Is That Person Really a Bigot?

Why we should be cautious with our use of the word "bigot".

Opposing gay marriage doesn't usually equal hating gay people.

The inspiration to write this post came from the Pink News piece of 27 May entitled, "Tory blogger Tim Montgomerie: 'I support gay marriage but most traditionalists are not homophobes.' " The Pink News article seems to be based on Tim Montgomerie's piece on Conservative Home: "The Ten Creators of Ukip."

It seems to me that there is a problem of language where the word "bigot" is concerned. At the moment, the word is applied to a very wide range of people. I often see the word being used in LGBT media comments pages as an unchallenged description of everyone who does not support same-sex marriage, with or without the prefix "hateful".

At one end of the spectrum, there is the real hateful homophobe, who would like homosexuality to be a criminal offence and LGBT people to be ridiculed, victimised and excluded. Some such people (particularly in fundamentalist Islamic states) think we should be executed.

At the other end of the spectrum is the person who harbours no hatred or dislike towards LGBT people, is outraged by homophobic discrimination when he or she perceives it, and supports an equal age of consent, job protection from discrimination, and a whole raft of equality measures, but because of a specific (usually religious) belief about the word "marriage" needing to be restricted to heterosexual relationships, finds himself or herself unable to support equal marriage.

The word "bigot" is a pretty blunt instrument to apply to both these people. To put them into the same category surely trivialises the evil of the former, by implying he or she is no worse than simply being in the same category as the latter.

We are all human. Let's listen to one another.

Where bigotry is concerned, I think it is best to look at evidence for what is going on in people's hearts. If they are wilfully ignorant and wedded to their hatred and disdain of LGBT people, then they are bigots. If they are generally good people who show good will towards LGBT people, but have a misguided belief here and there, then they are just misguided, and hopefully we can gently persuade them of their error, or agree to disagree given that we are otherwise very much on the same page.

I write this as someone who strongly supports equal marriage, and who has spent a lot of time arguing and campaigning for it.

What concerns me is black-and-white, entrenched thinking, from whatever side of the debate. Where LGBT people are concerned, most of us have experienced a great deal of suffering as a result of discrimination and prejudice. It can be very easy for that suffering and a response of anger to be triggered. Extreme language should in my view be reserved for those who really deserve it: otherwise the power of the language we have to describe evil people and evil deeds becomes diluted by too wide an application.

One thing I have learned in the course of my life is the importance of trying not to write people off, to damn them into a permanent and perpetual ossification of badness because of a view they hold that I do not like and do not agree with. In the case of some individuals, it is quite a challenge to live according to that maxim. In the case of others, it has become less of a challenge. 

There is a place for forgiveness and generosity in disagreement.

No-one forms their views in some kind of vacuum: life experiences and one's inherited disposition have a great influence on what we come to believe. We all harbour mistaken views at some points in our lives that may cause hurt to others when expressed or acted upon. I suppose that making room for such errors, in the hope that today's adversary may be tomorrow's ally, falls within the domain of what we mean by forgiveness. If we can only show very little forgiveness to others, we will only find very little forgiveness for ourselves, and that is a formula for suffering all round. 

Maybe the parable of The Good Samaritan is a good metaphor for how the person with whom we disagree may be the very person who would offer a helping hand during a time of crisis and adversity. That must surely be worth something.

© Gary Powell, 2014

UKIP's MEP David Coburn

What Scotland's new Ukip MEP thinks of the LGBT rights movement. 

“Equal rights lobby are not interested in equitable solutions,” Mr David Coburn told me via Twitter on 31 May last year, before calling me a "bigot" and saying I have "got it in" for people of faith because I supported the legalisation of equal marriage.

But Mr Coburn isn't any old Ukip reactionary. He is himself openly gay, and wrote to attack equal marriage in a Pink News piece of 2012. 

So here we are: campaigners for LGBT equality are degraded to the "equal rights lobby" in Mr Coburn's mind. But not only that. Apparently we are "not interested in equitable solutions."

This is the mentality of Scotland's new Ukip MEP. A gay man who, with glib generalisations worthy of Melanie Phillips, denigrates the movement that has provided him with the freedom and equality he is able to enjoy as a gay man today.

The link to the Twitter thread where Mr Coburn makes his comments is here. (I have a screenshot, in case this comment should ever disappear.)

I had posted on Twitter as I'd wanted to know how Ukip could claim they were protecting the rights of people of faith by opposing the introduction of equal marriage. After all, no-one was going to force churches etc. to marry LGBT couples; and if the European Court of Human Rights were going to impose SSM on churches, mosques, etc., it would surely already have done so in those EU states where SSM had already existed for some time. Furthermore, if the ECHR were likely to use equalities legislation to do this, I was wondering why Ukip was not warning of the risk women priests would be imposed on all churches, too.

Here are Mr Coburn's noteworthy comments from my Twitter exchange with him, which you will see in the thread linked to above:

Coburn: “Equal rights lobby are not interested in equitable solutions”

Coburn: “Equal rights political expression cant be trnaslated [sic] into religion”

Powell: "'Equal rights lobby are not interested in equitable solutions.' Disgraceful you dismiss civil rights movement like this"

Coburn: “If you take rights from one group and hand them to another that is not equitable -it is also not tolerant”

Powell: “Campaigners for LGBT rights have achieved much to be proud of, in the face of reactionaries & opportunistic colluders.”

Coburn: “Yes and Gay marriage is a step too far”

Powell: “The only "right" of religionists that equal marriage is denying is their

perceived right to discriminate.UKIP is a sell-out”

Coburn: “You have obviously got it in for People of Faith - so you must be the bigot”

Coburn: “If you truly believed in equal rights you'd make sure they are for all - inc people of Faith”

Powell (in response to Coburn saying SSM was "a step too far": “It wasn't in Canada or Netherlands or the many states/ countries that have introduced it & it

isn't for our elected MPs.”

Coburn: “ok getting bored-you're ranting and raving now”

Powell: “When "People of Faith" try to undermine civil rights & impose religion on others, yes I will oppose them. UKIP opportunists”

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether I was "ranting and raving", or whether Mr Coburn found he was out of his depth with his flimsy Ukip platitudes, just as I will leave it to the reader to decide who, if either of us, was the bigot in this exchange.

In my own Pink News piece of 5 May 2014, I explained how Ukip had stitched up the UK LGBT community on equal marriage in order to poach socially conservative voters from the Conservative Party. Clearly a very important strategy for Ukip, and Mr Coburn now receives his reward for his loyal defence of this thoroughly cynical policy with its thoroughly indefensible justification.

© Gary Powell, 2014

How to hammer arguments against equal marriage.

LGBT people are now able to marry in England and Wales, as a result of a campaign pioneered by the UK Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron. 

UK Prime Minister David Cameron championed same-sex marriage.

The legalisation of same-sex marriage in England and Wales came about in spite of a campaign orchestrated by dogmatic religious adherents, who tried to undermine confidence in the ultimate success of the campaign, conjecturing that the Prime Minister was intending to "kick the legislation into the long grass" and that the measure would be defeated in the House of Lords, the UK Parliament's second chamber. Neither of these things happened.

There is not a single valid argument against same-sex marriage, so far as I can make out, and below I list what seem to me to be the main objections advanced by opponents, and why they do not stand up to scrutiny.

If we allow gay marriage, we might as well allow people to marry members of their close family.  

But for this to happen, incest would have to be legalised. This would remove a social taboo that discourages the molestation of children by adults in their family, and lead to increased levels of child abuse. It would also undermine the stability of families, which is something that will have a serious effect on the emotional well-being of individuals in society. Romantic relationships often end in acrimony and alienation. If we start condoning romantic relationships with relatives, the break-ups and divided loyalties will tear our families and society apart. Family relationships are those that tend to provide emotional stability over long periods of time. And in the case of heterosexuals, of course, incest is likely to cause birth defects. 

If we allow gay marriage, the institution of the family will be undermined by devaluing traditional heterosexual marriage. 

Opponents of equality used to say that condoning gay sex would lead to the destruction of society. Indeed, Emperor Constantine believed that homosexuality caused earthquakes. Now it’s apparently equal marriage that will bring about the Apocalypse.

Same-sex marriage will have no impact on the marriages of heterosexual couples. Gay people buy bread in the supermarket. That doesn’t stop heterosexual people buying bread, or make it taste any different to them. No-one is proposing we should make same-sex marriage obligatory. Canada has had equal marriage for eight years at the time of writing. When is this societal breakdown meant to start happening? 

Gay marriage is opposed by religious Scripture and is offensive to many people of religious belief. 

Fortunately, western democracies are not theocracies. Many of these objecting minority fundamentalist religionists are of the kind that historically opposed the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and of the kind that in many cases abuse their children by brainwashing them and telling them they risk burning in Hell for eternity. Why should this religious minority be allowed to impose its religious beliefs against the will of the democratic majority, with the result that another minority group’s civil liberties are denied?

The fundamentalists who organise against equal marriage are, for the most part, a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites.

So many of those Christians who profess to believe that scripture should be taken literally as the revealed word of God, prefer to overlook the repeated Biblical warnings that the wealthy will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and that their wealth should be given to the poor.

Many anti-gay Christians manage to find a way of conveniently reinterpreting Jesus’ warnings about the sin of wealth, while continuing to condemn others for breaking the letter of the law in scripture with regard to sexual behaviour. This is cherry-picking. 

Gay people can marry someone of the opposite sex, so they already have the same rights as everyone else with regard to marriage. 

Gay people do not have ‘equal rights’ just because they have the right to marry a member of the opposite sex.

Gay people don’t want to marry a member of the opposite sex. They want to marry a member of the same sex, if they choose to do so, because that is who they are sexually and emotionally attracted to and bond with.

This anti-equal marriage argument is the equivalent of an Apartheid supporter saying that prohibiting mixed-race marriages is not a violation of equal rights, as each partner in a mixed-race relationship has the right to marry someone of their own race. (Indeed, the Dutch Reformed Church supported the outlawing of mixed-race marriages, and claimed to find their justification in Scripture: an interesting parallel to the current opposition to equal marriage.)

It is similar to a hospital only stocking Group A blood, and telling someone who had a Group B blood type and needed a transfusion, that he was not being treated any differently from other patients, as he also had an ‘equal right’ to a Group A blood transfusion. 

Gay people cannot change the meaning of the word ‘marriage’, because it has a longstanding dictionary definition of being between one man and one woman. 

Definitions change without the concept defined becoming meaningless, so long as the change is of something non-essential to the meaning of the term.

Some may think that two people of the same sex cannot marry because that would entail a violation of the essential meaning of ‘marriage’. However, the similarities between gay and heterosexual marriage in terms of commitment, love, care and intimacy, override the differences, which are simply that the two people are of the same sex, rather than of the opposite sex.

For instance, the Anglican Church recently ordained women to the priesthood. Most people accept that being female does not disqualify someone from being a priest. But the definition of “Anglican priest” changed, and most would say for the better.

Opponents of equal marriage may refer to history and tradition to support their argument, but people who counter the liberal view about women priests can also refer to two thousand years of tradition.

There is a further parallel with the term “democracy”. The definition of “suffrage” used to exclude votes for women. Those who resisted women’s suffrage might well have complained that “democracy” traditionally meant allowing the vote to men and not women, and that this meaning was essential to the traditional definition of “democracy”. Indeed, social conservatives could have referred to longstanding tradition and precedent to support their position.

The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa regarded marriage between people of different races as something violating their contemporary definition of marriage, which was the reason why it was illegal until campaigners forced a change in the law.

Most people recognise that a committed gay or lesbian relationship is not different enough in the relevant respects automatically to disqualify it from the essential definition of ‘marriage’ should the partners wish to make that public commitment, and the state allow it.

Just as women’s suffrage was a perfection of the concept of democracy and not a redefinition of it, both interracial marriage and same-sex marriage are a perfection of the concept of marriage. 

Marriage is for procreation. Therefore, as same-sex couples cannot procreate between them, they cannot enter into a valid marriage. 

Having biological children with both parents’ genes, is not intrinsic to the currently held concept of how marriage is defined. There are plenty of people whose marriages aren’t regarded as invalid simply because they do not have children, either from choice or because of medical problems. 

Gay marriage will lead to marriage to animals and polygamy. 

An animal cannot have a reciprocal empathic social relationship with a human. A human can with another human, though. And a human can have such a relationship, contract to make it a faithful, exclusive one, and make a commitment to it. If that relationship has a certain indefinable romantic or sexual quality, then the parties may consider getting married.

An animal is not a human, and cannot consent to a relationship, and cannot love, interact empathically, make sacrifices or make commitments. That kind of relationship is so far different from a marriage that it disqualifies for the definition.

The same applies to polygamy, which is also fundamentally different from our current concept of marriage, involving as it does an exclusive commitment between two people. Equal marriage is not different in any significant respect from the current concept of marriage: it is between two consenting adult humans, who would both currently be entitled to marry a member of the opposite sex if they were not gay. 

The campaign for gay marriage should be opposed on the grounds that gay and lesbian people don’t want equality: they want sameness. 

LGBT people should not be made to sit at the back of the bus.

Gay and lesbian people do not want to be ‘the same’ as ‘heterosexual’: they want to be ‘the same’ as ‘married’. In the same way, women priests do not want to be ‘the same’ as ‘men’: they want to be ‘the same’ as ‘ordained’.

Black people who are forced to sit at the back of the bus do not want to be ‘the same’ as white people: they want to be ‘the same’ in terms of their dignity and recognition of their human rights. Black people did not accept that they had to put up with being forced to sit at the back of the bus when the reactionaries said they had to because that was the way it had always been, or because they were still able to make their journey regardless. By the same token, gay and lesbian people should not have to sit at the back of the bus with their ‘civil partnerships’ because their relationships do not qualify for what is perceived by opponents as the higher status of ‘marriage’, exclusive to heterosexuals. 

Gay people have the same rights as those conferred by heterosexual marriage when they enter into a civil partnership. Calling the civil partnership ‘marriage’ would therefore not confer any additional rights. 

If this issue only involves a dispute over the redefinition of a word, then why is there so much opposition to it? It is the fierce and vocal opposition to equal marriage, with the intemperate language that is being used in some quarters, that provides an indication of why the legalisation of equal marriage is so important.

An important new right provided by the legalisation of equal marriage would be the simple right for some LGBT unions henceforth to be described as a ‘marriage’. This is important, because there is still a strong sense among people who grow up gay and lesbian that they are different from mainstream people in a significant respect, evidenced by the fact that so many gay and lesbian people continue to hide their sexual identity.

There is still an alarmingly high incidence of homophobic bullying in schools, and that the frequency of violent attacks against gay and lesbian people has increased in recent years. The attempt by social conservatives to isolate LGBT people and their relationships as being so radically different as to require a special label for their committed unions, fuels such prejudice.

According the status of marriage to gay and lesbian unions will be a clear statement of parity and endorsement on the part of the Government, which will model in an unequivocal way our society’s acceptance of lesbian and gay people as fully equal citizens. 

Forbidding interracial couples to marry was sheer prejudice, whereas forbidding same-sex couples to marry is sheer logic. 

Only a very small minority of people with extreme views would regard a marriage between two people of different race as something that violated the proper definition of marriage, and that was socially unacceptable to the degree that it should be made illegal.

But this was exactly the position of the Apartheid South African state, supported by its Dutch Reformed Church that defended its racist ideology by referring to Scripture.

So many of the arguments made against equal marriage could equally have been made against interracial marriage under Apartheid or Segregation. It is probable that, in a few decades’ time, people will look back on the opposition to equal marriage in the same way that we now look back on the opposition to interracial marriage: with a sense of outrage at the profound injustice and blinkered thinking.

A new, progressive consciousness is gradually dawning in countries where there is freedom to debate, to disseminate information, and to challenge the diktats of authority, including the arrogant authority of fundamentalist religious orthodoxy. The arguments of those who oppose equal marriage, which rest on a barely-concealed belief that LGBT people and LGBT relationships are inferior to their heterosexual counterparts, will not prevail against the gradual but ultimately benign progression of history, as human consciousness and human compassion subject religious dogmatism to ever closer scrutiny.   

© Gary Powell, 2014

Melanie Phillips's anti-gay blind spot.

Melanie Phillips stokes the homophobic fire, then objects to people getting burnt.

This blog is my response to the opinion piece "Liberal high priests pursue another heretic" by Melanie Phillips, published in the Times on 7 April 2014.

Melanie Phillips is an intelligent and articulate writer, and I find myself in agreement with her on a number of social and political issues, including the serious dangers posed by a nuclear Iran and the widespread injustice and misrepresentation suffered by Israel. It is for this reason that I feel such dismay when I see her writing in such a facile, superficial and half-baked manner about the lives and the rights of gay and lesbian people. For those without a Times subscription who are unable to read her article, I hope I have referred enough to its content below to convey its essence and make my objections intelligible.

The great irony is that Melanie, with her very unenlightened and rather offensive attitude towards gay people and gay relationships, is herself guilty of the “ideological intolerance” that she is attributing to others. She has seen fit to lump support for “gay rights” together with divorce, “elective fatherlessness” and domestic abuse of women by unmarried partners. Without the hard-won “gay rights” she disparages, gay and lesbian people would still be living in fear and shame, having to keep any relationship hidden from others, with discrimination at work and the possibility of prosecution hanging overhead like the Sword of Damocles. 

It is when people such as Melanie write about gay people in such an unconscionable manner that the kind of overreaction happens that led to the dismissal of Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO who was recently forced to step down because of his opposition to equal marriage: and it happens because ignorant homophobia has already caused so much suffering in the lives of gay and lesbian people, that a sea of anger is often just under the surface, and further instances of homophobia hit a hot button. Melanie has contributed to this polarisation by demonstrating such a lack of moderation, good judgment and forgiveness in her own writing about gay people. 

Just look at this paragraph:  

“Some gay activists have professed shock that gay rights have been used in this way to destroy other rights. Such avowals of outraged liberalism cut no ice. Having hijacked the institution of marriage, stamped all over religious beliefs and smeared objectors as bigots, such activists can scarcely pose now as principled defenders of freedom.”  

So her polarisation and demonisation of those supporting what she calls “the gay agenda” is such that those gay activists, including myself, who regard it as wrong that Brendan Eich was forced out of his job, have our views discounted because we dared to support equal marriage. Not only that, but apparently, being supporters of “the gay agenda”, what we express about this issue is not real shock, but “professed shock”, and “cuts no ice”. Why? Because apparently we have “hijacked the institution of marriage.” Perhaps, while she is at it, Melanie would like to rail against women for hijacking the institution of democracy when they got the vote. And it is hardly a “hijacking” when a good majority of the heterosexual population supported gay people being able to marry. As for “stamp(ing) all over religious beliefs”, she may feel her own religious beliefs have been stamped over, but she should realise that very many people with religious beliefs support equal marriage. Furthermore, there are plenty of “religious beliefs” that thoroughly deserve to be stamped over. Being a “religious belief” does not mean it has an absolute entitlement not to be criticised or rejected. Quite apart from that, civil marriage is not a religious institution; and if a number of religious adherents see a conflict between their personal religious beliefs and the right of LGBT people to marry, they should be modest enough to remember that while they have the right to hold any religious belief they like, they do not have the right to impose it on others who disagree with it, (who incidentally, in the case of equal marriage, constitute the majority of the UK population).

When she accuses us of “smearing objectors as bigots,” she needs to realise that a good number of those who objected to equal marriage are indeed bigots. This is, however, not necessarily the case: but when the fires of homophobia are stoked in the way demonstrated by her article, many of those who have already suffered a great deal at the hands of homophobes over their lifetime are going to react with anger. It is when this happens that injustices such as that suffered by Brendan Eich occur.

Marriage is a socially conservative institution. It seems to be something that Melanie strongly supports. How bizarre, then, that she opposes same-sex couples wanting to make the same kind of commitment as their heterosexual counterparts, especially as an increasing number of gay couples are bringing up children, who have as much right to be raised in a stable family with married parents as their peers who have heterosexual parents.

Melanie rails that “conscientious objectors to gay rights are (treated as) the equivalent of racists.” It is surely noteworthy that there were “conscientious objectors” to interracial marriage under Segregation and Apartheid, and that these were people who derived their views from their interpretations of the Bible. They may have been very nice and simply misguided people, but their views were still racist in exactly the same way as the views of those who opposed gay marriage are homophobic. People suffer because of ignorance and discrimination, whether it happens on the basis of race or sexuality.

The J. L. Talmon reference to “a dictatorship based on ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses” so aptly describes those dogmatic religious countries today where freedom and liberalism are crushed. Yet it also aptly describes the oppression suffered by gay and lesbian people here in the UK before the 1960s and for some time beyond then. Melanie is absolutely right to call for a more thoughtful, flexible, liberal and forgiving approach to those who express dissenting views of the kind shared by Brendan Eich. Yet by so dramatically failing to model such behaviour herself, she will unfortunately continue to generate the anger and create the polarisation that lead to the heavy-handedness, lack of tolerance, and blinkered thinking that she deplores. Or at least: that she deplores in carefully selected others.

© Gary Powell, 2014

Religious slaughter: pre-stun, or go to jail.

It is legal in the UK to cut the throat of animals while they are still conscious, but only if this is done during religious slaughter (halal/ shechita). It is a practice that must be banned. It does not belong in any civilised country.

 

88% of animals slaughtered in the UK by the halal method are already pre-stunned. It is therefore only a small minority of Muslims who continue to insist on slaughter without pre-stunning. In shechita, the Jewish slaughter method, no animals are pre-stunned, but 10% are given a post-cut stun. All really horrible stuff.

It is hardly an extreme or unreasonable demand for the law to require that all animals be pre-stunned before slaughter. There are certain fundamentalist religious practices that do not harm any other beings, and for the sake of freedom, they should not be banned. But there are other religious practices that cause clear and significant harm to other beings, and these should be banned.

It generally takes adult cattle 22-40 seconds to lose consciousness after their throats have been cut. It can take some calves up to 120 seconds to die. This kind of mediaeval cruelty inflicted on animals is utterly unconscionable.

Just because something has happened for centuries, does not make it right. Slavery lasted for centuries. Women were subjugated for centuries. People were burnt as heretics for centuries. Gay people were oppressed into concealment for centuries. “Ancient religious traditions, handed down over centuries” supported all of these outrages. Just because something is an ancient religious tradition, doesn’t mean it should be allowed to happen in a civilised country.

There are certain traditional religious practices that are generally accepted as totally unacceptable and rightly illegal. Stoning people to death and execution for apostasy are two examples. Saying that a cruel activity must be given special legal dispensation just because it is demanded by the ancient traditions of a fundamentalist religion is therefore not a good enough justification. If those making this claim simply believe that animal suffering does not matter, then they should be honest enough to state this explicitly.

If banning unstunned religious slaughter is persecution of religious minorities, then surely so is not allowing religious minorities to execute apostates and adulterers. Yes, the latter is worse, and more shocking. But if someone has a special right to make another being suffer simply because of religious beliefs, this is where the argument takes us.

Calling the campaign to ban unstunned religious slaughter “Islamophobic” makes no sense. 88% of halal slaughter in the UK already involves pre-stunning, so it is only a small minority of Muslims who insist on the animal being conscious when killed. That 12% cannot claim to represent all Muslims in the UK. So, if anything, opposition to it can only be called “Hard-Line-Islam-ophobic”. Criticising the beliefs and actions of hellfire Baptists does not imply any criticism of Quakers. It is not “Christophobic.” Furthermore, a “phobia” is an irrational fear. I fear the cruel suffering inflicted on animals in unstunned religious slaughter. That is a perfectly rational fear; not a phobia. There is nothing “Islamophobic” about demanding all animals be pre-stunned before slaughter. In this context, “Islamophobia” is a lazy term used to silence valid criticism of certain unacceptable aspects of fundamentalist religion.

It is not “libertarian” to defend the right to carry out unstunned religious slaughter. As well as having a right to freedom to do certain things, sentient beings have a right to freedom from having certain things done to them. Both of these will be defended by a true libertarian. If animals have a right to protection from cruel suffering, then this must trump the perceived right of the fundamentalist to inflict cruel suffering on them. Some fundamentalists think they are divinely commanded to kill apostates and gay people, and are prevented from doing so by the law. Here is the precedent that demonstrates religious rights are not allowed to trump every other right. Why should they be allowed to trump the standard legal acknowledgment of animal rights?

Some claim that it is “not our business” to interfere in how other people want to live their lives, including how they kill animals for meat. Many would have had the same attitude towards their battered next-door neighbour prior to the 1980s when domestic abuse and marital rape were still legal. Just because everyone else, and the law, turn a blind eye now, doesn’t mean it will ever be right, or forever be legal.

One journalist recently wrote that the campaign to ban religious slaughter meant that Britain was set to become a country that prized animals more than Jewish or Muslim people. But there was a time when heretics were burnt at the stake: and indeed, in some countries, heretics and apostates are still executed. Cue the defence against outrage: “This country is set to become one where heretics are prized more than devout believers.” It is a stupid and vacuous line of argumentation.  

There is a distinct lack of precise thinking in much of the material that passes for a defence of unstunned religious slaughter. I have outlined some of it above. Another bogus counter-argument is that all animal slaughter involves cruelty. This may well be the case. But that is equivalent to saying that because someone has been tortured with thumbscrews, it doesn't matter if he is put on the rack as well. No doubt there is suffering associated with all animal slaughter. But at least stunning the animal first renders it unconscious to what comes afterwards.

Then there is the vacuous counter-argument that the stunning procedures in standard abattoirs do not always work, and that some animals are slaughtered unstunned there. But at least the law declares this is illegal, and abattoirs can be inspected, controlled, and reported when there are contraventions. And the hand of campaigners against animal cruelty is strengthened by the existence of such legislation.

Then there are those who say that ritual slaughter seems to be the most humane way to kill an animal. As it can take adult cattle 22 to 40 seconds to lose consciousness after their throats are cut, and as it will take some calves up to 120 seconds to die, such arguments lack credibility. After all, what human being faced with his throat being cut would turn down the opportunity to be electronically stunned first?

Let’s stand up for suffering victims of religious fundamentalism who do not have a voice to stand up for themselves.

For more about religious slaughter without pre-stunning, the RSPCA have produced a comprehensive information sheet.

© Gary Powell, 2014  

Time to slaughter ritual killing arguments

A reply to Telegraph writer Cristina Odone, who is outraged about demands for animals to be stunned before their throats are cut by religious slaughterers. 

The journalist Cristina Odone has nailed her colours to the mast on the issue of ritual slaughter, and they are dripping with the blood of animals whose throats have been slit while being denied recourse to any stunning procedure that would have spared them the terror and agony that some aggressive religious adherents have been inflicting on sentient creatures (including fellow humans) for centuries.

  

Mrs Odone has written an article in response to the demand from John Blackwell, president-elect of the British Veterinary Association, that ritual slaughter without pre-stunning either be stopped voluntarily, or be banned. Mrs Odone’s piece for The Daily Telegraph is entitled “I don't want to live in a Britain that prizes its cows more than its Jews” (6 March 2014) and has the staggeringly asinine opening line, “Britain is set to become a country that prizes a cow more than a Jew, an ox more than a Muslim.” 

Mr Blackwell’s position is hardly that of an extremist. His concerns are based on animals suffering as a result of religious slaughter where they are not stunned before the knife is applied to their throats. He said:

“They will feel the cut. They will feel the massive injury of the tissues of the neck. They will perceive the aspiration of blood they will breathe in before they lose consciousness.”

Explaining the sensation of blood in the trachea to be like the pain when food goes down the wrong way into your windpipe, Mr Blackwell said:

“When you check the lungs of these animals there is clearly blood that has been aspirated. People say we are trying to focus on the last five or six seconds of an animal’s life when it could be 18 months old. It’s five or six seconds too long.”  

Mr Blackwell also only advocates a legal ban should Muslim and Jewish religious leaders not comply voluntarily with allowing animals to be stunned before their throats are slit. (The Times, 6 March 2014.)

Yet Mr Blackwell’s mild, reasonable and humane request has been turned by some into an attempt to put the rights of animals above the “rights” of dogmatic religious adherents. Mrs Odone belongs to the camp that is trying to make it all so personal, all so much a matter of religious persecution. 

Just take Mrs Odone’s statements, “I don't want to live in a Britain that prizes its cows more than its Jews,” and “Britain is set to become a country that prizes a cow more than a Jew, an ox more than a Muslim.”  So, what about those (thankfully few) people who treat their pets, or farmyard animals, with wanton cruelty, some of whom get discovered, successfully prosecuted and exposed in the media? Shouldn’t they, by the same token, be allowed to inflict cruelty on a non-human animal, given that it is an action that gratifies some kind of impulse or warped value? Are we not “prizing” dogs more than human beings when we punish an owner for cruelty, according to Mrs Odone’s reasoning?  

If it would be illegal for someone to slit the throat of his conscious pet dog and leave it to die in agony and terror, why should a dogmatic religious adherent be given special rights to inflict such suffering on an animal? After all, there are plenty of rules, commandments and endorsements in religious books that their adherents are no longer legally permitted to follow in any decent country: stoning to death, execution for apostasy, and ruthless oppression of gay and lesbian people are just a few examples. The Liberal Democrat UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, also a defender of religious slaughter, stated that the Government should not meddle in “ancient beliefs handed down over generations.” But if being an ancient belief comes with a special licence to override the growing tide of reason and compassion that are gradually asserting themselves against centuries of religious oppression and stupidity, then Mr Clegg would have to acknowledge that many of the freedoms and protections his party claims to support, should never have been allowed to trump longstanding religious dogmatism.

The other serious problem with the statement, “Britain is set to become a country that prizes a cow more than a Jew, an ox more than a Muslim,” is that it treats Jews and Muslims as though they were two internally homogenous groups with overwhelmingly shared values. This is patently not the case. Firstly, just as there are cultural Christians and observant, believing Christians, there are cultural Jews and observant, believing Jews. There are cultural Muslims, and observant, believing Muslims. There is a world of difference between being an observant Muslim and a cultural Muslim; between being an observant Jew and a cultural Jew; between being an observant Christian and a cultural Christian. I would imagine that many people who have grown up in a Jewish culture or a Muslim culture don’t even believe in God – or at least in the God as He is presented in their religion, (even if many might be too frightened to admit it to anyone for fear of repercussions). They may believe in certain tenets of their religion, and not in others. This is exactly the case with people who grow up in a Christian culture. Mrs Odone’s kind of generalising blanket statement also gives the false impression of a “them and us” situation: as though the culturally Christian mainstream is ganging up on the Islamic and Jewish minority. I do not believe that the majority of Muslims or Jews living in the UK truly hold the kind of fundamentalist beliefs that are represented by such teachings as the importance of ritual slaughter without pre-stunning, the evil of homosexuality, or the punishment of sinners by being burned alive in hell for eternity. These kinds of views are dogmatic, fundamentalist views that are not held by anyone who has had enough psychological and social freedom to develop a basic level of compassion and insight, and reset their moral and intellectual compass. Identifying yourself as Jewish or Muslim does not necessarily mean that you will only eat ritually-slaughtered meat, or that you think homosexuality is evil. Professing beliefs that identify you as a dogmatic, fundamentalist Jew or a dogmatic, fundamentalist Muslim is a different matter entirely.

The remainder of Mrs Odone’s article continues in the same fluffy vein. There are “millions of Muslims and Jews whose religion dictates that they eat only animals that have been killed in a particular way.” Those demanding a ban on ritual slaughter are saying, “Let them eat cake.” Halal and kosher slaughter have been practised “for millennia”. Ritual slaughter is “Not for the faint-hearted, but religion seldom is.” (Maybe the latter statement might have appeased the friends and families of mediaeval heretics being burnt alive at the stake.) Mrs Odone states that we have a culture “where animals matter more than people, and a lot more than religious people.” (Of course, we have all witnessed animals being given state education, NHS treatment, welfare benefits and legal protection from cruel violence: privileges so blatantly and so unjustly denied to “religious people”.) People are only objecting to ritual slaughter because lambs are “cute and cuddly” and “soft furry creatures”. (So does she really believe we would not object to cruelty inflicted on an ugly dog? And since when have religiously slaughtered cattle been soft and furry?)

Mrs Odone’s final paragraph even raises some doubt that animals feel pain at all: “Banning a religious ritual because an animal may (who knows) feel some pain before its killing, is a nonsense value.” “Who knows” that animals feel pain? Would she only be convinced if they phoned to make an appointment with the vet? That animals could not feel pain, as they did not have souls, was the view of her fellow Roman Catholic, René Descartes. Such views have no doubt encouraged a great deal of animal suffering at the hands of religious humans over the centuries. But at least Descartes has the excuse that he was writing in the 17^th century: an excuse Mrs Odone does not have. One might have hoped that religious adherents would have learned a thing or two over the last three centuries: not least because of the similarity between human and animal nervous systems, and the fact that animals exhibit clear pain responses to stimuli that would result in human pain responses. Even if a sophistical philosopher or theologian were able to make a theoretical case for animals not feeling pain, the fact of very strong – overwhelming – empirical and biological evidence that they do feel pain must support legislation for their protection.

So, can anyone invent a religion, which then comes to have a special status in law and confers a right to cause suffering to animals that non-adherents do not have? I couldn’t imagine many Pastafarians (members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster)  supporting a religious right to be cruel to animals. But what if another new religion took hold that claimed its deity demanded the trussing-up of cats and dogs, and their being thrown alive onto bonfires? Let’s remember that the Christian God used to be understood to command the trussing up of human “heretics” and their burning on bonfires. Was preventing people being burned at the stake an example of prioritising heretics over religious believers? Or was it a case of limiting the cruelty that humans are permitted to inflict on other sentient beings in the name of fundamentalist religion?  

Bogus arguments, red herrings, sloppy thinking and straw men from opponents, hinder the progress of those campaigning for an end to religious slaughter without pre-stunning. In modern, liberal, secular societies, religious dogmatism will not win religious dogmatists the support they need from the majority population, which has a healthy disregard for fundamentalism and for any claims to be able to quote God verbatim from religious texts that contain a great deal of cruelty and absurdity. Instead (with apologies to F. H. Bradley), the religious apologists for discrimination found bad reasons for what they believed upon prejudice: and those reasons were weak and flawed, and were blown out of the water by their opponents. The arguments to continue allowing religious dogmatists a special dispensation to inflict cruel deaths on animals are based on similar attempts to find bad reasons for what is believed upon prejudice, and the feeble attempt to present fundamentalist religious adherents as poor, persecuted victims, treated worse than animals, features large in these arguments.

The vast majority of the general public have learned to put natural compassion above the strident demands of fundamentalist religious beliefs that have caused no end of misery throughout history. Many people are unaware of what ritual slaughter involves, and that the president-elect of the British Veterinary Association is simply asking for animals to be stunned before they are slaughtered, as they must already be in all places where non-religious slaughter takes place. As the campaign to end non-prestunned ritual slaughter gains increasing attention in the public domain, the flimsy arguments of its religious proponents will buckle under the tide of opposition that has already removed so many obscene fundamentalist religious practices from the civilised world.

© Gary Powell, 2014