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Thursday 7 February 2008

Could we bend over backwards any further? [Brit]


Rowan Williams, the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury has always struck me as an intelligent guy, indeed, to navigate what seems to be an increasingly anachronistic organisation like the Church of England through modern society must warrant a modicum of brightness 'up top'.

He is no shy retiring wallflower either, and since his appointment has regularly made the news with his (and by extension the Church of England's) views on various subjects, from abortion to immigration, homosexuality to marriage - but today he appears to have truly blurred the already fairly murky boundaries between Church and State.

An article on the BBC has 'Bish Will saying that it is the adoption of certain elements of Sharia law by the UK "seems unavoidable", and goes further to say that we must "face up to the fact" that some of our citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

This is an absurd position to take and I wonder how much of this is said in an effort to bolster his Church's flagging relevance to a society which seems to want to break the traditional religious tethers that once bound it to institutions such as this (the same can be applied to the Catholic Church and other denominations).

Such a public statement from a figure such as he however is I feel symptomatic of a wider malaise currently running through the UK political landscape - whatever Muslims want, Muslims get; and if we don't adhere to that we're somehow being culturally insensitive or just plain racist. It quite literally is the biggest elephant in the room to date, and nobody seems willing to point it out.

In my mind, if you come to the UK to live and work, you first and foremost attempt to integrate with whats already here. If you don't like it, you can make moves to change it through our centuries old and well tested democratic process.

Since when did that become such a low priority option?

2 comments:


  1. I'm not sure there's the general appetite to appease muslims is there in any political landscape any longer. So I'll have to depart ways with your view point on that score. I mean come on, Rowan doesn't speak for the elected government of this land and neither does he speak from anything like the majority viewpoint of the overwealmingly secular United Kingdom.

    But overall I agree. I'm not sure what the hell Rowan is thinking.

    Don't like the laws? Like to believe in random medieval fairy tales? Well then sure we'll just set up courts with your own laws in them. Excuse me?

    Apart from anything else you can well see that na'er do wells would simply randomly choose if they were really muslim or not depending on how likely they are to do well out of the proposed 'marital' and 'financial' subjects which would be covered by both systems. Even on the marital side of things, do we simply abdicate the entire progress of the country in terms of sexual equality to allow a famously prehistoric bunch of fucking voodoo worshippers decide what the real decisions should be?

    You can argue that both parties have to agree to work within a sharia court but that's bullshit isn't it. Clearly elements of muslim society are not adverse to applying conformist pressure and making damn sure women will choose to settling things in a sharia court or things will go badly for them outside of the sharia court. And that's simply unnacceptable. There's one law for a bloody reason, it often needs to protect those who aren't able to protect themselves and it often needs to protect them from exactly the same sort of prehistoric prejudice that you'd find in a sharia court!


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  2. Yeah, I saw this today. He's clearly out of touch with what it means to live in a democracy, not that that has ever been a strong point of the church. I started to post on this on the BBC & gave up, taking solace from the fact that there's probably a far greater proportion of the UK population that can't "relate" to telepathically speaking to some cosmic Jewish sky zombie.

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