published a document that was supposed to be a summary of and response to the survey. This “summary” was very selective, and it epitomised the LGO’s systemic dishonesty and attempt to hoodwink the public. One of the most striking examples of dishonesty in this summary was where the LGO wrote: “39% believe we provide a great service to our customers but 34% are undecided,” whilst completely failing to mention that 27% positively disagreed with the statement.

I have written at greater length on the 2012 LGO Staff Survey here:

http://bit.ly/YV4w6h

This 2012 staff survey was damning of the LGO institution, and the absence of any reference to the results in Mr Gordon’s report is striking. Here is just one of the many shocking findings of the staff survey: Statement: “Our LGOs demonstrate good leadership skills.” A total of 80% of respondents disagreed, with 46% strongly disagreeing.” Surely Mr Gordon should have commented on that finding alone in his report.

Summary

In the course of the past decade, the current director of LGO Watch, Mr Trevor R. Nunn, and I, have spent a great deal of time researching the LGO’s activities, trying to expose its subterfuge and dishonesty, and learning from the experience of the many users of the LGO’s putative “service” who have contacted us, as well as trying to help them on a practical and an emotional level as best we could. Some of those complainants did not have a valid case that fell within the LGO’s remit, and had not been treated unfairly either by the council or the LGO, and were clearly persistently vexatious complainants. They quickly turned their vexatiousness on us when we told them what they did not want to hear.

Nevertheless, many people had received a “double-whammy” of maladministration with injustice: first from their local authority, and then from the LGO. Mr Nunn and I have also observed how the CLG Committee and those entrusted with carrying out reviews of the LGO are very reluctant indeed to grasp the nettle and consider the considerable and extensive evidence provided to the CLG Committee that the LGO is corrupted, not fit for purpose, and not reformable on account of an entrenched self-serving and biased ethos.

The LGO is a public spending outrage. Given the extent of the injustice meted out by the LGO, and its incompetence, the greatest benefit to the good citizens of this country would be to abolish the LGO altogether and to replace it with regional or local appeals tribunals, ideally staffed by competent volunteers drawn from the local community. This would be a measure that rescues the taxpayer from a situation where he is currently paying an institution a large amount of money just to prevent him achieving justice should he suffer maladministration with significant injustice at the hands of a local authority.

In fact, the LGO is such an appalling outfit that the citizens of this country would even be better off if the LGO were simply disbanded and not replaced with anything. At the moment, many of those who have been wronged by a local authority end up having their injustice compounded when the LGO finds in that local authority’s favour despite compelling evidence, as it so often does. The local authority can then refer to the finding of the LGO to close down the complaint, and can refer to it in vindication should the media make any enquiries, given that unless members of the general public have used the LGO’s “service”, they have no idea how corrupt it is.

The LGO is a bureaucratic behemoth that is protected by a well-honed edifice of subterfuge and by its allies in various sections of the British establishment. LGO Watch has made enormous efforts to encourage responsible politicians to respond to the evidence of systemic corruption and maladministration at the LGO’s office. The indifference of the CLG Committee and of its predecessor, the ODPM Committee, to the compelling evidence we have provided, is disgraceful. The political establishment seems to be very reluctant to call into question the integrity of this institution, and has been simply disregarding evidence that it finds uncomfortable. This is having the effect of alienating citizens from those they elect to serve them, and further undermining public confidence in the integrity of our political structures and in the accountability of our politicians and our political system as a whole.

It is time for the “political correctness” that has been protecting the ombudsmen to be set aside, and for the LGO to be subjected to honest scrutiny: a scrutiny that must include objective and conscientious consideration of the very extensive evidence that has been supplied to the select committee over the course of a decade, and that has been brushed under the carpet as too inconvenient, too embarrassing, and too “off-message” to deal with. Up until now, those trying to expose the LGO have been treated by those with the power to bring about change and reform as though we were the problem. Rotherham should remain a stark reminder of just where this kind of paradigm can lead.

Gary Powell

October 2014