ninme

Ah, Britain. With no Thanksgiving to speak of, their multicultural attacks on Christmas begin right after Halloween.

The Sunday Times - Let’s stop pretending all faiths are equal, by Minette Marrin

Following the national news can be bad for the blood pressure. According to a press leak, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) - Labour’s favourite think tank and one which has the ear of power - is to publish a report saying Christmas should be downgraded to improve race relations.

In the interests of “evenhandedness”, the report says, and “if we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life, even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too”. Presumably that means marking them equally, because “we can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one”.

This all sounds familiar, of course. We have become used to absurd stories of British Christmases being renamed Winterval, or children’s carols being stopped for fear of offending minorities - many of them true. We all know that the Christian Tony Blair and most top politicians send “season’s greetings” instead of Christmas cards. It is unabashed, yet guilt-ridden, decadent multiculturalism.

Sure enough, Ben Rogers and Rick Muir, the authors, do indeed call on the government to launch an “urgent and upfront campaign” to promote “a multicultural understanding of Britishness”. They rehearse the old arguments: different communities should not be expected to integrate but should be allowed to maintain their own cultures and identities; immigrants should learn some English and something of British culture, “if - but only if - the settled population is willing to open up national institutions and practices to newcomers and give a more inclusive cast to national narratives and symbols”.

Meanwhile, national ceremonies, civic oaths, parliament and the monarchy must be recast in a more multi-religious or secular form. Parents should be made to attend a public state ritual of citizenship for their new babies when registering their birth; “parents, their friends and family and the state [would] agree to work in partnership to support and bring up their child”. Presumably this would include an undertaking not to celebrate Christmas “inappropriately or exclusively”. …

I was beginning to think this country had recovered from its disastrous obsession with multiculturalism. All kinds of race relations pundits have recently changed their minds about multiculturalism and come to realise that an insistence on difference weakens the ties that bind a diverse society. It isolates people and makes them less willing to cooperate with - or pay benefits for - people they perceive as aggressively other. These new revisionists have finally understood that it was dangerous for the host culture to feel belittled and exploited by multiculturalist supremacists.

I thought that too. See here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here (lord it’s a good thing I have an extra hour today) and here and here and here and here and here (I’m just now getting into 2006) and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. But moving on to Cherie:

There are a lot of internal contradictions and confusions in that list; the liberal western point of view, as expressed by Cherie Blair in her Chatham House lecture last week, is riven with contradiction. She appeared to be making the courageous point that religion and culture should not be used as excuses for denying people - that is, women - their universal human right to equality.

I feel that just as strongly as she feels it. Religions and cultures that deny women basic equality, or exploit and abuse them, are, as far as I am concerned, a bad thing. I don’t feel the slightest obligation to respect them or to allow them to bring their practices into this country. However, the problem for Cherie Blair, not least during the visit here of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, is that in the western liberal agenda we are supposed to offer equal respect and equal rights to all cultures and all religions, and to people’s universal right to live according to them and to practise their faiths as they understand them. But you simply can’t. You can either have universal human rights, or you can have the universal human right to ignore them for cultural or religious reasons - not both.

If a culture or a religion does not share Cherie Blair’s absolute belief in universal human rights, then how can she respect it?

Indeed.

(Regarding that list of and-heres, do keep in mind that I am not an essayist, so each one of those is something that was printed, and since I don’t link to the Hayden Lake Times-Supremacy, each one of those was printed in a major publication, and given my established reading habits, printed in a major British publication.)