The Musings of Harry

This has to be the most shocking suggestion yet to emerge from the Home Office. The Prime Minister’s working group on security, crime and justice has suggested, in a leaked memo, installing millimetre wave cameras — which can see through clothing — on lampposts, to spot “armed terrorists and other criminals”. It was announced some time ago that this technology is to be installed in some tube stations in an attempt to catch suicide bombers.

I’m almost lost for words. What is wrong with these people? What on earth makes them think that this is ethical? How can they possibly believe that such an egregious violation of perhaps the most basic form of privacy — clothing — is acceptable? I am angry that this possibility has even been suggested by someone in government. It betrays such a gross lack of respect for the basic, fundamental rights of people in modern society that it beggars belief that anyone could have suggested it in seriousness. It’s bad enough that it is being installed on tube stations, let alone being deployed ubiquitously.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

The answer: more watchers. Apparently.

The Lothian and Borders Safety Camera Partnership have a tricky problem. Apparently, people don’t like speed cameras (who’d have thought?), and some of those hardy Scotts have taken to pushing them over, or setting them on fire, in protest. This isn’t quite mass citizen disobedience, unfortunately, as only seven attacks have taken place in three years. Not exactly a popular uprising, then.

Nonetheless, the Lothian and Borders police aren’t happy doing nothing, so they’re considering installing more cameras to monitor the cameras that people have started destroying. Quite what will prevent those people from destroying both cameras, Harry doesn’t know: it’s very nice of the police to provide them with twice as much equipment to destroy though. After all, the bigger one is the more there is to hit, and in this case, the more money they can force the Government to spend on repairs. Marvelous!

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. Harry finds it amusing the proverb holds true even for fictions that that are thousands of years old, and that people really should have learned from by now.

Let’s just hope that the bright sparks in in the Lothian and Borders Safety Camera Partnership don’t ever suggest installing cameras to watch the cameras that are watching the cameras…

As I suppose we should all have foreseen, and as others have commented upon, other churches have joined the Catholics in voicing their opposition to the Equality Act.

This is sad, especially since the Church of England — unlike the Catholic Church — purport not to consider homosexuality to be a sin. Harry supposes that they seek to prevent a precident from being established. In any event, this further reinforces Harry’s view that dogma is a very strong influences against reason. It seems obvious that prejudice against homosexuals is equally as bad as prejudice against people of other races, women, the disabled and soforth. These, one might think, are not things that the Church would be likely to endorse (implicitly or otherwise). Then one reads things such as the following:

In legislating to protect and promote the rights of particular groups the government is faced with the delicate but important challenge of not thereby creating the conditions within which others feel their rights to have been ignored or sacrificed, or in which the dictates of personal conscience are put at risk.

It would be deeply regrettable if in seeking, quite properly, better to defend the rights of a particular group not to be discriminated against, a climate were to be created in which, for example, some feel free to argue that members of the government are not fit to hold public office on the grounds of their faith affiliation.

The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well meaning

Imagine if this letter had been produced by the Christian Separatist Church Society in respect of non-white people, rather than the Church of England in respect of homosexuals? Would any reasonable person do anything other than condemn it as outrightly racist and unacceptable? Why is this homophobic claptrap even being considered by the Government, let along debated within it?

“Rights of conscience” is a synonym for “doing whatever the hell I like”. Secular, rational society must stand against this attempt by the religious to usurp the rights of a minority they happen not to like.

The Archbishop of Westminster (Catholic head honcho for England and Wales) has written to the Prime Minister threatening to shut down its adoption agencies if a special case, allowing its bigotry against homosexuals, is not created under the Equality Act.

The act, due to come into force in April, outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor says that this represents unjust discrimination against Catholics:

We believe it would be unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics for the government to insist that if they wish to continue to work with local authorities, Catholic adoption agencies must act against the teaching of the Church and their own consciences by being obliged in law to provide such a service.

Harry assumes that he is perfectly happy, on the other hand, to continue his unjust discrimination against homosexuals.

Religion cannot be allowed to provide a cloak for prejudice. If we as a society say that discriminating against homosexuals is wrong, and pass a law to that effect, then religious people must abide by it, just as the rest of us do. Nobody in their right mind would say that it would be permissible to ceremoniously whip drunken chavs if some religion’s doctrine called for it (although Harry thinks it might not be such a bad idea); in other words, nobody in their right mind would support an excemption for religious people to commit assault. Why should such an excemption be created to protect the arcane bigotry of the Catholic Church?

Sometimes Harry just comes across a story that boggles his mind.

In North Dakota, cohabitation is illegal. It is a classified as a sex crime, alongside adultery and incest! One entirely fair-minded senator thinks that this is not sensible, that in fact, it encourages disrespect for the law. Harry agrees; it seems obvious to him that illegalising manifestly ethical things that lots of people want will lead said people to break the law en masse: cf the prohibition of drugs.

What boggles Harry’s mind is not so much that this law exists — lots of boneheaded laws exist which are routinely ignored — but that attempts to rid the state of this puritan balderdash have repeatedly failed. One of the groups that lobbies against repealing the law in question is the North Dakota Priggish Fuckwit Alliance, a thinly veilled Christian lobbying organisation that apparently just can’t resist the urge to keep its head out of other people’s sex lives families. They say that repealing the law would send a message that the state doesn’t value marriage. Harry thinks that repealing the law would send a message that the state does value the right of freely consenting men and women to do whatever the hell they like.

How have these people managed to abuse the legal system to force their religion down the throats of the public? Harry has no objection to people being religious should they wish to, but attempting to force other people to live up to their religiously motivated standards of propriety is a bridge too far.