ONCE UPON A TIME

There was a time, quite recently, when more or less everything was perfectly okay on these islands of ours. Everyone worked hard, everyone played cricket, everyone went to church and everyone listened to the wireless. There was no crime and all the children were well behaved. You could still use the word "gay" in its proper context. There were one of two Bleck Piple and Hoh Moh Sexuals, but they knew their place. There may even have been on or two bad people, but they had their bottoms spanked and their necks broken and lived happily ever after, or not, as the case may be.

Then, quite recently, everything on these islands became awful. Really awful. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, excrementally awful the Daily Mail believes that modern Britain really is. Children cannot read or write; teachers are imprisoned for subtly reprimanding them; middle-class women have no higher aspiration than to become prostitutes; parts of the North of England are under Al Quaeda control. When the Chinese government donated two Pandas to London Zoo, Mac submitted a cartoon in which the animals threatened to commit suicide.

"But Andrew: haven't all people at all times looked back with nostalgia on the olden days? Hasn't everyone over 30 always thought that in their day, the summers were better behaved and the children were hotter and the women were braver and the soldiers were prettier? Don't you yourself think that the children's TV and the comic books were better when you were growing up, even if the pop music was much, much worse?"

Indeed. But the Daily Mail is not just telling the story of how the world used to be wonderful and how it recently became shitty. It tells the story of a world in which Somebody Is Responsible.

We didn't merely go to hell in a handcart. Someone sent us there. Deliberately.

It is the propagation of this story which makes the Daily Mail so pernicious. Daily Mail Woman may be bright enough to realise that there is no such thing as Winterval, that the dark skinned family next door are not actively working towards the establishment of a European caliphate and the two elderly spinsters next door but one are not part of a lobby hellbent on the destruction of civilisation. 

But when the individual lies are forgotten, the meta-narrative remains. Everything was lovely. Everything is shitty. Someone is responsible. Blacks? Gays? The Political Correctness Brigade? The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? But it would be relatively easy to change it back. Bring back hanging. Bring back the cane. Abolish immigration. Ban veils. Then everything in the garden will be lovely.

And this meta-narrative haa poisoned political discourse. Politicians on both sides believe in it, or pretend to believe in it. You can't have a sensible discussion about border controls, or running schools, or how to help people who don't have jobs: because discussion about IMMIGRANTS, DISCIPLINE and WELFARE SCOUNGERS are predicated on the theory that everything used to be fine and everything recently became awful.

During the election, David Cameron made the expression Broken Britain something of a mantra. Disgraced former Prime Minister Tony Blair said, explicitly, that before he came to power society had pretty much ceased to exist and been replaced with a maelstrom in which children murdered children in every shopping mall. It was his moral duty to restore civilisation through ASBOs, identity cards, literacy hours, war with Iraq etc.  

There is nothing wrong with hyperbole. I myself have used hyperbole on millions of occasions. We shouldn't hold a demagogue to account for the literal truth of everything she says during a full blown rant. If I say that in the entire history of the universe, no Scotchsman has ever left a tip in a restaurant, then it is not very helpful to say that in 1968, your friend Tavish McHamish said "Jings! What fine haggis" and left a threepenny bit under his napkin. I probably didn't expect you take me literally. But I probably did expect you to infer that I thought that Scottish people were a bit mean with money.

I don't know to what extent Melanie Phillips literally believes that the singing of hymns in Civil Partnership ceremonies will bring about the end of civilisation as we know it. I don't know the extent to which the Campaign Against Political Correctness and all the other rentaquotes believe that Political Correctness was invented by t he Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxists with the specific objective of bringing down western civilisation.

I don't even know to what extent any anti-semite ever really believed that a committee of evil Rabbis, operating out of a secret bunker under the Mount of Olives, was issuing edicts that, at 9.30PM on Channel 4, during a changing room scene in Footballers Wives, a man's penis should briefly hove into view. ("That will inflame the passions of goy women, cause them to leave their husband, bring down their society and hastern the coming of the Messiah. Oy! This roast baby is awfully good, isn't it?") Many of them really did, and really do, believe that the Media and especially Hollywood, is controlled by "Jews" and that this explains why the telly and the pictures are so rude and violent nowadays. 

Have you noticed, by the way, that no-one ever complains about shadowy Fenian puppet masters manipulating history from behind the scenes, or implies that the government of the State of Israel is like a thick, drunken navvy?

When Mel says that The Gay are plotting to bring about the end of civilisation as we know it, we may suspect her of going over the top for effect. But unless her typing is simply to be regarded as the newspaper equivalent of an idiot-boy going "burr-burr-burr", we have to assume that it is an exaggeration of something. Unless she believes that The Gay are, at some level, deliberately and intentionally doing harm, for politically motivated reasons, nothing she says makes the slightest sense. 

Mr Karl Marx believed that society had been dreadful and oppressive for most of human history, but that, real soon now, a fundamental change would occur and everything would be perfect and utopian for ever and ever, amen (although he didn't  believe in God). Mr Marx also believed that society was defined by its economic base -- one half of society controls the means of production, and the other half doesn't -- and that everything else grew out of that fundamental inequality. You can't fix the church or the schools or the family until you fix the economic basis: once the proletariat control the means of production, everything else will come right as surely as night follows day.

The Daily Mel, as we have seen, believe that society is defined  -- built on -- the privileged status afforded to heterosexuals and the inferior or subordinate status afforded to homosexuals. This is the core, the foundation, the bedrock the thing everything else was built on. As long as that bedrock of sexual inequality remained in place, society was good and perfect and idyllic. But someone has, or is just about to, overturn that fundamental base. We started regarding homosexuals as normal; now, we regard them as superior; pretty soon, heterosexuality will be forbidden. As a result, things have fallen apart and the centre is unable to hold  If mere anarchy were shortly to be loosed upon the world, I shouldn't be in the least bit surprised.

Everyone creates an enemy in their own image. The Daily Mel's fictional universe is a mirror image of the Marxism which she abominates As mythologies goes, it's neat, it's compelling, it could almost be true and it's completely barking mad.

PREACHER

So: why does singing hymns in registry offices, particularly, represent an attack on Christian civilisation? We need to wind back ten months, to May 2010 when an amateur Christian evangelist named Dale McAlipine was arrested and charged (but not prosecuted) "simply" for preaching Christian principles in public. 

Naturally Melanie Phillips leapt to his defence :

"Terrifying as this may seem, the attempt to stamp out Christianity in Britain appears to be gathering pace....a gentle, unaggressive Christian is arrested and charged simply for preaching Christian principles....It would appear that Christianity, the normative faith of this country on which its morality, values and civilisation are based, is effectively being turned into a crime. "

Well, yes.

Or rather "no". The preacher was not arrested for  simply preaching Christian principles. He was not arrested for simply saying that Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures, or for simply saying that He rose again on the Third Day. He was not arrested for simply saying that the First and Second persons of the Holy Trinity shared a single essence. (He'd probably, to be fair, have had to have said that in a fairly complicated way.) He was arrested for saying, in what the police judged to be incendiary language, that homosexuality was a sin.

You could only say that he was "simply" arrested for preaching Christian principals if you already believed that "Christianity" and "the sinfulness of homosexuality" were synonymous or interchangable terms. Which would, obviously, be completely mad. Some Christians think being gay is a sin. Some don't. Rowan Williams' whole problem is that his church is split on the issue. Even the more traditional Christians, who think that gay sex (and playing with your thing, and having sex of any kind before you are married) is Very Naughty don't generally think that it is the most important part of the Christian faith. Mr C.S Lewis was quite careful to preface his (extremely conservative) chapter on Christian Marriage by saying that some muddle-headed Christians talked as if this was the heart of Christian morality, but that it wasn't. (Pride, since you asked.) 

There seems to be a general agreement that the police action  in arresting the soap-box preacher was over-the-top. Peter Tatchell himself thought that it went well beyond what the incitement to hatred laws ought to cover. (He thought there should be a certain quid pro quo: if he had the right to stand up in public and say that the Pope was a child abuser and a bigot then other people should have the right to stand up in public and say that Peter Tatchell was a hell-bound sodomite. This is what used to be called "secular liberalism", I believe.)

In any case, the soap-box man was never prosecuted. The Gay Lobby aren't trying nearly as hard to stamp out Christianity as the State Lobby is to stamp out Student Protests.

I did a bit of street preaching myself in my reckless youth. If the police think you are obstructing the highway or making a nuisance of yourself, they "move you on". Only if you positively refuse to move do they arrest you. Some of the keener brothers rather wanted this to happen since it would give them the opportunity to tell the local beak that unless he repented, he too would perish, in the manner of Saint Paul on Mars Hill. The bobbies never, in my experience, obliged.

 

One police officer arrested one street preacher on one occasion. That doesn't amount to a blanket ban on street preaching. One police officer moved on one group of children on one occasion: that does not mean that sinister forces in the government are pursuing an ideologically driven anti-hopscotch agenda. 

Only a complete lunatic would think that it did.

Mel takes two rather incompatible lines over this kind of thing. The first is a simple free speech position: if we are truly a tolerant society then intolerance is one of the things we should tolerate.

"Surreally, this intolerant denial of freedom is being perpetrated under the rubric of promoting tolerance and equality - but only towards approved groups. Never has George Orwell's famous satirical observation, that some people are more equal than others, appeared more true."

It doesn't matter what we think about Sodomy: what matters is that the Hotel Martyrs sincerely believed it to be a sin, and sincerely didn't want any sin going on in their double beds. A tolerant society must allow then to act on these sincere beliefs. 

 

This doesn't hold water for five minutes. I may very well have a sincere belief that God has instructed me to go around shouting "fire!" in crowded theatres, but that doesn't mean that my right to do so is protected under "freedom of worship" laws. I can believe that God disproves of miscegenation as strongly as want: I just can't turn mixed race couples away from my hotel. The "NO DOGS OR JEWS" sign hanging outside my shop may be a perfectly honest and sincere reflection of my belief that the Jews killed Jesus, drink the blood of infants, and, moreover, smell of wee. It's still against the law. 

Everyone has the right to practice, or not practice whichever religion they like and society must, indeed, be very careful indeed of making laws which impact disproportionately on particular communities. I have no particular human right to stick vegetables in my clothes, but a law prohibiting anyone from putting leaks in their headwear during March would be judged to be a bad law, because it would have fairly obviously been invented with the specific aim of annoying Welsh people. It seems unfair that there is a special law against hunting foxes, with dogs, on horses, while wearing natty red jackets, because that law seems to single out a particular social class (rich country people) while leaving the fascist R.S.P.B quite free to gas hedgehogs if that's what they get off on. Laws preventing people from covering their faces in public, or changing the regulations about the humane slaughter of animals are open to the accusation of unfairly singling out particular minority religions. 

But that doesn't mean that all laws become optional if you can plausibly claim that breaking them is part of your religious identity. Every military officer and every schoolteacher knows this: it's one thing to say "Can I be excused chapel because I'm a Muslim" or "Can I take my day off on Saturday, rather than Sunday, because I'm Jewish" but quite another to say "I have just invented, off the top of my head, a religion called Jedi, and, as you know, it is against the Jedist faith to peel potatoes or go on cross-country runs." Satanists are perfectly free to be Satanists, Rastafarians are perfectly free to be Rastafarians and creepy evangelicals are perfectly free to be creepy evangelicals but the laws against performing human sacrifice, smoking weed and spanking schoolboys apply to them just the same as they apply to everybody else, however sincerely they believe that Satan / Jah / Dr Dobson told them otherwise.

So: since the argument that street preachers should be allowed to preach homophobia simply because that is what they sincerely believe is unsustainable, Mel has to resort to a deeper, more sophisticated, stupider argument. Preachers and hoteliers have a special right to discriminate against homosexuals because homosexuality is a special case.

 *

Most Christians are Christians because they believe that Christianity is true or at any rate, wish that it were. They believe in God and think that Jesus, or the Church of England, or Cliff Richard provided a good path, or the best path, or the only path for getting in touch with Her. Some of them -- some Quakers, maybe, Catholic Modernists, Sea of Faith Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury -- may not even go this far. "I don't know if there's a God" they say "But I do know that everyone would be much nicer and much happier if they just pretended." Nearly all of them have some feeling that Jesus is, or was, or would have been, or am, a really cool dude. They think that God and Jesus and Christianity are good things in themselves. 

Melanie Philips never mentions Jesus. (She's Jewish.) She doesn't regard Christianity as a good thing in itself. She takes a purely instrumental view of religion. It is a means to an end. The end is a mysterious entity variously described as "this country" or "society" or "civilisation". Christianity is "the normative faith of this country on which its morality, values and civilisation are based". Christian opinions represent "the bedrock values of this society". Biblical morals are "the bedrock values of Western civilisation" and "society's core values." If a preacher is arrested (but not prosecuted) for using incendiary homophobic language in public, it follows that "the faith Britain was built on" is becoming a crime. We need to be Christian, or to pretend to be Christian, or to have Christian morals, because that's the only thing which will keep "this country" or "society" or "western civilisation" ticking over.

Well, now. 

If by "culture" you mean "the stuff we've all got in common" then anyone might say that Christianity is a big part of British culture. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Henry VIII, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Cliff Richard were, or claimed to be, Christians. Parliament, the Church of England, Oxford and Cambridge University, Eton College, the BBC and the Beano were all founded by people who thought of themselves as Christians  (John Stewart Mill, Charles Darwin, Aleister Crowley, David Attenborough, John Lennon and Ricky Gervais were of course, atheists, but they were Church of England atheists. It was an Anglican God they didn't believe in.) And we could probably all agree that it would be a Bad Thing if Christianity, in this sense, were to be "stamped out" by an Orwellian boot. It would involve falsifying our history and our "culture". It would be quite odd if Kenyan children grew up knowing all about the Eskimos and the Highland Clearances, but little about the history of their corner of Africa. It would be equally odd if we decided to raise a generation who did not know who Friar Tuck, Solomon, Falstaff, Doubting Thomas, Sir Francis Drake, Daniel, Mr Micawber and Polycarp of Smyrna were. 

If that is really happening, which it isn't, then the stamping is being done, not by the Political Correctness Brigade but by gradgrindian Tories -- Daily Mail readers to a man -- who don't see how Shakespeare and Dickens and the Bible are going to help kids get out and compete in the global marketplace, or at any rate work in McDonalds. (Education for its own sake is a bit of a dodgy idea, as one of Blair's simians once remarked.) Even Richard Dawkins and Phillip Pullman agree about this: you may not believe in the Bible but you ought to know what it says. It's only the halfwits who contribute to the Guardian's religion blog who can't hear the word "Bible" or "Church" without blubbering "why even mention ancient savage bronze age stupid fairy tale primitive grapefruit segments har har Christians are silly".

But. 

Even if it is true that some or all British institutions were originally Christian, or Christian in inspiration, it could not possibly follow that the "stamping out" of Christianity would cause those institutions, and therefore the nation as a whole, to collapse.  I suspect that this part of Mel's argument is based on a rather silly piece of metaphor abuse. If my school was founded by a Christian teacher, using money donated by Christians, and if for 600 years a prayer has been said in the chapel each morning, then I might very well say "this school is built upon Christian foundations". It doesn't follow that if you stop singing hymns or appoint a Muslim headmaster, the building will fall down. It might be quite silly and quite petty to decide that prayers would no longer be said in the House of Commons, but the business of law-making could carry on quite happily without them. 

But there is not the remotest suggestion that this is going to happen. Mel's case for Christianity being turned into a crime depends on four examples. 

1: The aforementioned preacher, who was arrested, but not prosecuted, for what an individual police officer judged, wrongly, to be hate speech.

2: The aforementioned hotel owners, who were successfully prosecuted for refusing to allow gay couples to share a bed under their roof.

3: A local government official who was fired for refusing to perform civil partnership ceremonies. (She was offered a transfer to a different department, but refused to accept the offer.)[*]

4: Nothing else. 

That is: when Mel says that "Christianity" is being criminalized, what is being criminalized is prejudice against homosexuals. But that's okay, because prejudice against homosexuals is at the heart of the Christian message. It practically is the Christian message.  

What follows is a direct quote from her column: it is not a piece of satirical exaggeration on my part:

"Many of these cases involve the issue of homosexuality since this is the principal area where orthodox [**] Christian beliefs cannot co-exist with the law. This is in contrast to other contentious issues such as abortion, where the law specifically provides exemptions for conscience. This is because unlike the specific and limited issue of abortion, the militant gay rights agenda represents an attack on the entire value system of our society by destroying the very idea that any sexual behaviour is normal. "

Now abortion is the kind of issue which makes liberal believers -- liberals in general, I think -- uncomfortable. How can a horse, a dog, a rat have rights, and an unborn human no rights at all? Why are so many of us so absolutely certain that killing Nazi soldiers is wrong, killing murderers and paedophiles is wrong but killing unborn people is sometimes perfectly OK? Even if its a matter of life and death, why do we choose to kill the innocent who had no choice with the less innocent who, might have done? 

Don't bother to write in and tell me the the answer to these questions. I've already placed my bet firmly on the "pro-choice" side of the coin. I'm only saying that it's a difficult question. A question about morals. And that if you think -- as Mel I believe Mel does, and as I imagine the soap-box preacher does -- that abortion is wrong, you believe that it is wrong on simple, straightforward grounds that anyone, of any religious or philosophical persuasion, could easily understand. Killing babies is wrong. 

In the Melverse, it passes in a second. It is unimportant. "Saying that you can't preach inflammatory anti-gay sermons in public places" and "Saying that if you want to work in a Registry Office you have to perform civil partnership ceremonies" represents and attack on the entire -- the ENTIRE -- value system of our society whereas killing babies does not.

I am going to say that again.

Saying that two men or two women can form a legally binding civil partnership is an attack on the entire value system of our society.

Saying that it's sometimes okay to kill babies is NOT an attack on the entire value system of our society.

Why is the right of someone to preach homophobic sermons, or the right of someone else to turn gay men away from their hotel such an inalienable right? 

Because the idea of gay equality represents an attack on society because it would "destroy the very idea that any sexual behaviour is normal". It is "the very idea that any sexual behaviour is normal" which is the " core" or "bedrock" which she has been talking about. The distinction between normal and abnormal sexual behaviour is the thing which our society is based on.

To summarize:

The Entire Value System of Our Society (V) is based on the idea that heterosexuality is normal and homosexuality is not normal (H)

The Entire Value System of Our Society (V) is based on Christianity (X).

If V = H and V = X than H = X

Christianity can therefore be defined as "the belief that heterosexuality is normal and homosexuality is not normal." 

In the Mel lexicon, Christianity means homophobia.

Having dealt with the more sensible part of her argument, I now wish to turn to the part where she goes a little bit crazy:

[*] That really is a bit like a Muslim working in a hotel, who refuses a offer to be transferred to the kitchen, the waiting staff, or the coffee bar. "No" he says "I demand to be allowed to serve in the bar, but to have my conscientious objection to serving beer respected." He would not have been fired for "refusing to serve alcohol" so much as for "being a dick."

[**] She talked about Christianity as a "normative" faith; she's now talking about "orthodox" Christian belief. I am not sure what either of these two qualifying words mean. I know what an Orthodox Christian is; I think I know what an Orthodox Jews is: they aren't "orthodox" in the same sense. I think I know what a Normative Jew is. I have no idea what a Normative Christian is. (Does it mean "one who follows Christian norms, whether or not he believes in Christian theology". Or does it mean "The consensus among ordinary people as to what Christianity means, regardless of the what the clergy teaches.) I hope she is not using these big words just to throw sand in our eyes.

Begorrah!

not sulking

just busy writing stuff I'm actually being paid for

final sections follow next week, probably thursday

if you haven't heard it yet, listen to this: Best Fairy Tale Ever?

yeah, yeah, yeah lost manuscript of the aneied retrieved from a bonfire where i hve heard THAT one before?

Fury at "Elves Only" Sex Education Lessons

Interlude

or

What goes around comes around

or

Ten Years Ago Today


Jedi Master Am I Therefore Normal Rules of Grammar I Do Not Follow


It started on the net, it spread to the funny-pages in the papers, and then suddenly the serious columnists got hold of it. There is a space on the census form for us to specify what religion we are, so wouldn't it be a wheeze if all the Star Wars geeks wrote "Jedi" in the space. If enough filled it in, then the government would have to treat "Jedi" as a legitimate religion.

I haven't actually seen my census form yet. I understand from the Daily Telegraph that there is an entry for "race"; apparently, you are allowed to be Scottish or Irish, but not English or Welsh. (The English and Welsh have to be "White British", unless their grandparents came from abroad, in which case they are allowed to be Black British or Asian British.) Given this level of sensitive objectivity, I imagine that the "religion" section will say something like


Tick one:
1: Church of England
2: Loony fundamentalist
3: Papist
4: Godless heathen
If "1", please state whether or not you believe in God.

But it seems to me that the Jedi faction's sad devotion to this ancient form is entirely misplaced. What, pray tell, does "legally recognized religion" or "legitimate religion" or "official religion" mean? The last time I looked, we had religious freedom in this country. Since the 1839 Catholic Emancipation act, anyone can believe what they like. I understand that the French have banned Scientology, but we haven't. Small sects can claim charitable status. No religion, not even the C of E can advertise on the telly. Do the Jedi-ists want to avail themselves of Blair's stupid plan for state funded religious schools? But this would require Jedi teachers, and some parents who were prepared to put their children through the sort of abuse that Luke is subjected to by Yoda in Empire Strikes Back.

Granted, the Church of England has special status in that it is the Established Church; although this has only a very small effect in practice; if Charles became a Moslem, as he obviously would like to, then he would be disbarred from being King when the Queen becomes more powerful than we can possibly imagine because the Monarch is titular head of the church. Is the idea here that Jedi would take over Anglicanism's constitutional role? This would, at any rate, make State Openings of Parliament more interesting. "Policy of fiscal prudence my government will continue. Standards in schools my government will try to raise. Parliamentary time on fatuous legislation about fox hunting my government intends to waste."

In short, I think that the Jedi Census plan is based on a misunderstanding of the English constitution; not surprising, since, as I understand it, the original internet posting was a direct crib from one written in New Zealand where the rules are, I imagine, different. Even if the required ten thousand people did claim Jedi knighthood, I think it unlikely that the Jedi would re-establish themselves as a viable religious order. Tony Blair and Mrs Thatcher would wipe them out. Always two there are, no more, no less, a master and an apprentice. Now, if anyone wants to start a campaign to allow me to give my race as "Elvish", I may be willing to join in.

(First published 8th March 2001.)

MAWWIDGE

Marriage has a legal significance according to the British constitution. It has a spiritual significance according to the teaching of some religions. And many ordinary people think that it has a social significance.

The legal, religious, and social meanings overlap in all kinds of ways, like chocolate eggs and the resurrection of Jesus. The Church of England believes that Vicars have the power to cast magic spells whereby perfectly ordinary bonking becomes a mystic allegory of the interrelationship of the spiritual and the physical worlds -- or, as they put it, a sacrament. The government says that if two people make a legally binding contract to stay together for life (and cede to the state the right to divvie up their possessions if they break that contract) it will give them a number of privileges with respect to taxation, access to children, pensions and so on. Ordinary People see Marriage as a great big party in which two people affirm their love in front of their friends and their family and probably gain some social status and respectability into the bargain. But that social status partly comes from being married according to the law of the land, and illegal marriages are probably not sacramental.

I guess for most people, the social aspect is the most important: when buying a cake, planning a meal and choosing a dress, they are not primarily thinking of the love that is betwixt Christ and his Church, nor of their pensions.

In a traditional Church of England wedding the Vicar reads from the book of Common Prayer, and then he and the happy couple disappear back stage to fill out the legal paperwork, while the organist plays a long, rambling voluntary and everyone shuffles awkwardly. This makes it quite clear to everyone that the Vicar is doing two things: casting an Anglican spell, but also changing the couple's status under English law. But the law has the upper hand in the arrangement. The Vicar can't confer the religious status of "marriage" on anyone who the law says can't marry. If the Leaping Order of St Beryl says that marriage between cousins is forbidden, Leaping Priests aren't obliged to marry cousins in his church; but if the Leaping Order says that the age of consent is 15, rather than 16, then he can't conduct child-marriages -- or if he does, they don't have any legal status. (I've heard of devout Dungeons and Dragons players who decide to get all their friends together, dress up as warriors and wizards, and have the 10^th Level Cleric perform a ceremony according to the Melnibonean rite of Arioch. And that's very nice and very cute and very embarrassing for the in-laws, but it doesn't make them married in the eyes of the law, or in the eyes of any God apart, presumably, from Arioch.)

Since eighteen thirty something, it has been possible to have the "state" bit of the wedding without the "God" bit: to sign the legal documents in front of a civil servant, with minimal ceremony, and become married under the law. But those registry office wedding could be exceedingly clinical -- sometimes they really did take place in filing cabinet lined rooms in front of a council official and two witnesses -- so people who were not at all religious often chose to get married in churches -- or didn't bother to get married at all. (That is: they pretended to believe that their wedding had a spiritual significance, because a purely legal ceremony wouldn't perform the desired social function.) This wasn't an ideal arrangement, either from the point of view of the church or the state. So in two thousand and something, NuLab decided to let pubs, ships, hotels and parks accredit themselves as registry offices: the legal officials would come to you, carry out the legal formalities in a pretty room, along with whatever readings or songs you fancied. (At a stroke, this made non-religious weddings more attractive than religious ones, because you got to have the service and the party on the same premises.) There's currently a scheme to let people get hitched on the beach, although I suspect that wouldn't seem as romantic in Clacton as it would in Hawaii. Certainly not as warm. And in 2004, NuLab introduced civil partnerships which allowed same-sex relationships to have the same legal status as opposite sex ones, even though they were not actually called "marriages".

There are three wrinkles, however:

1: If you want a non-religious ceremony, then you have to have non-religious songs and non-religious readings. If you want God, head for the church of your choice. The state doesn't want it to be said that it's establishing a new religion in competition with the church of England.

2: There is no mechanism for a Vicar or Priest to officiate at a civil partnership even if the priest himself wishes to do so. That was implicit, I think, in the notion of "civil partnership". The state was saying "A relationship between two men and two women can have the legal status of a relationship between a man and a woman or a woman and man; and your family and friends may very well regard it as having the same social significance but its spiritual significance is none of the states business, thank you very much."

3: The Church of England is an established Church. The Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church; the Prime Minister has final say on who's Archbishop; the Archbishop crowns the Queen and Richard Dawkins can't go on Thought for the Day, so there. Some Anglicans still take this to mean that if you are English you are automatically a member of the Church of England. It follows from this that everyone (regardless of church affiliation) has (in theory) the right to be married in their parish church; for their child to be christened there; and to be buried in the churchyard when they die.

This causes problems if, as sometimes still happens, the Vicar believes in God. As a Christian, he may not want to baptise a child whose parents are not serious about the ceremony: as a member of the Church of England he is legally obliged to do so. From time to time, someone suggests that the Prayer Book should contain a form of service in which a baby is given a name and prayers are said, but in which no-one sprinkles water on anybody. This is always interpreted as an attempted coup d'église by liberals and agnostics who want to stop the Church of England from going all religious on them. In fact, it's usually suggested by very hard line evangelicals who think that Baptism is so important that it shouldn't be treated as a mere social rite. (The next step would be to start immersing adults in paddling pools.)

Now, the so-called Liberal Democrats have recently proposed:

1: That the rule about religious readings at registry offices should be relaxed. Like all rules, it could be imposed rather officiously. A lot of people think that playing "I'm Loving Angels Instead" by Robin Williams (I looked it up) as the happy couple walked down the aisle would not automatically give rise to the creation of a theocracy.

2: That religious groups should be allowed to conduct civil partnership ceremonies if they want to.

3: Nothing else.

As a matter of fact, I do see a possible problem with this. Because of the established nature of the Church of England it is possible that if Civil Partnership service were permitted, church of England Vicars might find that they were obliged to carry them out, even if they themselves didn't agree with them.

Some people might say "So he damn well should: the law should make no concession to homophobia, or any other kind of phobia". But it seems to me that this is a different kind of question from the one about whether homophobic hoteliers ought to be allowed to insist that gay couples sleep in separate beds. It seems to me that regardless of how, or indeed if, you interpret Christian theology, the question about the spiritual significance of categories of bonking is one that religious groups have got to be able to decide for themselves. The state has no power to say that as of next Tuesday, sex between two men is an allegory of the mystic union which is betwixt Christ and his church, any more than it has power to say that as of next Tuesday, the powers of Darkness won't mind if you walk round stonehenge clockwise as well as widdershins, or that a ball hit to the boundary without bouncing will score 7 runs.

The Church of England itself will eventually have to form their own opinion of this question (the one about gay sex, I mean, not the one about cricket) and if all the bishops, appointed via the apostolic succession, learned in the Bible and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit decide that Male-Male and Female-Female relationships can be sacramental after all (or, much more likely, that regardless of what Mr Cranmer may have put in the Book of Common Prayer, they don't really believe all that sacramental gubbins and never have done) then the individual priest would have to accept that decision, regardless of what he or she happens to think. That's what you get for being the established church. You get more status, but less freedom of conscience. If you don't like it, bugger off to Rome and see how much freedom of conscience Ratzinger gives you.

If Quakers, Methodists and Unitarians want to have Civil Partnership ceremonies, or indeed cricket matches, in their churches, then none of this arises.

My own point of view, and please don't hit me, is that if two people love each other, then its a no-brainer that they should be allowed to affirm that love according to the religious traditions of their culture. On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the position which says "The state cares about sexual relationships only because they are likely to produce children. Two guys or two girls are quite welcome to live together, and the state doesn't care whether they call themselves 'Married', 'Flatmates', 'Confirmed Bachelors' or 'Special Friends'. We are not even neutral on the issue: it just doesn't come into the state's sphere of interest." If it had been down to me, we might have had gay church weddings, but no civil partnerships. But it wasn't.

However, what me and Steve H are interested in is not what has really happened in the real world, i.e. nothing whatsoever. What we are interested in is how this impacts on the Melosphere, where civilisation is always about to come to an end, and everything is either forbidden or compulsory.

In the Melosphere, "It is proposed that some churches may be permitted to marry gays" translates as "All church are now obliged to marry gays." Civilisation is under attack. "The attempt to stamp out Christianity in Britain is gathering pace". (She really said that. Really, really, really. I didn't make it up.)

ELF

Elves have, so far as we can tell, the same sexual organs as everybody else. Their clothes certainly cover up the same areas of the bodies. (This is quite odd, when you come to think about it, because sexual modesty implies a loss of innocence, and elves are free from original sin. But their souls and their bodies -- their fëa and their hröa -- are wired differently from those of mortal men, doomed to die.) According to custom, female elves are more likely to be healers, and male elves are more likely to be warriors, but there is no role that a female elf is prohibited from performing just because she's female. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between the genders: if a male elf dies he always reincarnates in male form, and if a  female elf dies, she always reincarnates in female form. (This, incidentally, is true of the gods  Valar as well: although they are incorporeal and wear bodies when they have dealings with humans, some always wear male bodies and some always wear female bodies.)

The elves reproduce in the same way as all other mortals,  although it is hard to imagine a hobbit doing it, isn't it? Elf marriages are like English "common law" marriages: the act of sexual intercourse is sufficient to make two elves married. In practice, the elves do perform solemn ceremonies of marriage and betrothal but it isn't the ceremonies which make the marriage. (By tradition, the brides mother gives the bridegroom a necklace to signify betrothal, a point which was presumably not lost on Aragorn.) 

Elves marry for life. Since dead elves are reincarnated, it is pretty bad form for a widow or widower to remarry. Finwe did marry Indis after Miriel died, but that was a source of ill-feeling between Feanor and his half-brothers Fingolfin and Finarfin. 

After they have had a few children, an elvish couple lose interest in sex, and dedicate themselves instead to other elvish pursuits: sitting in idyllic woods idyllic composing harp music about idyllically sitting in woods idyllically composing harp music; idyllically baking lembas; idyllically fighting genocidal wars about the ownership of magic gems. After their children have grown up, which takes millennia, they may actually live apart. There is really no such thing as elvish lust: affection, sexual desire and the bearing children go together, almost, one might say, like a horse and carriage. You really can't have one without the other.

Daily Mail readers believe that this is also how human sexuality works. But it isn't.

BUTTON

There was once a young journalist. Each morning, as he set out for work, he worried: "What will I do if I get to the office and find out that there is no news to report." He confided his concern to a more experienced reporter. "No news?" replied the old hack "Wow, what a story that would be! I can just imagine the headlines FIRST DAY IN HISTORY - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS"

Political nerds on both sides sometimes talk as if they would like all newspapers to be Soviet style press releases for the Ministry of Propaganda. Papers, they say, should report the facts about what a brilliant job the Prime Minister is doing, and nothing else. That's what ordinary people really want to read about. Tony Blair, the disgraced former Prime Minister, affected to believe that ordinary people were just not that interested in the intrigues and power struggles within his government, and certainly not his disagreements with Gordon Brown, of which there weren't any anyway. What they really wanted to read about was what percentage of what New Labour was rolling out year on year compared with the last seasonally adjusted Conservative Government.

But this is foolishness. Newspapers are about news; and news means stories, narratives, things which are worth repeating. Newspapers are incredibly selective about what they report: but then, so are you. You don't tell your friends if you went into Sainsbury's and saw a lady with a small child, but you do tell them if you went into Sainsbury's and saw a lady with a small rhinoceros.

Stupid people often say "I wish the papers would report more good news". But good news is not "a story". How could it be? NO-ONE IN BRISTOL HAS BUBONIC PLAGUE might be very good news, but it isn't a very good news story.  BLACK DEATH STRIKES MONTPELIER --wow! what a story that would be.

Dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog is a story. I made that example up all by myself.

It may possibly be true that in relatively recent times, "politics" (stories about the rich and powerful), "society" (stories about the rich and famous) and "sport" (stories about the rich and stupid) have come more and more under the umbrella of "celebrity news". It may be true that current affairs and crime are increasingly reported in the language and style of a show-business gossip column. It may even be true that this is all the fault of Channel 4 and Big Brother.

It would be very surprising if murders and other sensational crimes were not reported in newspapers. You'd expect headlines that said: WOMAN DISAPPEARS, BODY FOUND, BODY IDENTIFIED, MAN ARRESTED, MAN CHARGED, MAN TRIED and MAN CONVICTED or ACQUITTED. But that's it. Everything else is sadomasochistic voyeurism. But increasingly, "murder" is treated as a sub-set of "celebrity news". Being murdered, like appearing on X-Factor, is a path to celebrity status. Along with all the pseudo-people that we have pseudo-relationships with, we need some pseudo-corpses to pseudo-blub over. When someone dead acquires a nick-name -- Little Jamie, Maddy, Lovely-Jo -- it's a safe bet that they've stopped being people and become a brand-names. They kept the Maddy brand going for a year. Tony Blair's success owed much to cynically positioning his product alongside the Little Jamie brand. The Diana-brand has come to its natural end, but the Kate-brand is even now being prepared for sacrifice.

Lovely-jo has stopped appearing in the newspapers because there is, er, no more news about her. And that's what you'd expect: things have returned to their normal state, in which a person who has passed away is remembered by, and mourned by, their family and friends -- the people who actually knew them -- and no-one else. Of course the rest of us are going to forget all about her. Why wouldn't we?

Daily Mail Woman doesn't understand that. If Lovely-jo's pictures is not appearing in newspapers, then it means Lovely-jo has been forgotten; if she has been forgotten, it means that she didn't matter, and Daily Mail Woman thinks Lovely-Jo matters an awful lot because she was pretty and liked posh pizza. Lovely-jo used to appear in the Daily Mail, like the important people. Now she is only on a police website. What can we do to promote the Lovely-jo brand?

Daily Mail Woman tries to retrace Lovely-jo's last movements. The easy way of getting from the flat where she may have died to the place where her body was found is by crossing Clifton Suspension Bridge. It is thought that the actual murderer must have taken a much longer route to avoid the security cameras on the bridge .

"Perhaps" says Daily Mail Woman, "He also wanted to avoid the 50p toll."

She has a very odd relationship with money, does Daily Mail woman. She has money for veggie burgers and pizzas, but no loose change to cross a bridge. She attempts to get across the bridge without paying her toll. She tries to put a button in the bucket, and (this is a comic master-stroke) she tells us which expensive shop the button came from. Still, they will not let her cross. The fee is, in fact, 50p.

Again, one asks: what does she imagine should have happened?

She visits the crime scene, and is surprised to find that there is no ceremony there. But how long should police stay at the scene of a murder?

She is surprised that no-one slows down outside the flat where Lovely-jo lived. How long does she think that cars should carry on slowing down for? (And do they only have to slow down outside the houses of people who have been murdered, or do they also have to slow down at houses where Mum has died tragically young of lung cancer?)

She is scandalized that the toll bridge won't let her pay 30p for a 50p fair. What does she think should happen?

That payment to cross a toll bridge should be optional, like a "pay what you can" night at the theater?

That the sign should say "50p, or 30p for people with the buttons off posh frocks"?

That the toll booth man should say "You go right ahead, you are a Daily Mail journalist"?

Or that, because there has been a murder in the town, all normal commerce should be suspended?

SPECIAL "PRETTY WHITE GIRL MURDERED" OFFER: ALL TOLLS HALF PRICE

I think I know what is going on. Oh god, I think I know what is going on. When you are bereaved, you feel that the world has ended. This can easily turn into a feeling that the world ought to have ended: into anger against people who are carrying on as normal. How dare they just buy vegetables in the market as if nothing has happened! Most people recognize that this is just a feeling. King Lear didn't really think that the death of Cordelia was likely to make all the horses and dogs and rats drop dead in sympathy. W.H Auden didn't really think it at all likely that all the clocks and telephones would be switched off when his boyfriend died. It's a way of expressing rage: what English teachers used to call the pathetic fallacy. But the Liz Jones character is so controlled by her feelings that she effects to believe that normal life really will be suspended when a pretty white girl is killed, and that if it hasn't been, someone should damn well do something about it. It's the ultimate triumph (the ultimate caricature) of the "feelings over facts" believe system.

And finally, the master stroke. The most literally mad thing that has ever been said by anyone ever not excluding Mr Dave Sim:

"Isn't it interesting that you can snatch a young woman's life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?"

No, it isn't interesting. It isn't even a little a bit interesting. And there aren't any elaborate systems in place. There's a little gate. You pay your fare, the little gate opens, you drive through, the little gate closes. Do you imagine that little gate technology could be put to use stopping people being murdered? Or that every time someone wants to install a little gate or a little turnstile, they should be told, I'm sorry, you can't have a little gate, you can't have a little turnstile, people must be allowed to use your bridge, your road, your car park, your zoo for free because there are still sometimes murders and we don't always know how to stop them.

You want to stop rare birds becoming extinct, but Whatabout farm chickens?

You think my house-cats may get out and eat rare birds, but Whatabout the feral cats who need to be neutered?

You want me to pay 50p to cross the bridge, but Whatabout the lady who was murdered not five miles away?

In the 1950s, it fell to a particular sub-committee of Blackpool (or, it may be, Clacton or Brighton) Town Council to censor the seaside postcards: to decide whether a picture of a fat man, anxiously searching for a lost child and exclaiming "I can't find my little Willie" went beyond the realms of what could be sold in a decent holiday resort. The committee came up with the wheeze of showing all the cards to the mayor's wife. If the Lady Mayoress said that the post-card to be filthy, dirty and disgusting, it was adjudged to be a harmless bit of risque japery. But if she ever said "I don't see anything funny in that" then the card was ruled to be genuinely obscene, and banned.

Dirty jokes, sick jokes, bad taste jokes, "politically incorrect" jokes. The old Daily Mirror cartoons made it quite clear that Andy Capp regularly beat up his wife. This didn't mean that the readers were supposed to approve of domestic abuse -- any more than they were supposed to approve of drunkenness or laziness or blowing your wage packet on the dogs. Andy Capp wasn't a role-model: he represented the worst possible stereotype of a lower class Geordie.

It's people who are rather coy, not people who are completely uninhibited, who laugh at dick jokes and loo jokes. George Orwell said that the very smuttiness of the seaside postcards showed how very moral the lower orders were: if they didn't take marriage very seriously indeed then the idea of a nervous little man with an enormous fearsome wife surreptitiously glancing at a curvaceous blond in a bathing costume wouldn't be funny. But there's a line -- surely there must be a line -- that decent people don't cross. C.S Lewis -- who liked rude jokes well enough himself -- thought that some people told sex jokes because they were funny, and some people told sex jokes simply because it give them an excuse to talk about sex. The same might apply to other offensive jokes. It is possible that you really have thought of some way to make people laugh that just happens to involve taking the mickey out of some minority. But you'd better be very, very sure that you aren't merely using "it's funny" as a fig leaf to cover up a lot of bigoted rubbish that you, or your audience, really believe in. (The aforementioned Jimmy Carr seems to be to fall on one side of the line; the ghastly Jim Davidson on the other.) It's certainly inconceivable that anyone would draw, or even reprint, an Andy Capp wife-beating gag today.



So: assume I am right, and Liz Jones is a fictitious character -- a self-parody -- an Internet troll. Does that mean we can sit back and say "Well, that's all right then?"

Either someone sat in an office in London and imagined, with a terrible smirk on his face what Daily Mail Woman would do if she were asked to write about a murder.

Or else a real journalist, maybe really called Liz Jones, really walked around Bristol, really walked into Tescos, really picked up a Pizza and then, trying to be funny, or trying to give us the frisson of being shocked really wrote things like "This pizza proves that this dead woman, who I never knew, wanted to have a lovely life.

(Wanted to have a lovely life? Who doesn't, fuckwit, who doesn't? You might as well write "Finland Is A Land Of Contrasts".)

This is not reporting: this is voyeurism. Trying to get a laugh or some morbid, masturbatory sentiment out of the death of an actual human being who you, your paper, have turned into a commodity.

Am I offended? No.

Was I offended when I first read it? No.

Stunned disbelief would describe me feelings better. Horror. Not so much at the piece, but that there exists someone who would sink so low as to write such a thing.

So yes. Yes, I have very probably just wasted you time repeating at length the judgement I made when I first read the column.

"You utter shit."

Speaking of which -- Melanie Phillips:







update: I appear to have been unfair to Jim Davidson. not a phrase i ever expected to write