From The Archive: General Election Does Some Good

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

General Election Does Some Good - 15/04/2005

Maybe the General Election campaign will be worthwhile, after all, if it means that the utterly stupid proposal to outlaw incitement to religious hatred has been dropped. Although, the article above does imply that the danger has not gone away (but whether the comment by 'Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland' is just a ruse t keep the Muslims onside during the election, we'll have to wait and see).

The obvious flaw in the legislation - that religion is a belief and therefore - at least in theory, changeable - unlike race which is a fact and unchangeable, has been gone over many times, and is so obviously correct that it is hard to see how anyone can still argue for the proposition anymore.

The proposed legislation has many other flaws too. However, the one I find interesting is this. The only reason why the brain-dead racist bigots are using religious belief (mainly Islam) as a euphemistic marker for the people they don't like is because they are banned by law from using racial abuse.

Therefore, it seems obvious - to me, at any rate - that if a ban on 'religious hatred' is introduced then they will move on to another way of identifying the people they dislike. Their irrational bigotry blinds them to the obvious fact that humans are far more alike than they are different. The bigots will search out another way of singling out the ones they dislike - or fear - then that will have to be banned as well, and so on.

This flaw is the same flaw that hamstrings the dread Political Correctness. Quite simply, changing the word will not change the behaviour, the thought, the deed or anything. For example, people have always used the words that describe mental or physical disability as terms of abuse, or to take the piss. Not particularly endearing, but there you go. Back when I was in the school playground people were called spastics, or even just a spaz, as terms of abuse or ridicule. Nowadays the words to describe mental and physical disability have changed (quite possibly because people did use the words disparagingly), a trivial example is when descriptions like differently-abled, mentally-challenged are used, we end up with piss-takes where bald becomes follically-challenged, or differently-hirsute and so on.

So, what this means for any law to outlaw incitement to religious hatred, is quite simply that it will not work, because the intended targets will take evasive action and come up with some other euphemism for describing those of different races and cultures. The slow ponderous machinery of the law will forever by lumbering in their wake, making more and more freedoms illegal, but never catch those it is after.