Social customs
Merry Christmas! "There's probably no God."
Recently, in Kansas City, members of the congregation at the Praise Chapel Christian Fellowship church informed their pastor they intended to dress up like Jesus Christ - as the holy-historical personage is often depicted in artists' images - in order to offer the public "a hard-to-miss reminder of the [Christmas] holiday's religious roots." (Associated Press)
"Jesus" at the diner: This week, Shawn Johnston of Kansas City, Kansas, read a newspaper at a coffee shop; a member of a local Christian church's congregation, in recent days he dressed up in historical costume to "show people what Christmas is all about"
The church' s minister, Kelly Lohrke, said of the roughly 400 members of his flock who told him they would take part in the Jesus-costume action, which took part in recent days and found them "showing up [dressed] that way...at jobs, shopping malls and restaurants": "I know it's a radical idea. Christians can have fun with their faith and sharing their faith." Lohrke reportedly arrived at the Jesus-costume idea "out of frustration over the removal of [Christian] crosses, nativity scenes and other religious symbols from public view. Several groups have pushed the issue this year, with the American Humanist Association plastering ads on Washington, D.C., buses that proclaim, 'Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake.'" News of that ad campaign "motivated Lohrke [to] protest." (Associated Press)
Earlier this month, at the state Capitol building in Olympia, Washington, a sign that had been installed by an atheist organization next to traditional, Christmastime displays - including a decorated tree and a Christian nativity scene - was mysteriously stolen. It turned up a few hours later at the offices of a Seattle radio station. The sign had been installed at the Capitol by members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national organization that is based in Madison, Wisconsin. "With a nod to the winter solstice in late December, the placard [stated], in part: 'There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.' The foundation's co-president, Dan Barker, said it was important for atheists to offer their viewpoint alongside the overtly religious nativity scene and a Christmas-style holiday tree at the Capitol Rotunda." Barker commented: "Our members want equal time....Not to muscle, not to coerce, but just to have a place at the table." (MSNBC, with news agencies)
American Humanist Association website
Recently, the American Humanist Association placed ads on buses in Washington, D.C., which said: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake."
An alternative to a religious-doctrine-based view of life and the world is that which is offered by so-called secular humanism. In the United Kingdom, Polly Toynbee, the president of the British Humanist Association, observes on that organization's website: "The humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic, in awe of human potential, living without fear of judgment and death, finding enough purpose and meaning in life, love and leaving a good legacy."
Toynbee's name may be familiar to "World Views" readers; she is a commentator whose essays appear in the Guardian. Writing in that British daily this week, Toynbee observed: "This has been the year of religion's fightback against secularism - a word made almost synonymous with the spiritual and moral decadence of materialism. Angered by the runaway success of anti-God books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, A.C. Grayling and others, the different faiths - though each believes it has the one and only divinely revealed truth and often fights to the death to prove it - combine in curious harmony against secularists. They blame us for all the evils of modernity, as if they could point to some morally better time when people feared God and sinned less. There is, of course, no evidence that God-fearers ever behaved better than the ungodly."
British Humanist Association website
In the U.K., the British Humanist Association has supported a campaign whose badges (like the one above), T-shirts and posters have carried the slogan: "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
Toynbee noted that pro-religionists tend to "turn on atheists for lacking any moral base without a God." She responds: "I could say we are mortally offended and demand protection from such insult. But it is the prerogative of religions to be protected from feeling offended. Priests, imams and rabbis reserve for their beliefs a special respect, ringfenced from normal public argument. It is abusive and insulting to suggest that belief in gods and miracles is delusional, or that religions are inherently anti-women and anti-gay. Meanwhile, non-believers suffer the far worse insult that we inhabit a moral vacuum. But we will live with the insult if we are free to reply that there is no inherent virtue in being religious either: it does not make people behave better."
The op-ed writer added: "The unctuous claim [that] there is a special religious ethos that can be poured like a sauce over schools and public services to improve them morally has been bought, to a depressing extent, by Labour" - the Labour Party that currently controls Britain's government. However, Toynbee noted, "[W]e all know one thing: religion no more makes people good than lack of it makes the rest of us bad....There is no emotional or spiritual deficiency in rejecting religions that infantilize the imagination with impossible beliefs."
Symbols of a non-religious Christmas, whose spirit is inspired by the Christian Christmas story: In Bucharest, Romania, earlier this week, people dressed as Santa Claus took part in an event in an effort to win the Guinness World Record for the most Santa Clauses ever gathered together at one time, in one town
By contrast, an editorial in the New Zealand Herald argues that, sometimes, one religion's values, ideas or celebrations may readily be embraced by followers of other religions - or even by those who do not follow any established religion at all. "The Christmas insight [in]to the essential goodness of human nature unites the Christian and non-Christian, even the determinedly irreligious, in celebration of the season," the newspaper observes. "Such is the generosity of the Christmas, or Christian, spirit that it does not even aggressively demand recognition that the phenomenon of Christmas is a Christian creation. We are forever being reminded of the pre-Christian festivals and the Jewish, Islamic and other religious observances that coincide with Christmas."
The New Zealand Herald adds: "In excessive deference to the rest, the word Christmas is declining in fashionable use in some quarters of the cosmopolitan West. Greeting cards and other messages have adopted the anodyne 'Happy Holiday' in a misplaced spirit of inclusion. Misplaced, because migrants from all countries delight in this element of their adopted country's religious heritage. Countries with different religious traditions have happily adopted all the trappings of Christmas. Santa Claus is a universal presence, and the carols and the cribs, the angels, shepherds, the baby in a manger, are never far away. So give religion its due at this time of year. Great numbers do. Churches tonight and early tomorrow will be filled by many who have been moved by the spirit. They might not all accept religion's answers to the mysteries of existence but they value its influence for goodness, warmth and generosity."
| December 25 2008 at 06:52 AM
Britons consider: Whose right is it to die?
Yesterday night in Britain, Sky TV's Real Lives channel aired the Oscar-winning, Canadian director John Zaritsky's film, "Right to Die?". As Canadian Press noted, "Britain's obsession with reality television" was set to reach "new heights - or depths - [last] night with the scheduled broadcast" of Zaritsky's film, which documents "the assisted suicide of a terminally ill American man at a Swiss clinic." In the film, the American-born, U.K. resident Craig Ewert, a retired university professor, "is shown with his wife at his bedside while he takes a number of barbiturates and turns off his ventilator. He then dies on-camera. It is a draining experience, even for viewers hardened by a hundred head-banging Hollywood films."
In the film "Right to Die?", the retired, American university professor Craig Ewert, a resident of the U.K., brings his own life to an end at an assisted-dying facility in Switzerland
Ewert's wife Mary had noted in the British press prior to the Sky TV broadcast "that her 59-year-old husband had been enthusiastic about having his final moments televised." She had stated: "He was keen to have [the film] shown because, when death is hidden and private, people don't face their fears about it...." Mary Ewert also "said that he wanted viewers to understand that assisted suicide allowed him to die comfortably rather than enduring a long, drawn-out and painful demise." However, Canadian Press reported, "This was written off as pure hogwash by members of Care, Not Killing, an anti-euthanasia group aligned with the Catholic Church and other religious organizations in Britain," whose director called the TV airing of "Right to Die?" "a cynical attempt to boost television ratings." He remarked: "There is a growing appetite from the British public for increasingly bizarre reality shows...." (Canadian Press)
The Times notes that Craig Ewert was an "American father of two who moved to Britain after taking early retirement...." In April 2006, he was "diagnosed with motor neurone disease...and given between two and five years to live. But the illness progressed far more rapidly than expected, and within five months he needed assistance to breathe." In Zaritsky's docu-film, Ewert, who died on September 26, 2006 at a facility in Zürich operated by Dignitas, a Swiss, assisted-suicide organization, says: "I am tired of the disease but I am not tired of living....I still enjoy life enough that I would like to continue, but the thing is that I really cannot. If I opt for life, then that is choosing to be tortured rather than end this journey and start the next one....Let's face it, when you're completely paralyzed and cannot talk, how do you let somebody know you are suffering? This could be a complete and utter hell. You can watch only so much of yourself drain away before you look at what is left and say, 'This is an empty shell.'"
Craig Ewert, in wheelchair, and his wife, Mary, who supported her husband's decision to end his life - and his suffering brought on by motor neurone disease
The Times notes that, in Zaritsky's docu-film, Mary Ewert tells her husband that she loves him as "he bites down on a timer to switch off his ventilator and then drinks a lethal dose of sodium phenobarbital through a straw." He dies 45 minutes later. To make his film, Zaritsky "was granted unprecedented access to the right-to-die organization Dignitas, which has helped more than 700 people from 25 countries to die since 1999. Switzerland is the only country where assisted suicide is legal for non-residents." Mary Ewert said: "I have absolutely no regrets about agreeing to leave the camera rolling as Craig died....It's what we both wanted....Craig had been a teacher, and you could say he made this film with his educative hat on."
The Independent notes that calls for changes in Britain's 1961 Suicide Act "have been marked by high-profile legal bids and a steady stream of publicity about U.K. citizens who have traveled to Dignitas...to die. Dignitas was founded in 1998 and takes advantage of Switzerland's liberal laws on assisted suicide....In 2006, an Assisted Dying Bill...was rejected in the House of Lords." The Times notes that, in the U.K., advocates of assisted dying "have long complained that British law criminalizes relatives who agree to help their loved ones...end their suffering."
Yesterday, in the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked if he considered the television showing of "Right to Die?" to be "in the public interest" or "simply distasteful voyeurism." Brown responded: "These are very difficult issues....I believe that it's necessary to ensure that there is never a case in the country [in which] a sick or elderly person feels under pressure to agree to an assisted death or somehow feels it's the expected thing to do. That's why I've always opposed legislation for assisted deaths." (Times)
In Britain, the organization Dignity in Dying stresses that "people should have more say over how, where and when they die." The group's website notes: "Greater choice includes giving terminally ill adults in unbearable suffering the option of an assisted death, within strict legal safeguards." Writing in the Telegraph, Dr. Michael Irwin, a former medical director at the United Nations and a former chairman of the organization out of which Dignity in Dying evolved, notes about "Right to Die?": "Each time I have seen it, it has brought tears to my eyes because it is so moving....It [represents] one man's determination to say, 'Enough is enough,' and he has his wife to support him."
| December 11 2008 at 12:00 AM
Bargain hunters or "warriors" in the stores?
"He's the rebel on the underground/She's the rebel of the modern town."
So sang - or shrieked - lead vocalist Poly Styrene of the British punk-rock band, X-ray Spex, in its 1978 ditty "Warrior in Woolworths."
And they're off!: The scene last Friday morning ("Black Friday"), when a Wal-Mart store in Oklahoma opened its doors to begin the day's business
Late last week, on the day after Thanksgiving - "Black Friday" for U.S. retailers, who hope that date's big, holiday-season sales will help push them into the black at year's end - warriors at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, in an early-morning battle for bargains, managed to kill a store worker, Jdimytai Damour. "The 34-year-old man was at the entrance of the Valley Stream Wal-Mart store just after it opened at 5:00 a.m. and was knocked to the ground," a local police report indicated. Apparently, he was the victim of "a stampede by frenzied shoppers who broke down doors and surged into" the store, a spokesman for the local police department stated. Last Friday, stores all over the U.S. "opened early to offer discounts to consumers hit by a contracting economy. Hundreds of shoppers waited in line before dawn at some locations to secure deals on holiday gifts." (Reuters)
Newsday, a daily newspaper based on Long Island (east of New York City), where Valley Stream is located, published one of the earliest, more detailed dispatches about the Black Friday crush that killed Damour. It cited a customer at the Wal-Mart outlet, who said: "Nobody was trying to help him....They were rushing in the store, rushing, rushing, rushing." Another female customer told the newspaper: "It was chaos...." Although shoppers in the store had been "asked to leave by other store workers, some of them crying," some customers "ignored the pleas that they stop shopping, move to the front of the store and exit...." That second female customer told Newsday: "They kept shopping. It's not right...." The paper reported: "Damour, who was a maintenance worker and was helping with the opening of the store, was pronounced dead just after 6 a.m....At least three other shoppers also suffered minor injuries, police said....As part of its Black Friday promotion, Wal-Mart had advertised sales like a Polaroid 42-inch LCD HDTV for $598.00 and a DVD of 'Rush Hour 2' for $2.00 - prices valid only from 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on Friday morning."
Last Friday, bargain-hunting, holiday-season shoppers who had arrived early in the morning waited for a Wal-Mart store to open in Oakland, California
"When told to leave," some Valley Stream Wal-Mart shoppers "complained they had been in line for up to 24 hours." A police spokesman said: "This crowd was out of control...." and "described the scene as [one of] 'utter chaos.'" (Herald Sun, Australia)
"Greed is deadly," noted a headline in Austria's Krone, referring to the Valley Stream Wal-Mart death. The French daily Le Monde reported that, in the U.S., the National Retail Foundation had estimated that some 128 million Americans were planning to go shopping last Friday, and that the trade association emphasized that the Valley Stream Wal-Mart incident marked the first time such a death - in such circumstances - had occurred.
Writing in La Presse (Montréal), commentator Stéphane Laporte notes, incredulously: "[Last] Friday, in a Wal-Mart on Long Island, an employee was trampled to death by customers rushing for discounts. This is not a joke. It's not a movie. A man really lost his life because the happy little madams were so eager to lay their hands on a vegetable peeler or a microplush blanket for half the price." Laporte also mentions an incident that occurred at a Toys R Us outlet in California last Friday, in which two men shot each other - dead - after the women who were accompanying them started fighting. (The Los Angeles Times reported: "When the women started arguing, witnesses said, the two men pulled out handguns and ran down the store aisles shooting at one another.")
Those were real guns, not toys: A woman and child sat on the grass near a Toys R Us outlet in Palm Desert, California, last Friday, following shootings inside the store that left two men dead
The out-of-control behavior of certain shoppers is an epidemic that has spread to Canada, too, Laporte observes, noting that, in Québec, "holiday-season commerce has not yet produced any deaths," but that a certain gloomy, disheartening air still prevails in many a shopping center. It's as though, he muses, everybody's playing parts in a Quentin Tarantino film. Some shoppers, he notes, are "[c]racked-up, aggressive, two fingers away from wiping somebody out," and their unpleasant vibe can be felt "on the escalators [and] in the aisles. Mothers even use their baby strollers to clear themselves a path, to roll right over other people. No civility at all. Someone will plow into an elevator even before others have stepped out...[or]...invade the fitting room even before the little gentleman has pulled up his briefs. Someone will break into the check-out line with the aggression of Lorena Bobbitt.*... Joyeux shopping!" (La Presse/Cyberpresse.ca)
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* Bobbitt was the Virginia woman who, in 1993, famously cut off a portion of her husband John's penis after he allegedly returned home intoxicated and raped her. A jury later found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity of maliciously wounding her husband, whom she subsequently divorced.
| December 01 2008 at 12:00 AM
Turkey: Secularism vs. Islamism leads to constitutional crisis
As the op-ed columnist Yavuz Baydar puts it, writing in the Istanbul-based daily Today's Zaman, there is "[n]ever a dull moment in this country."
In January of this year, a group of Turkish women in Ankara demonstrated in favor of the lifting of a long-standing ban on the wearing of the traditional Muslim headscarf by women in universities in Turkey; the national parliament overturned that law in February
Baydur refers to the fact that, yesterday, two rather dramatic - and, for some Turks and foreign observers, alarming - developments whose ramifications could be both political and legal took place in Turkey: First, the country's Constitutional Court decided to accept an indictment against the ruling party of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (the Justice and Development Party; Turkish abbreviation: AKP) brought forth by Abdullah Yalcınkaya, the top prosecutor of Turkey's Supreme Court of Appeals; second, government authorities sought out and detained "four retired, high-ranking generals[,]...along with dozens of others" in the latest phase of an ongoing "investigation into an illegal organization" that is believed to have been behind "two failed coup attempts" that were "allegedly devised by currently retired [Turkish armed-forces] commanders against the current government in 2004." In yesterday's round-up of supposed anti-government activists, "[t]wenty-one people, including two former army commanders, a journalist and the leader of a business group, were detained in operations in the cities of Ankara, Istanbul, Antalya and Trabzon...as part of an investigation into a powerful and illegal organization" whose goal, Turkish authorities believe, is to overthrow Erdogan's AKP-led government. (Today's Zaman news article)
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Despite its protestations to the contrary, does his ruling Justice and Development Party really want to Islamisize Turkish society, in defiance of its constitutional obligation to maintain and support a secular state?
Background: Erdogan's Justice and Development Party has its roots in Turkey's fundamentalist-Islamist movement, although the prime minister has downplayed its historical, religious affinities. Nevertheless, ever since the AKP came to power in 2002, staunch supporters of modern Turkey's secular tradition, in which church and state have been kept separate by law, have feared the creeping Islamisization of Turkish society, a goal they believe Erdogan's party supports. After all, in February of this year, Turkey's national parliament overturned a long-standing ban on the wearing by women of traditional Muslim headscarves in the country's universities. At the time, the government "argued that changing the constitution was crucial to ensure all women had equal access to a higher education." However, many Turkish women "fear[ed] that relaxing the rules on the headscarf [was] a first step towards increasing the influence of Islam on society." They saw the overturning of the law "as a serious threat to their own non-religious way of life," a legal move that could "chang[e] the face of modern Turkey." (BBC)
In presenting his indictment to the Constitutional Court, whose 11 judges accepted it unanimously, prosecutor Yalcınkaya argued that the AKP, in violation of the government's constitutional requirement to maintain and support a secular state, "had used a strategy of 'social agreement' to introduce moderate Islam and was aiming [to impose] sharia" on the nation (Islam's traditional system of religious law, that is). Thus, Yalcınkaya "asked for 71 politicians to be banned from politics for five years, including Prime Minister...Erdogan, President Abdullah Gül, and former Parliament Speaker Bülent Arinc. While there was disagreement on Gül, with 7 [judges] against 4 voting for his inclusion, the other 70 names were agreed on unanimously." Prosecutor Yalcınkaya, in a 162-page document for the court, argued that Turkey "'is in more danger than ever before'...and listed eleven different crimes of the [AKP] party." The prosecutor's indictment "will...be sent to the AKP, which has an initial period of a month to prepare a preliminary defense. The party will be given more time for [its] main defense" to come. (Bianet)
Symbol and graphics from the official Website of the Constitutional Court of Turkey
The detentions that took place yesterday were part of an effort on the part of Turkish authorities that has become known as the Ergenekon investigation. It began last year, when investigators discovered a house in Istanbul filled with weapons and ammunition. Today's Zaman reports: "Analysts say the Ergenekon group is part of [a] shadowy 'deep state'...." That's their "code for hard-line nationalists in Turkey's security forces and state bureaucracy [who, it is thought, are] ready to take the law into their own hands to accomplish their own agenda." The Ergenekon investigation "has significantly increased political tension in [Turkey]. Prime Minister...Erdogan had previously said a closure case against his party on charges of anti-secularism was a response to the government's determination in the Ergenekon operation, while others have claimed that the government is using the...investigation to suppress its opponents."
One of the suspects who has been apprehended in the investigation is the head of the Ankara office of Cumhuriyet. Cüneyt Arcayürek, a columnist for that Turkish, daily newspaper, "held a press conference...yesterday to comment on the Ankara bureau chief's detention, saying, 'It is in no way a coincidence that such things are happening at a time when the [anti-AKP] closure case is being heard at the Constitutional Court.'" The news article in Today's Zaman also notes that the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel Prize laureate "who [in the past] was prosecuted under a law banning insults to Turkish identity, and members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party... - [who are] seen by nationalists as a threat to national sovereignty - were reportedly on the Ergenekon [investigators'] hit list." (Today's Zaman)
Bronwen Maddox, the chief commentator on foreign affairs for Britain's Times, observes that "this clash" in Turkey between secularists and those who, supposedly, want to steer the country in an unabashedly Islamist direction "has been brewing" for months - and that it's a risk-filled confrontation, too.
Maddox writes: "It now seems that the struggle for Turkey's identity is going to get much worse, while its chances of a liberal, modern future dissolve. Ever since...Erdogan...and his Justice and Development Party...were elected enthusiastically six years ago, the country's old-guard defenders of its historic secularism have been uneasy....Turkey's secularism, a fervent refusal to allow religion to shape the institutions of state, has been the heart of the republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923. It has underpinned the extraordinary position that Turkey has chosen for itself: as the only Islamic member of NATO; as the only Islamic friend of Israel; as a bridge, culturally and diplomatically, between Central Asia and Europe."
In Ankara, in April, on National Sovereignty and Children's Day, Turkish schoolchildren read a poem as they held portraits of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revered founder of modern, secular Turkey
Maddox adds: "The issue on which the [Erdogan] government began to clash with the courts was its move to overturn the ban on women wearing headscarves in universities." The Muslim headscarf, she notes, is a garment of "huge symbolic significance...in Turkey...." Still, she asks, was the overturning of the ban worth squabbling over to the point of stirring up a constitutional crisis? The news analyst concludes: "Of course, no one would want to be relaxed about any kind of constitutional change that might lay the ground for more Islamic-tinged reforms. But it is unfair to imply that this is the [AKP's] intention, given its six-year record that has been liberal, more respectful of human rights and interested in joining the European Union. [Turkish] courts have been erratic in their defense of the principle of secularism over the years. The decision by the chief prosecutor to accept the legal challenge of the opposition and to move ahead in seeking to ban the entire governing party - not simply to challenge the headscarf rule - is a disastrous one. It has taken Turkey towards a confrontation that will be hard to defuse, and almost certainly, farther from Europe." (See also Turkish Daily News)
Turkish newspaper columnist Yavuz Baydar writes: "Expect even stranger days" to come.
| July 02 2008 at 10:14 AM
Polygamous marriages, in Australia?
In Australia, how many wives is too many wives - legally, that is?
That's the essential question, apparently, in a debate that has been provoked in part by remarks Keysar Trad, the president of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, made on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio program earlier this week. In a report titled "Polygamy in Australia," Trad told an ABC interviewer he believed multi-wife marriages should be legally recognized in Australia.
A summary of the report on the radio service's Website notes that Trad "grew up in a polygamous family: his mother was his father's third wife. Keysar says to take another wife would be a compliment to his first wife, Hanefa." The ABC program's reporter also spoke with Sheikh Khalil Chami of the Islamic Welfare Center in Lakemba, a suburb of Sydney; he, too, proposed that polygamous marriages should be legally recognized. Chami said that "he is asked almost weekly to conduct polygamous religious ceremonies" but that he "refuses because he is worried that without legal recognition[,] the wives would be vulnerable." However, Chami pointed out that other Muslim clerics in Australia do "conduct these ceremonies." The ABC Website notes that it is "illegal to be married to more than one person, so polygamous relationships are often kept secret. No one knows how common [they may be]."
Australia's Daily Telegraph quoted Trad's radio remarks, noting that he had said (in somewhat fractured English): "I certainly would not have entertained the thought of having a relationship without a religious marriage and I thought the relationship with that person was developing to the stage where we had become too friendly with each other....Rather than entertain any thoughts of an affair[,] I thought the only decent thing to do was to consider a proper commitment to that person.....This idea of plural sexual relationships, it is not so much frowned upon by society as long as these people don't say we want a polygamous relationship." The newspaper reported that the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia leader "said the women [in his parents' multi-partner marriage had] had admiration and respect for each other and [had] supported each other." Trad said: "In a sense, it's a compliment to the original partner that if he didn't find marriage to be so good[,] why would he go into it again[?]....In a sense, he's saying that his first wife has made life like heaven for him[,] so he's willing to provide the same service, love and support to a second woman."
Toby Melville/Reuters file photo
Muslim women in London in 2005; today, in Australia, a debate has emerged over whether or not Muslim, polygamous marriages should be legally recognized
A day after the ABC program was broadcast, Australia's attorney general, Robert McLelland, reaffirmed: "There is absolutely no way...the government will be recognizing polygamist relationships....They are unlawful and they will remain as such." (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Australian Associated Press reports that McLelland also told reporters: "Everyone should be on notice that the law in Australia is that marriage is between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others....That's based on a long tradition....It's based on the culture of our community[,] and polygamous relationships are entirely inconsistent with that culture and indeed with the law." In his radio remarks earlier in the week, Sheik Khalil Chami had said: "Why not change the law?" (AAP in the Age)
In an editorial in the Australian, that national daily argues: "Polygamous 'marriage' is not the Australian way." The newspaper observes that, if "Islamic men, Mormons or those of any other religion, or none, elect to live with, support and have children with more than one woman, that is their business, regardless of the fact that many would not approve....Marriage, however, is a distinct legal state and should remain so. Informed by centuries of Judeo-Christian tradition, it is a legal, binding contract, entered into with full consent by a man and a woman, excluding all others." To expand the legal definition of marriage, the paper adds, "to recognize polygamous unions would be to establish parallel jurisdictions and destabilize and alter society for the worse." Such marriages, the editorial argues, "would be a minefield of confusion in relation to taxation, welfare benefits, child support, superannuation, inheritance, divorce and custody settlements....To accede to [Sheik Chami's] wishes would be to adapt a part of sharia [Islamic religious law] by stealth. Far from enhancing multiculturalism, this would be the precise opposite of what many Muslims want when they come to Australia seeking a better way of life and[,] in some cases, liberation from repression."
| June 26 2008 at 12:00 AM
Views from abroad on Spitzer, sex and his "crime"
A politics-themed "blogue" for Canada's French-language cyberpresse.ca online news service notes that the sexcapades that got just-resigned New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's into career-crushing trouble are bad news for the presidential campaign of Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, too. That's because, he notes, Spitzer's sex-related, headline-making adventures could unpleasantly remind voters of the extramarital dalliances of Clinton's famous spouse, a former president who, one may assume, is not going to sequester himself and become invisible in the East Wing if his wife should win the keys to the White House.
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (right) and his wife, Silda, at the disgraced pol's resignation-speech event yesterday in New York
The Journal de Montréal notes that Spitzer found himself "forced to submit his resignation" because he had committed "the only real capital crime in the United States: adultery." Switzerland's Tribune de Genève, reporting Spitzer's resignation announcement and referring to his skills, accomplishments and ambitions as a lawyer and politician, dubbed the disgraced pol a "figurehead for the best and for the worst" personal qualities of a public servant.
The Spanish-language news service, Reuters América Latina, reports that, yesterday, most of Wall Street - where Spitzer had made a name for himself spearheading investigations of wrongdoing in the financial-services sector - came to a halt as traders and powerful money men stopped to watch the prostitute-frequenting politician's resignation speech on TV - and to savor his ignominious farewell. Meanwhile, Argentina's Urgente 24 wants to know: Now that Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the call girl whose wares Spitzer, as "Client 9" of a pricey "escort service," reportedly had sampled, has gone from "deluxe prostitute to famous prostitute," have the prices she charges increased?
Back when things were looking up: Spitzer, aspiring to become the governor of the state of New York, spoke to supporters at a campaign-fundraiser luncheon in December 2004
As an essay under the heading "Sex and America" in Die Zeit points out, it frequently has been said that Europeans are more "forgiving" and "mature" when it comes to the human foibles that lie at the heart of headline-making sex scandals involving political leaders. But don't kid yourself, the German newspaper adds, however "inhibited, puritanical and immature" Europeans may assume Americans are, their Euro-cousins are just as likely to lap up news like that of the late French President François Mitterrand, who, the world learned when he died in 1996, had had a second, secret mate and a daughter with her; or of German chancellors who have been married so many times voters lose track of who their spouses may be; or of the antics of the British royal family. ("Let's not even talk about it," the paper says of the Windsor clan.)
Die Zeit cites a very long list of recent, political sex scandals in the U.S., including those of the Republican senator, David Vitter, who last year was revealed as having been a client of the "D.C. Madam" (and did not suffer Spitzer's same fate as a result); or that of former Republican Congressman Mark Foley, who resigned after the discovery of his sex-themed communications to teenage, congressional pages; or that involving the fake reporter and former gay call boy, James Dale Guckert (a.k.a. Jeff Gannon), who enjoyed special access to the White House; or that of the Republican senator, Larry Craig, who was arrested for lewd conduct in an airport men's room last summer.
Still, Die Zeit notes, referring to the U.S., despite all this experience - and more - with sex scandals in the world of politics, "the more puritanical a society is, the less" likely it may be to simply accept and not get all worked up about the sexual proclivities or behavior of its public servants when news of such activities is made known. Ultimately, the paper suggests, that's the big difference between Europeans' and Americans' reactions to the news Eliot Spitzer's extramarital fling brought to TV screens and newspaper front pages this week. Audiences in both parts of the world may be entertained by the distraction, but whereas, in the U.S., heads will - or are expected to - roll, in the Old World, news watchers are more likely to just shrug and say, "C'est la vie."
| March 13 2008 at 09:16 AM
Britain's top Christian cleric: The U.K. is turning Muslim. Get used to it.
A few days ago, in Britain, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the highest-ranking clerical leader in the Church of England (the Anglican Church), opened his holy mouth and promptly put his holy foot right in it.
Appearing on British radio, Williams alluded to the significant Muslim population in the U.K. today. He observed that it is "inevitable" that aspects of the Islamic religious law known as sharia will someday be recognized by the country's civil-law system. For supporters of Britain's multicultural but decidedly secular society, whose secular traditions and social values have evolved over centuries, such a day, should it ever arrive, will definitely not be welcome. Among the reactions to Williams' controversial remark:
» In the Times, commentator Minette Marrin declares: "Archbishop, you've committed treason." She writes that Williams "seems to be losing his grip on what is good in this country and...to be throwing it away with both hands in his curious suggestion that aspects of sharia should be recognized in [British] law." Marrin reminds readers that, in his radio interview, Williams "said that the introduction of parts of Islamic law...would help to maintain social cohesion and seems unavoidable....We should 'face up to the fact' that some British citizens do not relate to the British legal system, he said, and that Muslims should not have to choose between 'the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.'"
Marrin also notes: "What he went on to say was more astonishing. He explained...that a lot of what is written on this confusing subject suggests 'the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody.' He went on: 'That principle is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy.' However, he continued: 'It's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society, and the law needs to take some account of that.' Stuff like this is bad for the blood pressure....What danger? And to whom?....What is good and best and essential about our society...is the principle of equality before the law. That principle and its practice have made this country the outstandingly just and tolerant state [that] it is; it is one of the last remaining forces for unity as well."
» Reuters reports that sharia "is a legal code based on the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed and centuries of Islamic jurisprudence....It is meant to help Muslims in daily life know what Islam says they can, cannot, should or should not do." Most affairs "handled by sharia courts - both in Muslim and [in] Western countries - judge whether marriage, divorce, inheritance and business cases adhere to Islamic precepts. Williams suggested that verdicts in such cases be accepted as legal, as long as they do not contradict British civil law, and sharia does not become 'some kind of parallel jurisdiction.'"
News-service file photo of a Muslim woman (left) in Britain: Could Williams be right when he says that it is "inevitable" that, someday, aspects of Islamic religious law will be accepted within the U.K.'s civil-law system?
Thus, Reuters adds: "Many routine sharia verdicts would be ruled out under these conditions or be irrelevant to the civil-law system, whose demands the defendants would have to comply with anyway. In a divorce, for example, a couple must end its marriage in a civil court regardless of any other rules its faith imposes....The principles of equality and individual rights would rule out many sharia verdicts common in Muslim countries. In many traditional sharia courts, a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man, and a daughter has a right to only half the inheritance that a son gets. In child-custody cases, men and Muslims usually have priority over women and non-Muslims."
» On the heels of the Williams flap, Saleem Kidwai, secretary of the Muslim Council of Wales, stated: "We don't want sharia law in Wales." icWales reports: "Sharia law - which is only used in Islamic states - is notorious for its use of barbaric punishments such as flogging, amputation and death by stoning." The Welsh news service reports that Kidwai, speaking at his organization's Cardiff branch this past Saturday, "appealed for calm and emphasized that no Muslims had called for sharia law to come to Britain." Kidwai said: "This is a knee-jerk reaction - typical Islamophobia in the crudest sense...It's creating fear for ordinary people, showing sharia law to be cruel and putting a community down. Probably 90 percent of people don't even know what sharia law is." Kidwai noted "that a sharia council does exist in Wales, but [that it] differs dramatically from a sharia court. The council gives advice on mundane issues such as inheritance, divorce and mortgages, but has no absolute authority."
Tired of "Islamophobia": A protester at a "Muslims Against Terrorism" demonstration in front of the prime minister's residence in London on September 11, 2007
» Observer senior foreign correspondent Jason Burke notes that, "with the weakening of the nation-state and growth in alternative identities, often religious," questions about the status of religious legal codes like that of sharia have "taken on a new urgency, particularly in Western countries with large, newly assertive, Muslim-minority populations. The resulting tensions are becoming more and more obvious." Burke notes that, in France, for example, "a country where the only identity officially recognized is that of 'citizen of the republic,'" the controversy surrounding Archbishop Williams' remarks has "provoked keen interest."
Burke writes: "The British system of multiculturalism is seen by many Frenchmen as evidence of an unforgivable and incomprehensible laxness....In Germany and Holland, similar debates are taking place as large immigrant communities, particularly those established for several decades, challenge the status quo, asking what their place is in 'Christian' countries?...[T]hey bring to the West an element of a fiery debate that has been longstanding in the Islamic world. In Pakistan, for example, the argument over whether the state is 'a Muslim state or a state for Muslims' has never ceased, contributing greatly to its instability....So in India, which does not have a state religion, 140 million Muslims...have retained their own civil laws governing marriages, divorces, deaths, births and inheritance. In overwhelmingly Muslim-majority Egypt, religious minorities are governed under separate, personal-status laws and courts."
» This past Saturday, Archbishop Williams "was heckled" when he attended a church service in Cambridge, England. "A few people...booed, and one man called for him to resign over his controversial comments about accepting aspects of Muslim sharia law in Britain....Williams didn't respond to the hecklers....Meanwhile, police in Kent said [Williams] had been offered round-the-clock protection, but [that he] had turned it down." (Sunday Mirror)
* * * * *For more information: A BBC guide to sharia is available here. A Council on Foreign Relations report, "Governing Under Sharia," may be found here.
| February 11 2008 at 07:02 AM
A whale of a crisis as anti-whaling activists confront Japanese hunters
Animal-rights advocates have long felt a whale-sized sense of anger over Japan's insistence on hunting and killing whales. Now, an Australian judge has "banned the company that conducts Japan's whale hunt from killing the animals in a large part of its regular hunting grounds off Antarctica." The ruling applies "to an Australian-claimed wildlife sanctuary that Japan does not recognize, so it [is] unlikely to bring an immediate end to Japan's whale kill. But it could strain ties between Tokyo and Canberra if Japanese whalers ignore the ban, and Australia is compelled to try to enforce it." (Press Association, U.K.)
Sea Shepherd ConservationSociety
Anti-whaling activists Benjamin Potts (second from right) and Giles Lane (second from left) were restrained with rope after they boarded a Japanese whaling ship
Meanwhile, in a news release issued on Tuesday, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an anti-whaling organization based in the state of Washington, reported that its ship, Steve Irwin, was "in full pursuit of five vessels of the Japanese whaling fleet," and that a Japanese vessel, Yushin Maru No. 2, had "taken two Sea Shepherd volunteer crew members hostage." Benjamin Potts, an Australian, and Giles Lane, a Briton, were being held hostage onboard the whaling vessel from Japan. "Both men were assaulted and then tied to the railings of the whaler. They were then moved and tied to the radar mast by the whalers." Potts and Lane had boarded the Japanese ship to deliver a message to its captain advising him that his whalers "were in violation of international conservation law by targeting endangered species in an established whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling. They also notified the captain that Australia had just passed a court ruling barring Japanese whalers from the Australian Antarctic Economic Exclusion Zone."
Yesterday, Australia's foreign minister said his government might "send a customs ship to pick up the two [Sea Shepherd] activists...to end the standoff," a prospect Japan welcomed. The head of whaling in the Japanese government's fisheries agency remarked: "...Japan would greatly welcome such a move because it would be one step forward in resolving this problem." Japan has said it "wants environmentalists to promise to stop harassing [Japanese] whaling ships." (Age, Australia)
April 2005: In South Korea, protesters showed off a life-size, 49-foot-long replica of a minke whale in a public demonstration against Japan's hunting of the giant sea creatures
Against the backdrop of this contretemps on the high seas, the Japan Times has published a commentary by Peter Singer, a Princeton University professor of bioethics and author of the book Animal Liberation (1975).
Singer writes: "Japan says that it wants the discussion of whaling to be carried out calmly, on the basis of scientific evidence, without 'emotion.' The Japanese think that humpback whale numbers have increased sufficiently for the killing of 50 to pose no danger to the species. On this narrow point, they might be right. But no amount of science can tell us whether or not to kill whales." As Singer sees it, "Japan's desire to continue to kill whales is no less motivated by 'emotion' than environmentalists' opposition to it. Eating whales is not necessary for the health or better nutrition of the Japanese. It is a tradition...they wish to continue, presumably because some Japanese are emotionally attached to it."
However, Singer notes, the Japanese "do have one argument that is not so easily dismissed. They claim that Western countries object to whaling because, for them, whales are a special kind of animal, as cows are for Hindus. Western nations, the Japanese say, should not try to impose their cultural beliefs on them. The best response to this argument is that the wrongness of causing needless suffering to sentient beings is not culturally specific."
Alas, Singer points out, "Western nations are in a weak position to make this response, because they inflict so much unnecessary suffering on animals. The Australian government strongly opposes whaling, yet it permits the killing of millions of kangaroos each year - a slaughter that involves a great deal of animal suffering. The same can be said of various forms of hunting in other countries, not to mention the vast amount of animal suffering caused by factory farms. Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western countries will have little defense until they address the needless animal suffering in their own backyards."
| January 18 2008 at 12:00 AM
The French (and other Europeans), kissing
A couple kissed while waiting for a train at the Gare du Nord station in Paris last month
A kiss is just a kiss - unless, of course, it's a delicate French peck on the cheek or in the air zone around the cheek weighted with all kinds of nuanced meanings for and between friends, family members, business associates and, yes, even lovers, but not necessarily with allusions to romance or sex. If this conjunction of thoughts and feelings and a certain je ne sais quoi linking the activity of heart and mind and lips sounds like the confounding stuff that's better left to poets than to social scientists, maybe it is...
Some British reporters in Paris write: "How many kisses to plant on the cheeks? It is a conundrum shared by the socially timid and extrovert alike: whether to plump for a brusque one-cheek brush or to dive in for multiples and risk appearing embarrassingly over-enthusiastic. Nowhere is the puzzle more complex than in France, the country most famed for the practice." (Times)
Gregory Bourdy of France kissed his trophy after winning the Mallorca Classic golf tournament in October
France's Libération recently noted: "To be honest, explaining the rule isn't so easy. For starters, there isn't just one kind [of social kiss]. More and more men are kissing." The paper pointed out that, in the south of France, men are always giving each other friendly smooches. Discussing social kissing in general, the newssheet added that, in such large French cities as Paris, Lyon or Strasbourg, "the rule seems clear: two kisses, but the farther away you go from the downtowns, the more complicated it becomes." So it is, Libé reported, that one young woman at a high school in Paris made it known that she routinely kisses her pals four times - two times on each cheek. More precisely, that gesture consists of kissing a recipient's one cheek, then his or her other one, then repeating that act. Libé also recalled that when French President Nicolas Sarkozy greeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a meeting not too long ago, the German leader "reflexively recoiled." (France's former president, Jacques Chirac, an older gentleman than Sarkozy, was known for kissing ladies' hands, Libé noted.)
French President Sarkozy planting a kiss on the cheek of Anne Lauvergeon, the CEO of Areva, a multinational industrial conglomerate that specializes in energy, especially nuclear power
In France, computer expert Gilles Debunne earlier this year set up a Web site dubbed "Combien de Bises" ("How Many Kisses"). The site may be seen as a research tool that will allow Debunne - and anyone else who examines it - to get an accurate sense of French social-kissing habits. Debunne said: "I was curious to find out what the reality was...." The Times reports that, by making his research data publicly available, Debunne hopes "to end the embarrassment that arises when trying to give three or four kisses to someone who turns [his or her] head away after just two."
The U.K. paper notes that many Britons "still regard the looming approach of a proffered cheek as a social minefield. Having adopted the French habit of kissing far beyond the family circle, the British often find themselves at sea when it comes to knowing where and when to kiss, how many times, and which cheek to peck first." The newspaper quotes the director of a school in Paris that offers lessons in etiquette and social customs, who observed of the social kiss: "It is very complex....There is a lot of confusion over this."
June 9, 2007: A couple smooched in front of the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest during an attempt to break a Guinness world record for simultaneous kissing
French visitors to Debunne's Web site can indicate what they feel is "the appropriate number of kisses for a greeting" as practiced in the respective départements (administrative regions of France) in which they live. So far, "[m]ore than 18,000 votes have been registered and the picture of a divided nation is emerging."
Meanwhile, in Italy, "kissing is restricted to very close friends or family [members]. The number is optional, and as there are no rules on which cheek to kiss first, there are frequent clashes." In Belgium, if the kisser is the same age as the kissee, "one kiss is the rule," but for "someone ten years older, three is a mark of respect." And in Germany, would-be kissers tend "to restrict kissing to family and very close friends." In Angela Merkel's homeland, notes the Times, "Handshakes predominate, and all meetings begin and end with this formality."
| December 07 2007 at 12:00 AM
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