Of faith, and hope, and charity,
Of pleas for public parity
Of common sense, that rarity,
I come today to speak.
They’re trying to eliminate
Our freedom to discriminate
They’re asking us to deviate
If public funds we seek
Religion’s place of prominence
And utter social dominance
Is threatened—surely commonsense
Will somehow be restored!
This isn’t mere frivolity;
Our nation loves equality;
It’s onerous, this polity!
We shall not be ignored!
The secular authorities
Oppose our (God’s) priorities—
Respect for some minorities
Just isn’t what we do!
No worries that our angle meant
A church-and-state entanglement—
Each dollar, and each wrangled cent
We’re spending, thanks to you!
The bishops are claiming discrimination… That is, they claim they are being discriminated against, by not allowing them to discriminate. No, really. They argue that they deserve the same access to your money that non-discriminators do. It’s just not fair to discriminate against them.
I really like your work. I visit often, but don’t usually leave a comment. I really enjoy your clever use of poetry to describe important events of the day. This post was particularly interesting because it showed an image of father Tom with a halo artifact behind his head. I’m sure the photographer knew what was doing. Cuttlefish, you do great work. I look forward to viewing your blog every few days.
That’s a fairly universal attitude among religious people, I’m starting to think.
I live in Israel, so the major religion is Judaism and not Christianity, but these things are the same.
A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a religious person in my office (an overall very nice and progressive person, as long as you try to ignore all the racist, misogynistic, etc… bits).
The discussion veered, as it often does, toward issues of politics and religion, and I mentioned the problem of religious oppression/discrimination here (no public transportation on the weekend, no getting married in the country without doing the religious ceremony and “donating” to the Rabbi, and so on and so forth).
His response was that I’m wrong, there is of course religious oppression here, but going the other way. It’s us secular Jews (no Jew can really be an atheist, we all believe inside even if we claim and act otherwise) who oppress the more religious population, by forcing them to live in a country where they know other Jews are driving in the Shabbat, where they know other Jews eat non-kosher food, where their men have to see scantily clad women around, and so on and so forth.
According to him if I really didn’t want discrimination then I should stop discriminating against them, and fulfill the religious requirements. Well, either that, or leave the country so the proper Jews could live freely without being discriminated against and oppressed.
Kind of the same attitude. Acting against discrimination is discrimination, and acting against oppression is oppressing.