The virtues of blackmail, misery and cheating

Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire. And I’ll bring you the hide of Patricia McKeever, the internet Torquemada of Scottish Catholic gaydom. Ms McKeever, of Catholic Truth is, as reported in The Times yesterday , a one-person outing operation, determined to uncover closeted cassock-lifters, to drag them shrieking and naked from their metaphorical priests’ holes and thereby to cleanse the Church. Ms McKeever has restored me to myself, reminding me – at an age when I expend my passions carefully – of just what it is in the public sphere that makes me most angry.

It’s the gap – the abyss – between the stated reason for the actions of the world’s McKeevers and their real (if hidden) motives that so appals. Why does Ms M send letters and e-mails to priests and seminarians whom she suspects of going to gay clubs? Why does she demand of an Edinburgh clergyman to know whether he is a homosexual? Ostensibly to “raise awareness of the problem . . . ultimately to ensure the safety of others in the Church. Not just the physical safety of children, important though that is, but also the spiritual safety of people and congregations entrusted to the care of a homosexual priest or bishop.”

She is no relative, naturally, to the poison pen writer, or to the persecutors of imaginary backsliding converted Jews or secret Trotskyists. She doesn’t send her missives, of course, for the pleasure of it, for the excuse to think and talk dirty in the name of purity. She doesn’t do it in the inner hope that by identifying the shameful “other” she somehow cleanses her own psyche of its troubling longings. She does it because she is righteous.

Ms McKeever is, in the point of general fact, not wrong. I don’t mean by this that ordinary Catholics or their children are in any way at more hazard from gay priests than from heterosexual ones. I mean that there almost certainly are many homosexual Catholics, including priests, and if you take the view, as she does, that such an orientation is an abomination and that one is required to persecute the abominator, then her witch-hunt makes local sense.

For various reasons Scottish Catholicism – itself for many years a persecuted creed – has acted as a lightning rod for recent electric traffic on the subject of the citizen and his or her personal morality. Abortion, said the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien three weeks ago, is murder. “In Scotland,” he said, “we kill the equivalent of two classrooms of children every day.” He urged Catholics, in effect, not to vote for politicians who upheld the existing abortion laws, and suggested in effect that pro-choice MPs couldn’t be real Catholics. “I can’t change the Ten Commandments,” said O’Brien McKeeverishly. “That’s what I’m ordained to teach and to preach: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ” I should not, of course, dispute theology with a full cardinal, but abortion is not in the commandments at all. Or anywhere in the Bible. In fact its proscription by the Church is a comparatively late development, so you might have thought that those who believe that abortion is wrong would be more tentative in their condemnation of those who take a contrary view.

I was alarmed therefore, to read my good friend and colleague Gerard Baker in these pages last week , describing abortion as worse than slavery, in that those who have an abortion know in their hearts that it is wrong, while slave-owners cheerfully thought that slaves benefited from three square meals a day and all the chains they could carry. Abortion would one day, Gerry predicted, be viewed as “a moral abomination”, when “almost all of the time choosing to have the baby is the good and moral and honourable thing to do”.

I’m not going to go all Dawkins on Gerry’s Catholic ass – in my half-century I think I have learnt that the possession or absence of religion is no real indicator of good character. But I think you do have to be a true believer to insult so many people so badly while laying claim to such virtue. When, in the mid-1960s, with four children already, after several miscarriages and with little money, my mother took herself to an illegal abortionist for a termination, she was not in my view committing a moral abomination. In fact what she was doing was morally right. What was morally wrong was that when the police discovered her name on a list held by the doctor who had performed the operation, she was forced to answer their humiliating questions. The doctor himself later committed suicide.

Now, it would be abominable for me to force a female Gerry to have an abortion. It is abominable to me for him to try to force people like my mother into illegality because of his own moral or religious views.

What makes it worse is that I have always sensed a low-level hypocrisy in the claim that abortion is murder. If it is, then every miscarriage is an untimely death, yet I don’t imagine that Cardinal O’Brien has the foggiest notion of how many pre-term deaths there have been since 1967, or has campaigned to improve massively the survival rates for otherwise miscarried foetuses. It’s somehow only death if women choose it.

Let’s not make this just about Catholics. There are all kinds of people who, for religious or cultural reasons, wish to see greater social control over what women, homosexuals and youngsters are allowed to do. They would like the rules on divorce tightened, the morning-after Pill discouraged, women to wear modest headscarves so that their hair doesn’t drive men wild with misplaced sexual desire. They want clear and stringent rules on what people may and may not do. They forget that, from Saudi Arabia to TV evangelism, such illiberalism always runs on the black hypocrisy of cheating husbands, punished women, blackmail, misery and self-slaughter.

Usually I don’t bother to say all this because we liberals have probably won the culture war, and it seems more relevant to deal with some of the malign consequences of our own victory. If David Cameron’s Conservatives now want to be liberal, then so much the better. I have always found it repulsive that people who used to specialise in persecution (remember the attacks on New Age travellers?) should get so het up by speed cameras.

But I thought that one recent commenter on The Times website had picked up something significant. Writing yesterday about the poll showing Tory MPs to be less than fully Cameronian, Malcolm McLean observed that “there are a significant number of Tories who don’t want secularisation, and some older school socialists who are beginning to realise that they agree with them”.

The battle may not be over after all. Better bring me the spear too.

Comments

[John Phillips]

Unfortunately, the battle is far from won, in fact in some ways it seems we are taking backward steps. I find this most disturbingly obvious, especially for one who considers himself leftist, in some on the left's recent joining with religites in the attack on people such as Richard Dawkins and the like for their books criticising religion. Added to that is the bizarre site of some on the left aligning themselves with muslim extremists who abhor all freedom except their own. Then again, many on the left have an almost religious belief in the righteousness of their cause and like the religious, hold the view that only they know what is good for the rest of us. At the end of the day, there is very little difference between the extremes of the left, the right or the religious, as they all claim to know what is best for us and should not be questioned without fear of being labelled a heretic of one kind or another. We do live in extraordinarily strange and surreal times.

[D Jackson]

Comparatively late development? In the Didache in AD70, the early Christians were told that

"The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child" (Didache 2:1–2 [A.D. 70])

[Anarch]

D Jackson. The Didache is not cannonical (ie. not church law) in any christian church except the Ethopian, and it was only re-discovered in 1873, so Aaronovitch is right that it is not in the bible. He has oversimplified the position when he says that the proscription of abortion is a late development - he is strictly correct, that universal proscription is fairly new - abortion has been a common practice in a lot of catholic and other christian communities but it has also often been proscribed and punished. More broadly, I can half understand the earlier proscription (more ignorant and brutal times) but there is not, and I suspect there never has been a reasonable theological justification for it.