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Whatever floats your boat?

Religion … political correctness … freedom of expression … faith … enlightened thinking … each to their own … progressive ‘modern’ attitudes … simply straightforward basic human rights … ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ (widely believed to be a quotation from Voltaire but in fact a creation of English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall, writing under the pseudonym S.G. Tallentyre, to describe Voltaire’s attitude towards fellow French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius in her 1906 biography The Friends of Voltaire) … and, let us not forget – this my own personal favourite chestnut – ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison’.

Sport and politics have always made uneasy bedfellows. Especially when the one is used to make points – or attempt to do so – about the other.

Cue South Africa and apartheid. The D’Oliveira Affair. Exile from the Commonwealth. The rock band Queen getting castigated for playing at Sun City in Bophutswana. US singer-songwriter Paul Simon’s classic but controversial 1986 album Gracelands.

Or 1980 when sections of the Western World including Great Britain sort-of boycotted the Moscow Olympic Games over the 1979 Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan [it says much that said campaign was so long ago and now seems so absurd that I had to go online to look up what it was all about!] the Olympics went ahead anyway.

And when it comes what everyone remembers about that entire episode, the overwhelming highlight for Brits is the track & field Coe/Ovett ‘switch-around’ … in which Ovett made the podium in the 800 metres final and then Coe took the 1500 metres gold, when in advance the reverse had been predicted … simply because the video recordings of those races are regularly re-run on television sports programmes. Meanwhile, the exact political points supposedly being driven home by the 65-nation boycott are long buried in the mists of time.

Recently we have seen Aussie tennis legend Margaret Smith – since 1991 an ordained Pentecostal minister – being vilified by ‘political correct’ campaigners because she has consistently aired her traditionalist (for which read ‘conservative’) views on gay and lesbian [and no doubt also bisexual, transgender and of course gender-fluid] rights as a matter of principle.

There have been endless calls from notables in both the tennis and political worlds for Smith’s name to be removed from the Margaret Smith Arena in Melbourne because of her stance.

A few days ago budgie-smuggler-wearing Tom Daly won the men’s 10-metre synchronised diving gold medal with Dan Goodfellow at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, also in Australia.

In the media room and elsewhere afterwards, Daly took the opportunity to  ‘call out’ the 37 Commonwealth countries which he claimed in some form or another persecute, and/or deny rights to, their LGBT communities.

To end my list of ‘instances’, there is the ongoing case of Australian rugby league (and now rugby union) great Israel Folau who a fortnight or so ago got into hot water for expressing his religious fundamentalist views on homosexuality on social media. Based upon the most recent reports I have seen, it appears he has refused to apologise for his deeply-held attitudes and that the Aussie rugby authorities have accepted this and are hoping that the whole issue will soon be buried 100 feet underground without their sponsors noticing or – if they should do so – without them taking any adverse action.

See here for a link to a piece by Bret Harris that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

It seems to me that in 2018 – well, indeed perhaps it has always been thus – we live in a strange world where, on the one hand, we trumpet the right to freedom of speech from the rooftops as being one of centrepieces of Western democracy, decency and civilised behaviour.

And yet, on the other, simultaneously there seems to be a growing indeed endless crocodile of campaigners joining the metaphorical queue waiting to speak at the public microphone to denounce different (and/or new) sincerely-held attitudes, views, principles and articles of faith … and/or go further and demand they those who hold them should be silenced or at least neither heard or seen in the media.

Not much ‘right to freedom of speech’ about that approach, is there?

[I should perhaps add here that, being an atheist myself, I have ‘no personal dog in this fight’. However, I do tend to respect people possessed of religious faith, of whatever nature or degree – why, even ‘some of my best friends …’ (to coin a rather condescending phrase) for two reasons.

One, they often seem to have ‘something’ in their life that I do not.  

And two, because often – otherwise than on this particular issue – they seem as rational, thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent and amusing as anyone else I ever come across and/or listen to.]

When it comes to politics or sport, of course, there are also further layers of complexity.

You can find strident feminists who are strongly opposed to abortion as a matter principle.

And you can find similar who are equally strongly in favour of it.

You can find fundamental Christians who are vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage. And you can find gays and lesbians of strong religious faith who are equally adamantly in favour of it.

I suppose much of the ‘difficulty’ could be avoided if – in theory but absurdly – the world could be divided into different countries of equal size, wealth and resource in which different sets of sincerely-held views prevailed and then we as individuals could simply move to that which best reflected our own.

But the world is not a perfect place. Half the problem is that when people take up strongly-held views on any subject under the sun, they tend not to rest at the prospect that they could find a land in which they – and everyone of the same persuasion – could live in harmony without being bothered by, or themselves bothering, anyone who thinks differently.

No – as night follows day – it is the nature of human beings that when, e.g. they are convinced that – say – abortion is wrong, it is never enough that they might find a place to live in which everyone is of the same mind and all of them would be collectively happy to leave it there.

Instead they want to go to every land, every county, every town, every nook and cranny, wherever a population (or indeed an individual) holds a different view … and browbeat them into their own way of thinking.

What kind of arrogance gets them thinking like that?

 

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About J S Bird

A retired academic, Jeremy will contribute article on subjects that attract his interest. More Posts