Posts By Crommunist

7 Fuckin’ privilege? How does that work?

April 6, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · privilege · race · racism

My experiences dealing with other people, as well as my own recollections of how my opinions have changed over the years, have imprinted upon me the need to be as even-handed as possible to those whose positions oppose mine. As hard as it is to do sometimes, I have to constantly remind myself that it is entirely possible (and more than likely to be the case) that my opponents really do believe the nonsense they defend sincerely. Sometimes the opinions expressed are so batshit insane that I am sorely tempted to suspect that my interlocutor doesn’t really believe what she/he is saying, but is simply trying to get my goat.

Goat — I don't blame them - my goat is adorable

More often than not, disagreements between people are rooted in ignorance. There are a few people to whom I quite regularly lose arguments, and 95% of the time it is because I don’t actually know what I am talking about. Once I am educated about what piece of evidence or alternative argument I have overlooked, I eventually either concede the argument or revise my position. This kind of discussion is only possible when the opponents respect me enough to not simply dismiss my arguments out of hand.

And so it is in this spirit of extending the benefit of the doubt that I address those of my readers that don’t accept the existence of white privilege. I know they’re out there (at least 2 of them have said as much), and many people who haven’t heard of the concept before find it hard to spot. It’s one of those seeming Catch-22s that one of the ways privilege manifests itself is that it prevents you from seeing it, which directly leads to you denying it. Hopefully this will help change some minds:

Seattle University researchers who posed as “secret shoppers” to test customer services at the Department of Social and Health Services gave the agency a failing grade. Their report card, released this month, showed that DSHS treated whites and people of color differently, failed to provide basic information on programs when asked, failed to keep confidentiality and made things difficult for the disabled and those who don’t speak English.

The researchers, who are of different ethnicities, visited all 54 DSHS offices around the state between July and December of 2009. Of the four female researchers, the African-American received the worst treatment, according to the study. Many DSHS receptionists also assumed the Asian-American investigator was a foreigner and asked questions about her citizenship status, even though she was born in America and had no accent, said lead investigator Rose Ernst, Ph.D., an assistant political science professor at Seattle University and the study’s author.

It is rare that such a blatant example of this effect manifests itself, and I’m sure using this example will open me up for criticisms that this is not representative of average experience. To make it clear – I don’t believe that this magnitude of racism is widespread and normative; however, this kind of racism exists everywhere. The level of service experienced by these researchers varied based on their race – to an almost comically absurd extent. This isn’t in the South either – this is Washington state! Super-liberal latté and arugula Washington state. I’ve said this before, but I should probably re-iterate: being a liberal is not a magic pass to being non-racist. Liberals are racist too, just in a different way to conservatives.

There are two distinct phenomena happening here that I think must be explored and highlighted. First, there is the experience of the researchers of colour. They posed as women needing information and assistance – the purview of the DSHS. What they received instead was dismissive and rude treatment:

The African-American investigator encountered rude or dismissive behavior in roughly 40 percent of her visits to DSHS offices compared with 25 percent for Ernst, the white investigator. At times, staff members raised their voice to “shame” the African-American investigator by broadcasting her question to the entire office, the report says.

This is your classic racism, which strictly speaking is not privilege, except insofar as being non-white is a barrier that a white person doesn’t face. The consequences of being non-white are palpable in this case study, and were not experienced by the white researcher. There are a number of other embedded barriers here – poor women are likely to receive inferior treatment compared to middle-class or rich women, women with unaccented English will be treated better than women with accents, men will (probably) be extended more respect than women (although that might not be the case here, given that many DSHS users are abused women – men might be a bit unpopular). That’s only half of what is going on though.

There is a second phenomenon that clearly demonstrates the manifestation of white privilege:

“I never had a single question about my citizenship status,” said Ernst, who is white. “On the flip side, there was an assumption if I was in the office, I had a very legitimate reason to be there, that I really needed help,” Ernst said. Ernst said office receptionists asked if she had a domestic violence problem or drew her into hushed conversations about others in the waiting room.

Not only did the white researcher not face the same kind of overt discrimination that the others did, but she received preferential treatment because of her skin colour. This is not treatment that Ernst had demanded or otherwise solicited – the fact of her white skin gave her a leg up that, if she had not been looking for it, would have been completely invisible to her. In other words, had she been unaware of the phenomenon of privilege, there is no way she would have seen her experience as anything but typical. She would have been, from her own perspective, right to say that she didn’t receive any special treatment because of her skin colour – why would she suspect otherwise?

It is precisely that aspect of privilege that is most galling to people on both sides of the debate. It bothers anti-racists because it is so shockingly obvious once you see it, but its existence is denied to high heaven. It bothers deniers because it seems like a non-falsifiable hypothesis – denying it is proof that you have it. My hope is that this example might provide a clear illustration of not only what privilege is, but how it works as well.

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4 Additions to the blog roll

April 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Uncategorized

So in addition to the new site design (I made that header myself – be proud), I’m also updating the blog roll that is on the right sidebar of this page. As threatened, I have removed some that are no longer being updated and have added some new ones that I am following:

(Not So Secret) Secret Blog – thoughts on anti-racism and feminism from a reader of this blog (I’m glowing with pride at launching another blogger into the world)
Blag Hag – Jen McCreight’s excellent blog about feminism, atheism, and science.
Canadian Atheist – a blog collective from young atheists across the country, of which yours truly is one
Friendly Atheist – Hemant Mehta’s equally excellent blog about trying to make your way through this crazy mixed-up world… that makes it sound like an after-school special 😦
STFUConservtives – a fun tumblr compilation of ridiculous things that conservatives are prone to say. Warning: may cause rage.

I suppose now is the time to shamelessly plug myself (that sounds disgusting). If you have any friends or family members that you think would enjoy or benefit from the stuff on this blog, won’t you consider recommending a couple articles to them? Maybe throw me some link love on your blog or Facebook page? You’re never going to see a ‘Donate here’ button (unless I get fired… but I’d probably just look for a new job) – I give you my very best FOR FREE! Help a brotha out and spread the word, nuh?

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5 There’s an election coming up!

April 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · politics

In case you are completely disconnected from what is going on around you (as too many of my friends are, sadly), there is a federal election happening next month in Canada. I gather that the majority of my readers are Canadian, but I know a lot of you aren’t. Right now we have Canada’s equivalent of the Republicans in power, so I am obviously not too thrilled about that. Polls show that they will win this next election, possibly gaining seats in the process, which depresses me to no end.

Anyway, if you wanted to know where Crommunism sits on the political spectrum, CBC has helpfully provided an Electoral Compass:

Click on the image to try it out for yourself and see where you fall. Some of the positions are Canada-specific, so if you don’t know about a particular policy issue, just skip it.

If you live in Canada, vote!

N.B. Pat Dixon has made a good point, one that I meant to put in the article. You should be voting for whatever party has the best chance of beating the Conservatives in your riding. Sadly, we live in a country that has 3 left-wing parties (although I doubt the Green Party would consider themselves as such), and only one right-wing party. This results in vote splitting that allows the minority group to enjoy majority rule. Vote for whoever is likely to beat the Conservatives.

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0 Freedom of religion… inherently contradictory?

April 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · law · news · religion

Okay, not usually, but maybe in this case?

A polygamous society “consumes” its young. It hurts people. It hurts society. Because of that, polygamists ought to be criminally prosecuted, not shielded by constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion, expression or association. That’s the position laid out by the B.C. attorney general’s lead lawyer Monday as the reference case to determine whether Canada’s 120-year-old criminal law against polygamy ought to be struck down entered its final phase in B.C. Supreme Court.

I’ve tried to avoid commenting on the polygamy case thus far, because I wasn’t sure what there was to say about it other than the obvious, but I’ll try to wade in a bit here. For those of you that haven’t been following the case, a group of religious fundamentalists in Bountiful, British Columbia are before the Provincial Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of Canada’s ban on polygamy. They are claiming that they should be exempt from the law on grounds of freedom of religious expression, a claim which obviously irritates me to no end. If your religion commands you to break the law, it’s not the law that must change, it’s your religious practice. Canada is a secular country that allows people to believe however they want – that courtesy is not extended to behaviour.

The contradiction doesn’t come from their central claim:

What [Canadian historian Sarah] Carter wrote was that protection of women was “a central rationale” for outlawing polygamy and that “Anti-polygamists claimed that polygamy meant unmitigated lives of slavery, bondage and horror for the wives.” “The child brides smuggled across borders to serve as compliant wives to middle-aged men they have never met, the boys expelled or sent to work camps without an education, the harsh mechanisms of control, the grotesque subjugation of women and girls, these are not discrete harms [of polygamy] that are simply coincidental,” [attorney general’s lawyer Craig] Jones said.

It comes from the idea that telling someone they aren’t allowed to enslave children is a violation of that person’s freedoms. Now they may not see it as slavery, but the disgusting way in which they treat these supposed ‘brides’ is medieval and undoubtedly falls under the umbrella definition of slavery.

If I can read the judicial minds of the Supreme Court, I’d imagine that this case will not be granted as argued – there is no Charter protection of compulsory servitude for life, nor does punishing the violation of both the law and common decency amount to religious persecution. However, the attorney general is attempting to demonstrate that the abuse and depravity that is systemic in the Bountiful group is a necessary product of polygamous relationships. In this attempt, I think he will fail. While there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the particular kind of polygamy practiced in Bountiful and other fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints churches (as well as some branches of Islam) is inherently exploitative, that fact is insufficient to justify a wholesale ban on polygamy.

The claim that polygamous marriage would disrupt society is certainly a true one. The definition and practice of marriage would become unbelievably complicated if groups of people were allowed to marry. Marriage has specific legal implications, and making changes to that would have broad societal ramifications. However, I remain unpersuaded by this argument, simply because a different formulation of it was used to prop up racial segregation and to bar women from getting the vote. Constitutional freedoms should not hinge on whether or not their are convenient – the whole point of having guaranteed human rights is that sometimes they are wildly inconvenient. We have to find a way to work around them.

However, there is one argument now being made that I find particularly interesting:

“We’ve seen the extent to which religion is used as the control mechanism, as the enforcement mechanism that magnifies the harms of polygamy,” Jones said during his third day of final submissions at the constitutional reference case being heard by the B.C. Supreme Court. “The evidence that has emerged from expert and lay witnesses alike is that the greater the religious fervour with which polygamy is intertwined, the more harmful it can be expected to be. There is something significantly harmful about the religious manifestation of polygamy.”

It is entirely possible, and seems to be supported by the testimony, that when religion is used as the justification for polygamy, that’s when the whole host of other abuses begin to manifest. As an anti-theist, this certainly gels with my view of what religion does – takes a perfectly decent thing like community or charity and distorts it into something sinister. That being said, banning things because they are religious sets a dangerous (and, frankly, ridiculous) precedent. If we say that polygamy is allowed for secular reasons but not religious ones, we are simply tipping the “freedom of religion” argument to the opposite extreme. We cannot begin outlawing things because they are religious, just as we cannot permit things on the same grounds. We should be making our legal decisions on grounds that entirely ignore their religious justification.

The abuses that occur in these polygamous groups are criminal. Child neglect, emotional abuse and imprisonment are all horrible acts that we should fight vociferously. However, they are not necessary outcomes of a man married to several women, even if such marriages are done for religious reasons. While the men of Bountiful should not be allowed to abuse their child brides because their imaginary friend said it was okay, it is illiberal and anti-democratic to punish them for such delusion. The harm of polygamy manifests itself as abuse – when that happens the abusers should be punished. In absence of abuse, there are no grounds to ban polygamy that are not just as arbitrary as the arguments against gay marriage, interracial marriage, or allowing women to vote.

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9 The value of the ‘spiritual’

April 4, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism

I have a few close friends who describe themselves as ‘spiritual’. In fact, for the intervening period between leaving religious dogma and rejecting god-concepts altogether, I described myself along similar lines. When I said it, and I suppose when my friends say it, it meant that while I did not adhere to a particular religious tradition but still recognized that there was a non-intellectual part of the human experience that made up a non-trivial portion of my life. While my particular ‘spirituality’ did not encompass things like ghosts or angels or other non-corporeal forms of life, it did recognize that there is more in the world than limited human understanding can fully encompass.

In elementary school and throughout my life as a churchie, I was told that in addition to physical, social, emotional and mental health it was important to maintain one’s “spiritual health”. Googling the term gives you a whole flood of holistic sites that make the same claim. The interesting and telling part of both the religious and secular concepts of the spirit is that neither one bothers to actually define it, except in the most vague terms:

Spirituality is having meaning & direction in life. It involves development of positive morals, ethics & values. Being healthy spiritually helps us to demonstrate love, hope & a sense of caring for yourself and others.

The above is the most specific definition I could find, and even it doesn’t really bother to define what the spirit is, merely asserting the effect that having ‘healthy spirituality’ has. Apparently, according to this particular site, morals and values are the domain of the spirit – so much for philosophy and psychology I guess.

The galling part of the ‘spirituality’ issue is that, almost without question, it is describing subjective states of the brain. At least the religious definition posits the existence of a soul, although it is clear from explorations in neuroscience that the ‘soul’ is just another trick of the mind. However, the idea of ‘spirituality’ is inherently flawed in this way – it confuses an illusion with reality, and then back-fills its assumptions to fit the conclusion. First, the ‘spirit’ is created out of thin air; next, characteristics and qualities are ascribed to this figment; finally, a complicated system of diagnostic and treatment techniques are prescribed to maintain the health of the spirit:

Create art work and/or writing centered on hope of peace, then have an art show

Create cards to send to individuals who are alone, sick or just having a difficult time

Draw or write about what you would like to do for a job or career when you get older

Participate in mentoring i.e. reading a story to a younger child, either at home or within the school day

Participate in random acts of kindness

Have a ceremony celebrating Canadian Citizenship (lolwut?)

Recognize others special gifts or individuality – e.g. Identify a strength of each person in your class/family

Identify/draw a picture of or write about two community resources that help children/youth

It’s not a minor issue – major health care providers offer ‘spiritual health services’, seminars teach courses about how to heal your spirit, books are written that advertise the secrets of ‘boosting your spiritual health’. Millions of dollars are being made every year by people who claim to hold the secret to fixing a part of you that doesn’t exist. What’s more, belief in this non-existent vestigial and ephemeral organ is seen as a virtue – watch as people nod sagely and knowingly as someone repeats the canard “I’m not religious; I’m spiritual.” Contrast that to the reaction to someone who says “I don’t ride horses; I only like unicorns“.

Once we unpack the embedded implication of ‘spirituality’ – that there is something called a ‘spirit’ or a ‘soul’ that exists separately from the body – we are left to explain the pseudo-phenomenon of spirituality. We certainly experience life as though we are a spirit encased in a body, as though there is a living energy (as Orson Scott Card would call it, an aiùa) that comprises our ‘self’, our unique essence. It’s impossible to discuss this phenomenon without leaning heavily on the psycho-babble that makes up the language of spirituality. Anyone who has meditated, been inspired by a beautiful sight or song, felt connected to the planet, or allowed her/his mind to wander cannot deny that there is at least the illusion of a ‘self’ that exists beyond the wet and fleshy bits that make up our body.

What is this a picture of?

If you said ‘a pretty butterfly’, you’re wrong (if you said anything else, you might have a psychological problem). This is a picture of a bunch of coloured dots, arranged in a pattern that resembles a butterfly. The image of the butterfly is the product of your brain interpreting a number of individual stimuli and synthesizing them into one coherent expression. In the same way, your brain takes a variety of sensory information and builds a subjective experience that creates the illusion of a ‘spirit’ or soul:

All this is in no way meant to diminish the power of subjective experiences. I’ve been sublimely moved by works of music or literature (particularly the latter) that have changed the way I look at the world. I have, while looking at the night sky, felt a super-real connection to the universe. I have, on occasion, been knocked completely sideways by a stray thought that altered my perspective. I have, in years past, felt the Lord Jesus Christ in my heart, and had the Holy Spirit speak through me. These kinds of experiences are part of what defines our human experience. However, it is important to remember that while these things may have deep, powerful personal meaning, they do not correspond in any way to objective reality.

Tl/DR: There can be great value in those things we call ‘spiritual’, but the word itself props up a flawed view of the world.

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13 The new layout

April 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Uncategorized

Hey readers,

I thought I would spice things up a bit by changing the layout. Let me know what you think in the comments – do you like the change or should I go back to the old style?

0 Movie Friday: Trololololo

April 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · funny · movie · religion

It’s April Fool’s Day! This year I am celebrating by trolling the hell out of Canadian Atheist, another site I occasionally blog on.

I am putting this up because I fear that people may not understand that I am joking, and hoping that they click through here for more information.

Here are some other awesome religious troll pranks, in honour of this most foolish of days:

Punk’n the Fundie

Fresh Prince Troll

Miss Cleo Calls a Psychic

The April fool hath said in his heart that this shit ain’t funny.

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0 Unopposed hypocrisy

March 31, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · liberalism · news · politics

I am what libertarians would describe as a ‘statist’. I believe that the government can and should play an active role in maintaining the stability of the society, as well as being actively involved in the economy. Of course, the word ‘statist’ has a bunch of other baggage that doesn’t apply to me at all, and I certainly have some libertarian leanings that my more liberal brethren disagree with, but suffice it to say I am not in favour of a completely hands-off approach to governing, nor do I necessarily think that the private sector will do a better job than the public sector in controlling costs or delivering high-quality services.

The only way that the democratic process can work well for the people is if there is a strong and effective opposition. The government’s interests should be to best represent the people, but as history shows us, it tends to become self-serving. Regular elections help balance that out, but an effective opposition can bring light and voter attention to issues that might otherwise escape notice. In the absence of a powerful opposition, or when the opposition has power but cannot wield it effectively, the government has a free hand to indulge in its favourite pastime: soul-crushing corruption and hypocrisy.

US state department spokesman PJ Crowley has resigned from his post following controversial comments involving the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The news on Sunday came three days after Crowley was reported to have criticised the Pentagon’s treatment of detained US soldier Bradley Manning. Crowley said the defence department’s handling of Manning, who is accused of leaking thousands of confidential US documents to WikiLeaks, was “stupid” and “counterproductive”.

So… let’s get this straight. A non-violent, non-enemy military person leaks non-mission-critical information to a journalistic outlet that makes the info available to the world. That person is locked in a maximum-security prison, deprived of his civil rights, humiliated and held without trial. This, according to the Obama administration, is in no way cause for anyone to be fired. Despite repeated violations of the constitution and basic decency, there are no deleterious consequences for the way in which Manning is being treated.

Someone within the administration voices a perfectly reasonable criticism of this atrocity, and he’s pushed out. Someone, incidentally, with years of experience in a time when experienced state officials are sorely needed. And the rabbit hole of hypocrisy and self-immolation doesn’t stop there:

Of course, it’s also the case in Barack Obama’s world that those who instituted a worldwide torture and illegal eavesdropping regime are entitled to full-scale presidential immunity, while powerless individuals who blow the whistle on high-level wrongdoing and illegality are subjected to the most aggressive campaign of prosecution and persecution the country has ever seen. So protecting those who are abusing Manning, while firing Crowley for condemning the abuse, is perfectly consistent with the President’s sense of justice.

Also, remember how one frequent Democratic critique made of the Right generally and the Bush administration specifically was that they can’t and won’t tolerate dissent: everyone is required to march in lockstep? I wonder how that will be reconciled with this.

This, from a Republican president, would be a not-so-shocking example of executive overreach. From a Democratic president who campaigned on changing the way politics is done in America, this is a disgusting betrayal not only of the trust of those who voted for him, but of liberal democratic principals and basic human decency.

So where, pray tell, is the outrage over this issue? Where are the Republicans to stand up for the constitution, for civil rights, for open and transparent government? Oh right, the Republicans are more concerned over stripping the rights of workers to stand up to their employers and the rights of women to sexual self-determination to bother with something as trivial as the rule of law.

An effective, well-coordinated and disciplined political opposition is crucial to the health of a democratic state. No matter who is in power, she/he will invariably become corrupt and begin abusing her/his power. A political opposition provides a check on that power, to ensure that corruption is exposed. When your opposition is completely incompetent, then the interests of absolutely nobody are represented, and everyone loses.

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2 Psychology beats “bootstraps”

March 30, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · critical thinking · privilege · psychology · science

Crommunist is back from vacation, at least physically. I will be returning to full blogging strength by next week. I appreciate your patience with my travel hangover.

Here’s a cool thing:

You don’t have to look far for instances of people lying to themselves. Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.

Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies.

Psychology is a very interesting field. If I wasn’t chasing the get-rich-quick world of health services research, I would have probably gone into psychology. One of the basic axioms of psychology, particularly social psychology, is that self-report and self-analysis is a particularly terrible method of gaining insight into human behaviour. People cannot be relied upon to accurately gauge their motivations for engaging in a given activity – not because we are liars, but because we genuinely don’t know.

Our consciousness exists in a constant state of being in the present, but making evaluations of the past and attempting to predict the future. As a result, we search for explanations for things that we’ve done, and use those to chart what we’d do in the future. However, as careful study has indicated, the circumstances under which we find ourselves is far and away a more reliable predictor of how we react to given stimuli than is our own self-assessment. This isn’t merely a liberal culture of victimhood, or some kind of partisan way of blaming the rich for the problems of the poor – it is the logical interpretation of the best available evidence that we have.

Part of the seeming magic of this reality of human consciousness is the fact that when we cheat, we are instantaneously able to explain it away as due to our own skill. Not only can we explain it away, but we instantly believe it too. A more general way of referring to this phenomenon is internal and external attribution – if something good happens it is because of something we did; conversely, bad things that happen are due to misfortune, or a crummy roll of the dice. When seen in others, this kind of attitude is rank hypocrisy. When seen in ourselves, it is due to everyone else misunderstanding us. This is, of course, entirely normal – everyone would like to believe the best about themselves, and our minds will do what they can to preserve that belief.

The researchers in this study explored a specific type of self-deception – the phenomenon of cheating. They were able to show that even when there was monetary incentive to be honest about one’s performance and cheating, people preferred to believe their own lies than to be honest self-assessors. However, the final result tickled me in ways that I can only describe as indecent:

This final result could not be more important. Cheaters convince themselves that they succeed because of their own skill, and if other people agree, their capacity for conning themselves increases.

There is a pervasive lie in our political discourse that people who enjoy monetary and societal privilege do so because of their own hard work and superior virtue. This type of thinking is typified by the expression “pulled up by her/his bootstraps” – that rich people applied themselves and worked hard to get where they are. The implication is that anyone who isn’t rich, or who has the galling indecency to be poor, is where they are because of their own laziness and nothing more. It does not seem to me to be far-fetched at all that these people are operating under the same misapprehension that plagued the study’s participants – they succeed by means that are not necessarily due to their own hard work, and then back-fill an explanation that casts themselves in the best possible light.

Please do not interpret this as me suggesting that everyone who is rich got their by illegitimate means. If we ignore for a moment anyone who was born into wealth, there are a number of people who worked their asses off to achieve financial success – my own father is a mild example of that (although he is not rich by any reasonable measure). However, there are a number of others who did step on others, or use less-than-admirable means to accumulate their wealth. However, they are likely to provide the same “up by my bootstraps” narrative that people who genuinely did build their own wealth would, and they’ll believe it too! When surrounded by others who believe the same lie, it becomes a self-sustaining ‘truth’ that only occasionally resembles reality.

The problem with this form of thinking is that it does motivate not only attitudes but our behaviours as well. It becomes trivial to demonize poor people as leeches living off the state, and cut funding for social assistance programs as a result. People who live off social assistance programs often believe this lie too, considering themselves (in the words of John Steinbeck) to be “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who will be rich soon because of their furious bootstrap tugging. While it is an attractive lie, it is still a lie that underlies most conservative philosophy – which isn’t to say that liberals aren’t susceptible to the same cognitive problems; we just behave in a way that is more consistent with reality, so it doesn’t show as much.

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8 The hypocrisy of the religious right

March 29, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · conservativism · hate · LGBT · politics · religion

Crommunist is back from vacation, but still slowly putting his life back together. I will be posting something every day, but don’t expect it to be up to my usual standard until next week.

So obviously this title will raise exactly zero eyebrows among those who have read my previous discussions of religion. I find so many aspects of religious expression hypocritical (accusing atheists of arrogance whilst insisting that the universe is created specifically for them, accusing others of immorality whilst maintaining a hideous behavioural track record), there is one form of hypocrisy that I find unique among the political right wing:

A florist in Riverview, N.B., is refusing to provide wedding flowers to a same-sex couple, according to the event’s planner. After agreeing to provide the flowers for a wedding, Kim Evans of Petals and Promises Wedding Flowers sent an email last month to the couple, saying she didn’t know it was a same-sex wedding and would have no part of the ceremony. “I am choosing to decline your business. As a born-again Christian, I must respect my conscience before God and have no part in this matter,” the email said.

The religious right has two gods: their own perverted vision of Yahweh as some kind of doting father cum eternally judgmental asshole, and free market capitalism. If one takes even a fleeting glance at the agenda of the Republican party of the United States (and anyone who thinks that Canadian Conservatives are functionally different from Republicans, or that the evangelical wing of the Christian faith is anything other than CPC boosters needs to pull her/his head firmly from her/his asshole and take a look around), one cannot help but be inundated by people who’ve never cracked Friedmann in their lives talking about “common sense economics” and the virtues of small government.

It is certainly defensible to hold these two positions in concert, although it should be fairly obvious that neither one is contingent upon the other. It does not follow, for example, that limited government is necessary because Yahweh deems it so. Conversely, being a laissez faire capitalist who believes in allowing the chips to fall as they may does not lead one down the path to accepting the supremacy of Jesus Christ. The conflation of the two non-overlapping positions is a carefully constructed marriage, match-made by the Republican party in an attempt to get a single-issue voting bloc.

Laissez-faire capitalism dictates that someone should attempt to make as much money from a potential customer as possible, provided that doing so does not break the law (well, strictly speaking it doesn’t, but I’ve never encountered a libertarian or conservative who believes that people should flout the law to make money). Considering that gay marriage is legal in Canada, Ms. Evans is behaving in a decidedly anti-capitalist way by refusing to provide a service to a law-abiding person.

Now I have no proof that Ms. Evans is a conservative. My suspicion in this matter stems from the fact that I have yet to meet any evangelical who does not also immediately grant the superiority of unregulated free markets. If she is not a conservative, she should be strongly condemned by conservatives for being anti-capitalist. However, the comments section overfloweth with supportive comments from her CPC brethren.

Dollars to donuts this is going to soon end up on a Christian website as a “prime example” of religious persecution against Christians.

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