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Friday, Jun 03, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

A freedom to oppress

Nick Cohen

ANYONE WHO has seen the films of Michael Moore or read the vaguely leftish books which pour out of America might imagine that they do not need to be told the background to the Workplace Religious Freedom Act currently before the United States Congress.

After the loud campaigns to allow prayers and creationism into U.S. schools, a working assumption would be that Republicans, probably in the pocket of Halliburton or Exxon, were once again playing on the ineradicable paranoia of the religious by claiming that Christians were being persecuted by employers. With the votes of the credulous sewn-up, they would be free to concentrate on destroying rainforests and dining on seals. But not a bit of it. The Act is sponsored by those great liberals, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who maintain that it is the logical extension of the movement to uphold the rights of women, blacks and homosexuals.

The same pattern is being repeated across the democratic world. In Italy, a journalist, Oriana Fallaci, faces trial for writing a book which is "unequivocally offensive to Islam." The alleged crime of The Rage and the Pride is to insist there is an unbridgeable divide between the Islamic world and the West. What she says may not be true, although it certainly is true of Islamism and the West, which have armies at war to prove it. It is also the case that even by the standards of Italian journalism, Ms. Fallaci is a raging prima donna. Still, since when has it been a criminal offence for prima donnas to sing, however tunelessly?

Religious hatred

If Tony Blair has his way in the U.K., his Government will soon be censoring critics of each and every religion for the crime of inciting religious hatred. As I write, the radio reports that the Sunni Muslims of Al-Qaeda are slaughtering Shia Muslims in Iraq. As true believers, they kill because they necessarily believe that every other religion incites hatred against them. In these circumstances, a universal blasphemy law is an oxymoron as well as an assault on the victories of the Enlightenment, but the Blair government either doesn't know or doesn't care. The wise course for a centre-left party is to prosecute ideas.

In the U.K., it was announced recently that the Government would create a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, which sounds liberal and cuddly. It is only when you get to the detail you find that the commission will fight all those who have prejudices about "gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion and belief." Belief? What beliefs? Are the censors planning to take their ideas to the conclusion and prohibit the incitement of hatred against all other beliefs. It makes as much sense (or as much nonsense) to have a law preventing offensive attacks on Blairism or romanticism or Europeanism as Judaism and Hinduism and satanism. Unless, that is, you somehow imagine that religious beliefs — all of them and all at the same time — are truer than the ideas of mortal men.

Corporate Britain is mooing along with the political herd. Human resources managers from Accenture, Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Shell, the Co-operative Group and the BBC came together in April to form the Employers' Forum on Belief. It will "recognise the religious needs of employees and promote good business practice toward religious belief." Allowing Sikhs to wear turbans at work or the devout to celebrate religious holidays sounds innocuous, although the U.K.'s National Secular Society has asked whether irreligious employees will have to cover for them during prayer breaks and festivals. To date, it has not had a reply.

Victims of injustice

The idea behind the upsurge in demand for benefit of the clergy is that the religious are the victims of injustice in developed countries rather than of a long, slow intellectual defeat in the free exchange of ideas. Since 1977, American employers have had to make "reasonable accommodation" for the religious beliefs of employees and allow them to follow religious fashions and observe festivals. The American Civil Liberties Union made a good guess at what would happen if Ms. Clinton and Mr. Kerry got there way by looking at the claims which have failed under the existing law but may have a chance of success if privileges were extended.

In the name of tolerance, the institutions of the profane are agreeing to compromise with fundamentalism and, in the process, multiculturalism is manufacturing culture. American civil libertarians fear that nurses who want to denounce gays or social workers who want to cast out prisoners' demons but don't because of the restraints of the rest of society will be emboldened by their new rights. What was a private conviction would become a public act.

It is not necessarily a hysterical fear. In the U.K. recently, we saw the multicultural production line at work when a religious rabble silenced a young Sikh playwright in Birmingham, the country's second largest city. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Blair promised a universal blasphemy law and a religious right was created. Its members were always there, but the U.K.'s strange liberalism made them a visible force in public life.

Everyone knows that the contradiction of liberalism is that its commitments to tolerance and freedom conflict when the intolerant demand the freedom to be illiberal. It is also the case that liberals can become ugly and intolerant when they use force to make others become liberal. None the less, you might have expected that the governments of the countries which send young men and women to fight fanaticism on foreign fields would not be using the majesty of their laws to nurture fanaticism at home. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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