Airbrushing out Women

The US Secretary of State sat in the war room as her troops closed in on Osama, monitoring developments carefully with senior operational chiefs including the Director of Counterterrorism. The manner of Osama's taking off has raised moral concerns, but the fact that the US secretary of state, being female, “doesn't have a wee tail like little boys do,” (as a recently seen Edwardian manual of nursery management says) is a matter of fact that would, you’d think, raise no religious or moral concerns.

But you'd be wrong. The sight of Hillary Clinton in role as Secretary of state and Audrey Tomason as Director of Counterterrorism so offended Der Zeitung, a Brooklyn based hasidic newspaper, that it airbrushed them out — a time-consuming operation, but necessary to protect their readers from the dreadful sight of women in positions of authority.

I am sure the newspaper notionally admits these woman exist. Some animals have to cover their eyes so they can't be seen. In that spirit, the paper airbrushed the women out of what soon became one of the most famous images in the world. This was a crass and obvious thing to do, presumably because the satisfaction of the few in their silo outweighed for them the millions beyond their silo who would find their behaviour reprehensible.

Der Zeitung’s reaction was a real give away:

Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

In other words, if we don’t consider it disparaging, it isn’t, because we say so. What tosh! The newspaper went on to say its photo editor did not realize he was violating White House copyright conditions.

“We should not have published the altered picture, and we have conveyed our regrets and apologies to the White House and to the State Department,”

So hang 0n, DZ still does not acknowledge its journalistic sin of manipulating the truth, let alone its somewhat medieval attitude to half the human race. As one is usually told by Unreconstructed Discriminators in every sphere of life, this had, of course, nothing to do with women being women — a piece of self-deception that always gives the game away from the start. The reality is that discriminatory is as discriminatory does. All else is self-deception.

Instead Der Zeitung took refuge behind a screen of faux-religiousity. I say “faux” because I take it from the fact that back in the Iron Age there was no need to airbrush the judge Deborah out of the Book of Judges, that the Eternal himself does not feel the same collywobbles about this as his more zealous minders.

So we see the capacity of Religion to become part of the problem, a smokescreen to cover unreality rather than a means of engaging with Eternal reality, including that of the present. Soon those who take this path are safely tucked up in their own religious disneyland in which the thing they most fear is kept out of sight. Their religion thus becomes a cover for fantasy, an alternative world, ultimately an insanity licence.

And just as all of us this side of the pond smirk away at the gormless folly of Die Zeitung, perhaps we need to reflect on our own more ingrained cultural sticking points about women. 30 years after equal pay legislation came in, womens’ earnings still lag significantly behind those of little boys with wee tails, the British Boardroom is still largely a male preserve, and, dash it all, we have all just enjoyed a lovely wedding in which the only female voice in an hour of liturgy was that of the Bride, as though that were normal. We all still have some way to travel ourselves before we arrive at the world of Ephesians 2.

Moral relativism is not enough...

Everyone will, like the Dalai Lama, find the death of Osama Bin Laden “understandable.” They will think his demise broadly desirable, and hope it draws a line under a particular strand of Fundamentalist militancy. But the manner of it, which is not entirely clear, raises disturbing questions for many people alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Given that Osama was more effective and dangerous totemically than operationally, have we, in fact, seen the last of him? Treating him as a warrior rather than a criminal could play dangerously into his followers’ fantasies about him. In a world where people deny the moon landings, 9/11, and the death of the Princess of Wales, we can look forward to a rich flourishing of conspiracy theories about it.

Nobody who was not in Osama’s bunker this time last week knows exactly what actually happened — indeed those who were present must have been in a state of mind very different from judge and jury. The troops themselves had to calculate their risks in real time, reacting to all the circumstances they found. The rest of us will be profoundly grateful we didn't have to make that call.

What the debate about Osama's death has revealed is a startling moral relativism in many reactionary journalists and a few of the politicians they phoned around as they strung together a story out of this.

We must respect humanity because it is an absolute created by God. He made human beings in his image and likeness. Humanity is not a privilege accorded by other creatures, but the Maker's Mark. My own sense of moral reference is a basic way of honouring God. My respect for the humanity of someone else is not a privilege for me to play God and give them, nor a reward for good behaviour. Furthermore, people are capable of all kinds of evil, all of us, Christians (Adam and Eve) believe. The Church calls realism about this the doctrine of the Fall, and it is the context of all human behaviour to a greater or lesser extent. This doctrine carefully preserves the truth that nobody is, in any simple sense, evil, although they can do massively evil things. God saw all that he had made and it was good.

It follows from this basic theology from page 1 of the Bible, that if I commit an act, like a lynching, that denies the image of God in another human being I not only act out my own fallen nature (thus losing the moral high ground), but I also behave in a way that compromises my own humanity — thank God he gave it as an absolute that no human being can take away, not even me.

The moral relativism of some journalists about this (“Normally, of course, we should respect life, but he didn't so we don't have to”) is a real slippery slope, morally. It betokens not Conservatism, but Pelagianism — one of the oldest heresies in the book. They must not be surprised if bishops, including the Archbishop, do not collude with their Pelagian views.