The Right to Hate?
Last night there was a unique coming together of Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups in protest outside the Houses of Parliament. Were they coming together to express their horror at the US-UK instigated bloodbath in Iraq or the torture of the Palestinian people? Of course not, they were united in their hatred of gays and lesbians.
They were protesting to support the attempt by a member of the house of lords (and they call this farce a democracy - who voted for these parasites?) to sabotage a bill to outlaw discrimination against people on the basis of their sexuality. This the "faith" community are keen to tell us is an outrageous assault on their "human rights" - specifically their right to live their life according to their beliefs that gays and lesbians are intolerable.
Of course in the USA this kind of discourse has been taken to it’s (ill)logical extremes long ago. For decades now neo-nazis in the US have exploited the USA’s liberal "you can do anything you like and not pay tax as long as its a church" laws to carry on their tendency. The Church of the Creator is a creation of neo-nazis to set up their party masquerading as a church or religion - they claim that their belief in aryan supremacy, the global zionist conspiracy and the desireability of a final solution to the same is simply part of their religion and is therfore not only legal, but tax-deductable. All of this is simply the taking of an originally liberal-mided initiative to allow people freedom of religion, faith and assembly.
The problem is not one for the lawyers, it is intrinsic in the whole discourse of "rights". To illustrate, let’s contrast a properly secular approach - if the codes of society are for us to make as best they suit us, then let’s talk instead of agreements or pacts.
Let’s re-examine the god-botherer’s protest that toleration of gays and lesbians is an infrigement of their rights. In agreement terms, they are asking us all to agree that they need only accord egality to straight people. That’s not a socially stable solution.
The political ethic of egality is in reality, both conceptually and pratically, a ceasfire line. Ultimately, there are more arguments against egality than there are people to die for them. We take our basic argument for egality and the process of progress through debate and experiment from the no-brainer that no-one will settle permanently for being on the losing side of any other kind of settlement. Further, that peace is more prosperous than the war of all against all.
The concept of "rights" is a historical hangover from the era of theology, let us now talk of reasonable agreements. Let us agree on the right to co-exist. Let us hope that we all we ultimately come to appreciate that when it comes to diversity and "otherness" less is, in actual fact, less… and more is genuinely more.
