Squaring a Human Rights Circle

There used to be a sign on Paris Metro trains designating a particular seat for the use of people with special needs of seating. This being France, it had its own legal hierarchy, including, if I remember correctly war wounded, blind people, and pregnant women. I used to wonder if wild fights ever broke out between old blessés de guerre from 1914 and pregnant blind women over who took priority and why. The thought is ridiculous.

But that is how some see human rights legislation. It’s understandable because if people take human rights cases to court there can be involve a notional process that feels like that, applied with what's called proportionality.

I play the Euphonium to express myself. My next door neighbour wants to sleep at night. If legal push comes to shove an accommodation has to be reached between us. It spoils the story perhaps, but this probably will not involve either banning all Euphonium playing for all time, or absoutizing the right to express oneself in this way so as to banish sleep for ever from those living next to euphonium players. Proportionality looks for a practical way of respecting both rights (privacy and self-expression) simultaneously.

So what about religious particularity and freedom from discrimination? Pushed to an absolute degree either could compromise the other. If an atheist could fight a way through the courts to become Pope that would be a magnificent expression of openness, but bad news for the Papacy, which partly exists to define and maintain a particular identity in a way that can only credibly be done by a Roman Catholic. If, conversely, a Police force decided to soft pedal on the misdeeds of some clergy because they are authority figures in the community representing the dominant religion, this is plainly wrong and deprives the victims of a basic justice they have every right to expect.

This becomes even more complicated when people start asserting Christian rights. Jesus' teaching about non violent resistance (turning the other cheek etc) and the strand of wisdom represented by Romans 13, does not lend itself to crusading militancy. Whenever the Church has ignored this principle it has made a fool of itself and compromised the gospel by behaving in a violent and assertive way to whch it might notionally have been entitled, but which was far from Christlike. People who are being reviled have a notional right to revile back, perhaps, but Jesus tells his followers to do the exact opposite. This being the case it is hard to represent an assertion of that right as something required of his followers by their religon. It damn well is not.

A few preliminary jottings are emerging for me about the ways christians are supposed to apply human rights law to ourselves.

1. Everything is contextual, sociologically and legally, but discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It is no defence to say “I don’t consider my behaviour to be so,” “We’ve always done this” or ”God told us to do it.” God told slavers they could hold slaves, using clear and obvious Bible passages to do so. But they were wrong. Moral absolutes do emerge and become increasingly apparent contextually because there is a Holy Spirit. Religious groups are not immune, any more than the Scribes and Pharisees were, from moral critique just because they are religious groups.
   
   
2. Any religion has a core of beliefs and practices — Kosher food, Holy Communion, Pilgrimage to Mecca. These practices characteristically bind believers but not non-believers and are part of the distinctiveness of the religion. People have a greater right to bind themselves to these than to impose them on others. As to whether a religious practice is good or bad, by their fruits ye shall know them.
   
   
3. All sorts of lifestyle choices may emerge from religon as moral choices, like pacifism or vegetarianism. Where significant numbers of believers within a religion take different views that is part of how all religious communities evolve, and all we can say is that such subsidiary moral convictions are to be respected as far as possible, but cannot be rolled up into the religion as though they are a core part of it. Their motives may be, but they are not. It is deceitful to suggest otherwise.
   
   
4. I cannot, as a Christian, evade the force of the Golden Rule and Jesus’ summary of the law as core components of Christianity. Against such there can be no law. According to others the positive radical respect, or love, that you would hope for but cannot require from them is a significant absolute requirement. It is hard to square with any attitude which defines them in a way they do not recognise — behaviour which leads to the sin of the Pharisees who bound burdens on others that they themselves could not have borne had they been applied to them. Human rights law is more a matter of “not doing unto others what you would not have them do to you,” but a Church which does not even aspire to manage the lesser standard can hardly represent the greater one.
   
   
5. Christianity has its own absolute principle of Incarnation — that God takes flesh. Therefore dualism about the wicked world is questionable from a Christian point of view. The trick, to quote a Lent Eucharistic prayer, is to find a way to live in this passing world with our hearts set on a world that will never end. The calling is to be entirely within the world but distinctive, as goldfish are wet, 98% water indeed, without ceasing to be goldfish. How to express this calling is a $64,000 plus question which Christians should vigorously discuss but defer to each other about wherever possible because, important as it is, it cannot be an exact science. This is not done not by fixating on any particular behaviour that is held to be counter cultural. Rather it is best done by refusing to absolutise any particular cultural behaviour, ancient or modern, so as to leave room for the greater principle to express itself circumstantially in an authentic way. I am particularly suspicious of temporal certainties being absolutized in the fields of economicas or personal morality.

I wonder what I’ve missed or misrepresented?

Don't pick the Fastest Lemming

A central part of my job is helping discern people's callings to particular jobs, with search groups. Very often “leadership” is high on the list of essentials. I uderstand why. Everyone is more or less disorientated in a fast-changing world. People look to clergy to help them through the shifting sands, fog, smoke and mirrors. What many busy people want much of the time is a messianic figure who will turn out and fix things for them. This is the age of the quick fix. Sadly some of the most intractable problems communities face didn’t arise like this and won’t go away without costly and potentially time-consuming social and personal transformation.

The temptation is to pick what seems the most obvious candidate — the competent performer to get things done. But what if the problems are not technical problems? One of the limitations of the Anglican Covenant, peace be upon it, is that it is basically a lawyer’s solution to a broader problem — an attempt to solve mutual incomprehension with aspirin — a quick fix to a chronic cultural issue. People would grow more if they engaged with it humanly and spiritually as well as trying to fix it legally; but maybe all we can manage for now is a bit of paper.

The best leader is the slowest, not the fastest lemming, the oddball who slows down, stands aside, and wonders why. She can be of far more value than the sleekest, zippiest rodent. Appointing to technical criteria is a good discipline for preliminary screening and showing up the issues to discuss at interview. Once that stage is reached, however, you need to look for the person's inner security, personally and spiritually, how well they know where they stop and others start, their sense of perspective, their eccentricities, and the factors that make them the slowest, not the fastest Lemming. Otherwise all you get is the greyest, sleekest überLemming who seems to lead the pack, and we all end up in the drink.

The race goes not to the fastest Lemming, but the one who comes back up the cliff. Discuss?

Munchausen loses Court Case

Having penned a little piece in the Guardian about the Johns Case, reactions have ranged from nutter denunciations to thanks for saying what everybody felt but hadn’t got round to saying. Actually, the realities of this case were extraordinarily simple, summarized thus by the judge:

the views that Mr Diamond seeks to impute to others have no part in the thinking of either the defendant or the court. No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not 'fit and proper' persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. No one is seeking to force Christians or adherents of other faiths into the closet. No one is asserting that the claimants are bigots. No one is seeking to give Christians, Jews or Muslims or, indeed, peoples of any faith, a second class status. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law, to our polity and to our way of life, that everyone is equal: equal before the law and equal as a human being endowed with reason and entitled to dignity and respect.

So...

You may think everybody is out to persecute your religion, but you can only get a court to stop them, if there is any evidence that could give substance to your fears. It is perfectly lawful in the UK to suffer real fear about religious discrimination. It does actually happen and may indeed happen to you. What you cannot expect is the blanket protection of a court against a specific instance of it without evidence that it has happened or is likely to happen to you.

Premature burial is a dreadful thing. Before a Court will injunct a local authority against doing this to you they will require some evidence that it is likely to, or indeed that you are dead in the first place. Since nobody brought any evidence in this case, the result can hardly surprise anybody.

What have we learnt?

1. Courts don't make law, parliament does. Well, wasn’t that a surpise?
   
   
2. If you require protection against an imaginary threat, go to an imaginary court. Using real courts as grandstands, an essential part of the lexicon of US Culture warriors of the Right, is still, understandably, frowned upon by English judges, who are busy bunnies.
   
   
3. The conflation of a moral view held by a particular section of Christians into a banket phenomenon called “Christianity” that is then adjudged to be under threat doesn’t wash. It’s rubbish. Some Christians, for example, are profoundly sincere pacifists. In stark contrast to anti-gay campaigners, Christian pacifists could claim some sanction for their view from the teaching of Jesus. That doesn’t, however, make pacifism integral to Christianity, such that any court that refused to order the Grenadier Guards to lay down their arms could be held to be attacking Christianity.
   

Ah, but you may say, there are people out there who don’t like Christianity. There are, and there always were. Some English Christians seem hell bent on behaving like a persecuted minority, and who am I to try and stop them? They’ve obviously never been to Pakistan or anywhere else Christians really are persecuted as Christians.

Historic Christianity does have massive historic, cultural and legal influence in the UK, not least in the pursuit of ancient rights founded on the principles of Equity that gave rise to our human rights law in the first place. The surest way to destroy this influence is for a group of zealots to take upon themselves the role of being the “one prophet left,” and indulge in the legal equivalent of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.