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The new secular orthodoxy comes laden with threats to traditional religious beliefs and freedoms
The first thing you want to ask about Gary McFarlane, the man who lost his case against unfair dismissal from Relate because he refused to counsel gay couples, is whether a fundamentalist Christian heterosexual with strongly held views about homosexuality was necessarily the best person to give advice on gay sex. The second is why it didn't occur to McFarlane before he signed up with Relate, which advertises courses on counselling gays, lesbians and bisexuals, that his religious beliefs might prove an obstacle.
These questions drifted through my mind as I listened to the judgment on the BBC's midnight news. Greece was going down, the Gulf of Mexico is polluted for an eternity and the election rages but here were the courts engaged on an issue that seemed heroically beside the point. The BBC reporter mentioned that Lord Justice Laws, the judge in the McFarlane case, assessed religious conviction as no higher than "opinion", but before I'd had time to compute that another item came along: the Belgian parliament had voted to ban Muslim women from wearing the veil.
Both stories may give hope to many that at least some things are going right. Homophobia is being ruled out of order; Muslim women in Belgium – and probably soon in France too – will no longer wear the signs of their oppression. We can cheer two more victories in the campaign to secularise everything in Europe except its temples and churches, which are, in any case, either neglected or swamped by tourists blind to their mysteries.
Yet these two stories left me feeling oddly uncomfortable. In the McFarlane case, I regret that a man lost his right not simply to express but also to live by his religious conscience, however loopy and offensive the majority believes it to be. Lord Justice Laws's judgment said: "In a free constitution such as ours, there is an important distinction to be drawn between the law's protection of the right to hold and express a belief and the law's protection of the belief's substance." Well, yes, of course there's a difference between allowing someone to believe something and believing it to be a fact yourself, but that doesn't prove his point that religious beliefs are simply another "subjective opinion".
Even an atheist like me understands that religious conviction is as vitally important to some people as sexual orientation is to most of us. McFarlane simply has no choice in the matter: the meteor showers of reason and disdain from Hitchens, Dawkins and others will have no impact on his beliefs any more than it will change the colour of his skin.
Is this really such a terrible thing, given that he would almost certainly be lousy at advising gay couples? Of course, if he was to go around whipping up hatred against gays, that would be different, but he simply said he would prefer not to do something and I cannot see that he is causing any harm by quietly making that choice. We should allow for these prejudices if they don't affect the lives of others for the good reason that court cases and the sort of legislation against speech crimes proposed by the last government will not make them go away. I wonder why Relate didn't work round his views but perhaps a rather prim correctness suggested that he was not the person to be doing counselling of any kind, which is why his case ended up with the activist judge.
For Christians who feel persecuted by the enforcement of secular values, this case was important but when the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, wrote a letter supporting McFarlane and suggesting the appointment of a special tribunal of judges sensitive to issues of religious rights he was going too far. Such a court would establish the same exceptionalism that sharia argues for, which is completely against the traditions of English law, as well as being against the interests of a cohesive society in which everyone is treated the same in the eyes of the law.
What I am arguing for are attitudes that allow for more negotiation and that accept that religious conviction should not be treated as simply opinion or the inconvenient relic of a superstitious age. We abhor homophobia and any kind of discrimination and deplore the veil and all that it signifies, but a law that fines or imprisons a person for the outward manifestation of their religious convictions seems as wrong as any blasphemy ruling. A belly laugh rose when I read this sentence in theNew York Times about the Belgian decision: "Belgium's French-speaking liberals, who proposed the veil law, argued that an inability to identify people who have hidden their faces presents a security risk and that the veil was a 'walking prison' for women."
They may be Belgian, they may be French-speaking, but they are no more liberal than Monsieur Jacques Straw. The ingenious idea of banning the veil on the grounds that it addresses both equality and security is a sly hypocrisy, for the truth is that the instinct to legislate in this area and to police Christians' objections to homosexuals belong on the same spectrum of intolerance as the one that authorises the stoning of women for adultery and the execution of gay men.
Voltaire would have grimly noted the irony that people who imagine themselves to be his liberal and tolerant heirs have become the opposite because of their enforcement of, you guessed it, the very ideas of toleration and liberal secularity that he stood for.
These issues would not be so fraught if we understood that it is to be expected that two rights occasionally clash and that our job is to make sure that neither one wins completely. The rights of gay people to receive counselling and to be treated equally under the law are now thankfully assured, but they should not always trump the rights of Christians to decline and demur because of their beliefs.
The Europe-wide tendency to enforce secularism is not only misguided but also impractical and, when it comes to Muslims, inflammatory. We dislike the veil for what it does to women, as well as the direct challenge to liberal society that it consciously presents, but a general ban cannot work, because it will achieve nothing but resentment. It is wrong that nurse Shirley Chaplin and the BA worker Nadia Eweida lost their jobs because they refused to stop wearing crucifixes. The veil and the crucifix are matters of people's personal choice and we have to live with that, just as we have to tolerate Gary McFarlane acting on his religious convictions – his right to resist the new secular orthodoxy.
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