Workers' Liberty

When Archbishop Rowan Williams proposed that British courts should use Islamic sharia law for family matters among Muslim citizens, he met with a just uproar of denunciation.

Williams was not concerned only with extending the role of sharia law amongst Muslims in British society. He wants — and he said so clearly — to increase the role of all the different religions, in British society, and not least the one at whose head he stands.

Adapted from the introduction to Workers' Liberty 3/1.
In many countries, religion and disputes about, or expressed in terms of, religion have long been central to political life — in Christian Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or the USA; in Muslim Iran or Algeria; in Lebanon; in Israel-Palestine. Today, since Islamist terrorists attacked New York on 11 September 2001, religion, or concerns and interests expressed in religion, are at the centre of international politics to a degree without parallel for hundreds of years. We have not, as in Francis Fukuyama’s thesis after the fall of the USSR, reached “the end of history”. We seem to be reprising long-passed stages of our history.

As my regular reader will know, I am writing a book about Poplarism in the 1920s. I'm just drafting a section about the extent to which the Poplar struggle was influenced by religion. But I think there is more to be said about this than I want to include in the book, so I thought I'd share it with you here ...

As I write this we are awaiting the High Court judgement on the case that a 16 year old girl, Lydia Playfoot, has brought against her school for stopping her wearing a “purity ring”.

By Maria Exall

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the leader of Scotland’s Catholic church, has made an unprecedented threat to Catholic politicians: support the church’s position on abortion or face excommunication. While Catholic intervention on the issue of abortion is par for the course, such a direct intervention is a new departure. What has caused this outbreak of “political Catholicism”?

The march of organised religion into the centre of political life continues, as does the growth of religious sectarianism as a force in British politics. The latest sign is the outrageous speech of Cardinal Keith O’Brien against abortion in Edinburgh on 31 May.

File this under 'Deaths That Will Cause Me No Tears'. Jerry Falwell, religious fruitcake and rampant reactionary, has departed this mortal coil, aged 73.

Here are some of his lowlights:

Equal rights for all!

Dear Mr Murphy O’Connor,

Courage in “Defence of the Faith” is, I suppose, a requirement of your office. Even so, I find it hard not to admire your courage — or bare-faced cheek — in attempting to “lay down the law” to the British government and the people it governs on what legal rights gay people in the UK should have and what legal rights granted to others should be denied them.

By Sean Matgamna

“They take each other by the hand today, but they will take each other by the throat, tomorrow,” we said not long ago, commenting on the United Front of Christian, Muslim and Sikh zealots to repress “disrespectful” comments on their respective religions.

Today, Tony Blair is having trouble making his mind up. According to his press briefing this morning, Tone is struggling to make a decision about whether to exempt faith-based adoption agencies from anti-discrimination legislation. You see, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has written a stern letter to the Prime Minister and Cabinet demanding the "right" of Catholic adoption agencies - and those of other faiths - to refuse to consider same-sex couples as potential adoptive parents.

Blair whines that "this was an issue with sensitivities on all sides" and is "not clear-cut or straightforward". Au contraire, Mr P.M., it's very straightforward. You either allow homophobic bigotry or you don't.

There aren't too many Employment Tribunals where I'd support the boss against the worker. But here's one.

Andrew McClintock claims he was forced to resign as a family division magistrate because he was not prepared to agree to remove children from their families because they might be placed with a lesbian or gay couple.

The march of the creationists into our kids' schools must be getting bad when even other Christians are complaining about it to the Government.

Christian thinktank Ekklesia and the British Humanist Association have jointly written to Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education, calling for science teaching to be based on, er, science.

Last night Channel 4 showed a 2 hour documentary by Baldric, sorry Tony Robinson, that was supposed to expose the nonsense of the fundamentalist Christians known as Endtimers - that is those nutters who believe in the Bible literally, and believe that the world is about to end in accorance with the predictions in Ezekiel and Revelations.

Hat tip to John Angliss's blog for this snippet ...

Apparently, the House of Lords, while discussing bird flu, was most concerned that men of the cloth should get the medicine first. Why? Because they are 'key workers' of course!

This is my dissenting view on this article in the new issue of Solidarity - a damnation of The Da Vinci Code for promoting conspiracy theories.

The writer reckons the reason that so many people like The Da Vinci Code is because they believe (or want to believe) that it is true, and that this is a "mix of alienation from authority ... and bottomless ignorant incredulity". Leaving aside the point that "alienation from authority" is in many ways a good thing, this article is far too narrow in its explanation of the book's/film's popularity, and so shows a sort of pitying contempt, and a decidedly po-faced attitude to culture.

Much of the ostensibly “revolutionary socialist” left has fallen on its knees before the forces of reactionary anti-Western political Islam, hailing it as a progressive “anti-imperialism”.

Andrea D’Atri, a professor at the Argentinian national university of La Plata, is active within the Argentinian women’s group Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses). She spoke to Laura Schwartz about the struggle for women’s rights in Argentina.

A play by Peter Burton examining the origins of Christianity.

Gerry Bates reviews The Pauline Conspiracy by Peter Burton

The history of Christianity is irretrievably myth-ridden. Little is known about Jesus as a historical figure. The early Christians had as little scruples as later Stalinists about inventing things they thought would serve their cause.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Pope Idol

Karol Wojtyla, alias John Paul II, supreme caudillo of the Catholic Church, finally popped his clogs last week. He has gone to the great Vatican in the sky to hobnob with the other dead Popes, a pious collection of poisoners, adulterers, thieves, warmongers and dictators. Not to mention the Protestant church leaders — Luther the anti-Semite and Henry Tudor the serial wife-murderer…

I sometimes think that Maria Exall and I are the only Christians who support AWL. The valid points made in the article (Solidarity 3/70) headed “Keep religion out of politics!” were undermined by the headline, which could have come from the Daily Mail.

See the National Secular Society website for a selection.

By John O’Mahony

The forces of militant obscurantism, bigotry, intolerance, and social regression, are on the march in Britain! Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has implicitly advised Catholics to vote for Michael Howard’s Conservative party in the General Election, on the grounds that the Tories support a lower limit for legal abortion — 20 weeks of pregnancy instead of 24.

1.7 million people watched the BBC2 screening of the award-winning Jerry Springer, The Opera on Saturday 8 January.

Prior to the broadcast, the BBC received 47,000 complaints from people organised by fundamentalist Christian groups who regard the musical as blasphemous.

The main discussion will be on Religious movements of the right and left, looking primarily at Christianity, from liberation theology to the US Christian right. The second in our series of three meetings about Religion and Politics.

By Mathew Bailey

Parents, teachers and students of Northcliffe School, serving Conisbrough and Denaby near Doncaster, have recently stopped their school from being turned into an academy run by a religious organisation, the Emmanuel Schools Foundation (ESF). This is the first time proposals for an academy have been overturned. It is, as the Yorkshire Post put it, a “huge blow to Blair”.

By Dan Katz

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is considering abolishing Britain’s absurd blasphemy laws when legislating for a new offence of incitement to religious hatred. By so doing Blunkett hopes to split those opposed to the new incitement law.

• Rogue bodyguards

• Blair's bodyguard
• Multi-cultural? No, anti-semitic
• BNP idiot of the week
• By their celebrities shall you know them
• Not our brothers

Rogue bodyguards

Over the last weeks we have become more aware of the extent to which the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority "outsources" its security services. According to the Pacific News Service 1,500 of the security personnel are South Africans and many have used their backgrounds as mercenaries during the years of apartheid to bolster their credentials.