Grave dancing and when I might make an exception

The look of hate

It is tempting, when someone dies whose legacy is particularly negative, to make one or two choice, splentic comments.

It was very much the case with Fred Phelps, who died last week.

The octogenarian preacher became famous not because he founded a small, extremist Christian sect in the US, but more because, in recent years, he and his followers (many of whom were from his extended family) picketed the funerals of people who had died of Aids-related illnesses and US soldiers who had been killed on active duty.

‘God hates fags,’ became their slogan – designed to get as much publicity as possible, which it duly did.

There has been speculation that Phelps himself might have had a homosexual encounter or even homosexual inclinations that left him with such an apparently deep-seated hatred.

Members of the family who have left it have reported a violent home life.

But what is left is the memory of hate – which will continue as long as his sect continues. Indeed, he was apparently ‘excommunicated’ from his own church last summer, with some versions of events having it that he was thrown out for wanting to soften the sect’s image.

And there is something pitiful about an old man dying, with some of his family not allowed to see him a final time, while others had rejected him in other ways.

Phelps may have been at the extreme end of fundamentalism – mostly because of his actions rather than his beliefs – but he was not alone.

Also last week, one Susanne Atanus, won the Chicago primary for the GOP, and will now challenge the Democrat incumbant for the 9th Congressional district of the city.

Among her views, Atanus is opposed to abortion, marriage equality and LGBT rights.

She has stated that: “God controls the weather. God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions.

“Same-sex activity is going to increase Aids. If it’s in our military, it will weaken our military. We need to respect God.”

So, three stops short of Upminster, yes?

Well according to unofficial totals, this bona fide loon received 15,238 votes compared with her opponent’s 13,864 votes.

No matter how much the Republican Party itself is trying to distance itself from her and urge her not to stand, we’re still left with an equation where a whole load of people went into the ballot box and cast a vote for someone who espouses such views in public and during her political campaigning.

Thank goodness that the US is part of the civilised West.

Phelps’s death was widely reported in the UK, such had been the publicity surrounding his actions.

The face of someone who makes a living by being nasty

“Founder of hate-filled Westboro Baptist Church Fred Phelps dies aged 84,” said the Daily Mail headline. In reports and comments it also called Westboro a “hate church” and a “hate group”. And all without even a hint of irony.

This was on the same day that the paper’s infamous click-bait columnist Jan Moir declared that she had only heard of the recently deceased L’Wren Scott because she was Mick Jagger’s partner, and Jagger himself was “seedy”.

Moir is no stranger to controversy, having penned a particularly poisonous piece about Stephen Gateley that tried to suggest that his death from natural causes was actually unnatural and somehow linked to his “dangerous lifestyle”.

And now, with editor Paul Dacre’s approval, she has shown once more her utter lack of humanity and decency. She and the paper are perfectly suited.

The Mail was one of a number of publications that had earlier decided that it was entirely appropriate to splash a picture all over its front page of Jagger at the moment he learned that his partner had taken her own life.

So that’s what Dacre and so many of his fellow editors meant by a ‘free press’ when facing the possibility of actual regulation.

There was no public interest argument: it was sensationalism, voyeurism and intrusion into a moment that should have been respected as private.

You don’t need to like or dislike Jagger, or to be profoundly aware of the life and work of L’Wren Scott to understand this.

Forget Phelps and live life

And to understand that, on Dacre’s watch, the likes of Moir and others pour poison from their keyboards – regardless of whether they actually believe it – simply to gain hits and gain advertising revenue. Which makes them far more morally bankrupt than Phelps and his ilk.

But back to the preacher.

On the one hand, I rather like the idea that his funeral will be picketed by flamboyant drag queens miming to I Am What I Am.

On the other, if nobody attended, if the streets around were deserted, it would stand as a message that his views have no place in the world today. And that his legacy may well be, as many have suggested, an increase in tolerance for LGBT people rather than the increased intolerance that he might have wanted.

The people to feel for are the family – the ones who have managed to break free from a life of hate, and the children who are still there, locked into a world where hate is central to the daily diet.

Feel sorry for the children, taught to hate

A form of child cruelty? Probably. Remove them from their families? If we start doing that, perhaps we'd also have to start removing children from homes where the Daily Mail is part of the daily landscape.

And that would be a slippery slope.

However, in the case of Dacre, I may break every possible promise I could make about not dancing on graves, when he himself finally self-combusts after spending so many years trying to poison the public discourse.

It was Oscar Wilde who said, with great beauty and poignance: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

With Dacre and his unholy rabble, who pimp other people’s lives and loves and deaths and grief to line their own pockets, they’re so deep in the sewer that all they can ever hope to see above them are the rats swimming away to the surface.

It's my body – not yours

London protest against harassment at clinics

It’s difficult – if not downright impossible – to imagine that anyone could consider abortion to be ‘nice’.

But while many countries now have legal abortion, there are still countries that do not – and plenty of campaigners that would like to stop for former having legal abortion too.

From 25 September, in response to the campaign 40 Days for Life, a counter campaign, in support of reproductive rights, was launched: 40 Days for Choice.

40 Days for Life is not a new group, and it uses US-style tactics, picketing clinics where abortions are carried out or at least discussed: in other words, harassing those entering or leaving.

The campaign states quite clearly that it wishes to see “an end to abortion”.

Not just a reduction in times within which an abortion can legally be carried out, but an end to all abortions.

Now just think what that actually means.

It means that, even if a woman is likely to die unless she has an abortion ... well, she’ll just have to get on with it and die, won’t she: preferably as quietly as possible. Because, the message goes, the ‘unborn child’ is more important than her.

In Nicaragua, where an incoming government sucked up to the Catholic Church by introducing precisely such a ban, women have died and are dying because of it.

If there is a hell, then Daniel Ortega deserves to go there for this one move – and all to get himself off the hook over accusations of abusing his own daughter.

Which also says something about the church’s attitude to the rights of children once they’ve actually popped out, although we probably already knew that.

Indeed, to stay with Nicragaua, there have been at least two cases of a young girls being made pregnant as a result of rape.

The Catholic Church has squealed at the prospect of them having an abortion, threatening excommunication – but not for the rapist.

But setting that aside, such an aim works, philosophically, on the premise that life begins at the moment of conception. And that, if you’re religiously minded, is when the soul is miraculously ‘born’ too.

However, just one of the problems with this approach is that of spontaneous or natural abortion.

If one describes any fertilised human egg as a ‘unborn child’ (ie a human person), then there’s a lot of ‘children’ who ‘die’ when the body naturally or spontaneously aborts.

Scientific research suggests that less than 50% of all fertilised eggs will even be successfully implanted into a woman’s womb causing pregnancy to continue.

There is then a 25-50% chance of aborting before the woman even realises that she is pregnant. If, however, she makes it to a month, then the odds go up to 75% chance of carrying to term.

So if we accept the belief that life begins at conception, then nature herself is a mass murderer. Or, more pertinently, God, the creator of everything, is a mass murderer.

Mind, fundamentalists and their supporters in the US are trying hard to tackle this natural deviation from the plan that God himself obviously got somewhat wrong by bringing in laws to prosecute women who miscarry, if it is decided that they did something that may have brought that miscarriage on.

So, watch out with that glass of wine with your dinner – you might be pregnant and if you miscarry, you might then be responsible for murder.

In case you’re wondering whether this campaign really has a religious link, the campaign blog hopes “That all the campaigns across the UK will be blessed with God’s grace”, while the Twitter account says that the 40 days will be accompanied by “peaceful prayer”.

So what do they do? They harass people who are probably in a fairly conflicted and vulnerable state to start with.

In the meantime, we have a global population that is rising to levels that present problems when it comes to sustainability.

No – I’m not suggesting that abortion is the key, but pointing out that we’re hardly short of new human life as a result of abortion.

It’s a popular approach for anti-abortionists to claim that abortion is being used as a contraception, yet one that is not supported by research among those who seek a termination.

Of course part of the religious answer is that one should not have sex unless one is, at the least, prepared to get pregnant and, for many, unless one is intending to procreate.

Damn that God geezer again: makes sex so damnably pleasurable and then has his squaddies wandering around telling people not to do it because it’s sinful.

Worse still, if you’re a Catholic, then even a relieving wank is out of the question because that’s a mortal sin. Far better just to increase the global population. Or be celibate. Like priests.

Not only do anti-abortionists play to a sentimental view of when ‘life’ begins and what it means, they also like to pretend that they are ‘pro-life’. As opposed to anyone else.

It gets particularly amusing in the US, where many of the same ‘pro-lifers’ turn distinctly anti-life if there’s the chance of a nice execution going.

Simply, it is far better to describe them as being anti-abortion or even anti-choice.

Those who are pro-choice believe that a woman has the right to choose – whether that be to have an abortion or not.

There is something rather disturbing about a group of people wanting to control the sex life and body of complete strangers.

Not only wanting to, but believing that they have the right to.

In the US again, it’s doubly creepy – and hypocritical – since many of the same people who oppose abortion also like to rant and rave about keeping the state out of as much as possible.

Expect women’s reproductive systems. Obviously.

The idea that a foetus – a life that is not realised – should take precedence over a realised, developed life, even if that kills the latter, is one that can only come about, ultimately, through a hatred of women: in most cases, a hatred either borne of religious belief or lent some form of legitimacy by it.

A belief that women are to blame for sin, for The Fall.

It also comes with a view that sex, outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage, is wrong, and that female sexuality in particular is dangerous and needs to be controlled.

A few other religions have similar ideas too.

It's quite remarkable just how dangerous to civilisation my cunt appears to be.

It is difficult to imagine any other circumstance in which people seem to imagine that they have a right to control another human being’s body – apart from the question of the right to die, where religion also gets involved, and where those who otherwise want the state out of private lives suddenly want it to defend what they believe to be God’s will.

People have every right to believe that abortion is wrong. They have every right to campaign openly and honestly.

They do not have the right to bully and harass in an underhand effort to get their way.

It would be nice if anti-abortion campaigners would start a political party and stand for election, just to see how popular their views are. But they won’t. For obvious reasons.

As a placard at one protest against 40 Days For Life put it: 'Keep your rosaries out of my ovaries'.

• You can keep up to date with the campaign at the following:

@40DaysofChoice

40daysforchoice.tumblr.com

Abortion, FGM and porn: abuse and choices

Last night, in a quite extraordinary performance, Texas senator Wendy Davis stayed on her feet for 10-plus hours to effectively break a plan by that state to close most of its clinics that offered abortion (amongst other services) to women.

She couldn’t take a break to pee or to eat; she had to keep speaking – and staying on topic. This was no opportunity to quote Shakespeare at length or read her favourite poems.

It was an extraordinary feat, and one that should be applauded anywhere and by anyone who cares about women’s rights.

Actually, you’d expect it to be applauded by those who care about a small state too – but that’s one of the oddities of the times we live in: many of those who say that they believe in the smallest state possible make an exception when it comes to women’s reproductive systems. And, of course, anything to do with LGBT people.

The ideology of such people is remarkably selective.

Mind, as of 2012 – perhaps lawmakers have subsequently seen sense – oral sex was illegal in Indiana.

In Washington DC, anything other than the missionary position is strictly verboten.

Sex toys are illegal in Alabama.

In San Antonio, Texas, it’s illegal to flirt.

It is illegal in Bakersfield, California, to have sex with Satan without a condom. If only I’d known.

And so on. There are plenty more where those came from.

So when you look at those examples of controlling, interfering laws, perhaps it’s hardly a shock that some states are targeting a women’s right to control her own body. And indeed, there are a few that are now prosecuting women for having a miscarriage.

But there really are times when the state should butt in (so to speak).

A report from the NSPCC a couple of days ago revealed the scale of the problem of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a practise that’s exclusive to any one religion, but crosses the divide. In Somalia, for instance, it’s to be found in Christian, Islamic and animist communities. In other words, it’s cultural in the widest sense of the word, not simply in terms of a single religion.

But although the NSPCC stressed that the youngest victim who has been treated by the NHS in the last two years was seven, and although various agencies warn of the scale of girls who are at risk, little seems to be being done in terms of using the weight of the law to prosecute families where it is uncovered.

Personally, I don’t buy into the argument that such things can simply be out down to ‘the patriarchy’. If a woman, who has suffered FGM herself, and knows therefore what it does, still decides to inflict it on her own daughter, then the prime responsibility is hers.

If it hasn’t happened to the mother, there’s even less of a mitigating argument.

And that is particularly true for women living in the West. If it isn’t, that means we have ghettos where nothing breaks in. But that’s a different problem.

Personally, I don’t think that any parent should be able to simply lop of a child’s foreskin either. If your god wants it as a mark of faithfulness, then wait until the child is a man and can make his own decision.

Anything else is simply about parental faith and is a symbolic version of child sacrifice.

These things are irreversible. There is rarely ever a sound medical reason for male genital mutilation and while it doesn’t have the same medical ramifications as FGM, there is evidence that it reduces male pleasure.

And here we hit the nub.

It’s that thorny old issue of sex – and pleasure.

In particular, in most of this, it’s about controlling female sexual pleasure – and ‘urges’. In the 21st century, it seems that some people don’t even comprehend that hormones create desire – not genitalia.

Indeed, here, an Egyptian Islamic cleric argues that’s it’s for controlling women’s “sex common sense”.

Mind, it’s worth remembering that FGM continued in the US well into the 20th century in order to control the dread evil of masturbation. So we should abe wary of thinking ourselves so far advanced of some other societies.

But it’s not far removed form the obsessive desire to ban pornography either. And all the ranting and raving, and all the claims of ‘cultural violence’, do not change one simple fact: not a single, solitary piece of serious research has ever been found a link between porn and violence –  predominantly by men toward women and children.

And people have been looking for that link for years – just as they have been looking to prove a link between violent entertainment and violence in real life.

Yet now, in the UK, we have legislators who are seriously coming up with propositions that would make it illegal to mention legal activities in print. Or even a private email. No matter how consensual. Fisting is just one. Bondage is another. I could potentially be breaking the law by evening mentioning those unmentionables.

To read more on this, follow lawyer Myles Jackman on Twitter and his blog. His most recent posts should be mandatory reading for any would-be censor.

Yet research done with serial sex offenders does tend to suggest a link between a sexually repressive background, with no outlets, and offending.

Statistics from the UN tend to suggest that the more liberal a country is in its attitudes to sex, sexuality and the sex industry, the lower the rates of rape and sexual abuse.

These are notoriously difficult stats, since cultures in countries such as Saudi Arabia make it very difficult, if not pretty much impossible, for a woman to report rape – not least since she stands the risk of being punished herself.

And also because, in places such as Scandinavia, not only is the opposite true, but the bar for what constitutes rape is set much lower.

Much of the point here is that the West should not be complacent – but nor should it fall into a trap of intellectual sloppiness, and start adopting what are, in essence, the attitudes of reaction.

If there are cases of FGM, we should deal with them with the full force of the law. We should not run around, flapping our hands in the air and worrying about upsetting someone’s cultural sensitivities. It’s abuse, pure and simple.

But neither we should not fall for the argument of social conservatives worldwide that sexual pleasure is bad and should be stamped out, whether in terms of a woman’s right for her clitoris to remain intact or for men and/or women to make and view pornography that is consensually produced.

In the case of the former, as stated, it’s a straightforward issue of abuse. In the latter, we’re back to some people trying to control the behaviour of others on the basis of, at best, an absence of substance.

If we don’t think it acceptable for the judicial system to bang someone up because they ‘think’ they might have done something, we shouldn’t fall into a trap of calling for a ban on something just because we ‘think’ it’s bad.

If I don’t buy into the easy idea of blaming ‘the patriarchy’ for everything, I equally do not buy into promoting a culture of victimhood among women. And to constantly assert that women do things only because men tell them is actually the most patronising (matronising?) thing imaginable.

It also pongs of an elitism: that ‘I know better than you and I know the best for you’.

And ultimately, people who might see themselves as progressive actually add to the argument of social conservatives who would really like to turn back the tide and keep women ‘in their place’, as homemakers and breeding machines.

Be very aware of whose side you’re on. It can – or it should – be rather telling.

But let’s wind up by returning to abortion.

If a woman can be coerced into making porn, and if that’s the prime reason for banning it (since there is no evidence of it causing harm) then a woman can be coerced into having an abortion, so perhaps that should be banned too?

The truth is, we should stop treating women as malleable beings who cannot be trusted to make the ‘correct’ decision for themselves and are always and utterly the victims of men – unless they’re in that self-selecting band of the truly ‘liberated’.

If a woman is capable of making such as major a choice as abortion – and research shows that women do not take such a choice lightly – than women are capable of deciding whether to watch or appear in or produce or write pornographic material. And women are capable of making a choice not to have their daughters (or their sons) mutilated.

Either women as a whole are capable of taking responsibility for their reproductive and sexual lives – or they are not.

Anything else is disingenuous nonsense.

Note:

A day or so ago, the BBC published a quite interesting article on porn.

Sex and the holy city

Imagine the scenario. A small child is abused and raped by a relative. She's only nine, but she becomes pregnant as a result of the rape. Her mother finds out and arranges an abortion.

If there's a problem, it's that a child has been abused and raped.

But no. That's not the case. In what passes for the mind of the Catholic church, the prime problem is the abortion. And as a result, the doctors and mother have been excommunicated.

Flippancy kicks in. 'Screw you' should, perhaps, be the response to the religious sect in question. 'Fuck you' – and I'll get my strap-on ready to do just that.

But the trouble with that is that it would ignore the power and authority that that sect wields in many parts of the world.

How dare they. How dare they suggest that it is in any way appropriate for a victim of rape and abuse to be made to go through with a full pregnancy and childbirth! I don't like the idea of any sort of 'them v us', particularly when it veers into 'women v men' terrain, but in this case, it is women v religious fundamentalists.

Here we have shriveled up, old men, saying that a child – a victim of abuse and rape – should carry the child of her abuser to term.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine if someone came out and suggested that the victim of, say, a burglary, should entertain the burglar in their home for nine months and possibly beyond?

Can you imagine a situation where the victim of a crime is the one who is punished?

Yet this is what the church of fucked-up old men in frocks think should happen to a nine-year-old child – because the nine-year-old child, as a female, is not as important in their 'minds' as a potential male child. That's what it amounts to. Potential is more than what is already present – particularly since potential allows for a male.

This is the same church that spreads lies throughout the developing world about the efficacy of condoms. This is the same church that skates over the issue of child abuse and rape by members of its own priesthood.

We talk – quite rightly – of how Islam oppresses women. Because Islam is used to oppress women in a great many parts of the world. But we need to remember that it is not the only religion that does so – and this case is an example of just what the Catholic church thinks of women.

It wants to put them on pedestals and worship them (Mary). But don't dare allow women to be sexual themselves – or that reduces them from Madonna to whore. The all-male guardians of the Roman Catholic church wish, most of all, to put the clamp on female sexuality. It caused, through Eve, the fall of man. It is directly responsible for the idea of original sin. And now it has to be stopped again.

It's worth pointing out, at this stage, that the Catholic church is not unique – but merely the vanguard of those Christian religious groups that believe that women have to be kept in check; that women's sexuality is a bigger threat to mankind (the word) than global warming, HIV/Aids, nuclear warfare or anything else.

How on Earth have we reached a point where we tolerate this bunk – and even accord it some sort of respect? Grow up, people! Throw away your comfort blankets and your dummies – you do not need them. Learn to think for yourselves – and stop allowing a bunch of sad, shriveled old men to tell you how to run your life on the basis of a fictional authoritarian figure in the sky.