ABORTION – CALLOUS OR COMPASSIONATE?

Anti-abortion poster from the Irish referendum

In Ireland there has been only one issue on peoples’ minds recently – abortion.  The votes are bring counted in the referendum as I write in a short gap between jobs and it looks as though the Irish people have voted to change their constitution to allow the termination of pregnancies up to twelve weeks into a pregnancy.* This is half the time currently allowed under British law although, to complicate matters, abortions are not allowed in Northern Ireland and Theresa May’s decision to call an unnecessary election has handed power to the Democratic Unionists who oppose it, so reform there is unlikely any time soon. The strongly Catholic Southern Irish republic will, therefore, have a more liberal abortion law than British Northern Ireland ruled by Protestant Unionists.

The right to an abortion is one which those on the left normally support and those on the right usually oppose.  Yet most of the posters urging people to vote No in the referendum have pictures of a foetus which a change in the law would allow to be destroyed with the implication that it is the left-wingers who are being callous in killing a potentially healthy human being, while the right-wingers are being compassionate in trying to protect it.  I have long thought that one of the reasons pro-choice supporters get so angry with pro-life supporters is that they cannot stand the thought that someone else is outdoing them in idealism and compassion, the very qualities which they assumed they had a monopoly of.  If being left-wing means anything it is supporting the underdog and you cannot be more of an underdog than an unborn child.  Just try looking at one of those photos of foetuses which adorn almost every other lamp post in Ireland and say that it can be flushed away without any qualms at all.  I simply cannot do that.

Yet, if I had a vote, I would almost certainly have gone with those who want to allow abortion.  To use an Americanism I am conflicted on the issue.  In Britain you rarely see those pictures of a foetus which everyone in Ireland has been bombarded with recently. Although there is a vigorous pro-life movement the issue has been more or less settled and one in five pregnancies, the vast majority of healthy potential humans, are ended because the pregnant woman does not want to go through with it.  Many women feel huge relief at not being saddled with a child they do not want after an abortion and there is even some evidence that places with relatively liberal abortion laws suffer less from crime and social problems later on as the majority of children born are not unwanted and therefore less likely to go off the rails twenty years down the line.    

One of the jobs of politicians – and the people who vote for them – is to differentiate between a sin and a crime.  That word sin is not very fashionable these days as it has biblical connotations and sending people to prison surely has little role in the issue. However, the words are useful shorthand for distinguishing issues where the individual decides based on his – or, in this case, usually her – moral outlook and where the state should intervene to decide when to take action.  In fact, abortion is one of those issues where at a certain point in the journey from sex to birth the state has to draw a line and say that the foetus/unborn child/whateveryoucallit is now a potentially viable human being and deserves protection.  In other words, destroying it before that point might be considered a sin but should not (yet) be regarded as a crime. Then it becomes a crime to kill it.

No-one advocates criminalising contraception, although some do regard it as sinful, just as no-one can argue in favour of legalising infanticide, although it has been practiced - and tolerated - in the past).  At some point the potential human in the womb gains the right to life and the protection of the state. The British line is drawn at twenty four weeks and there are arguments in favour of reducing it to twenty weeks as medical advances make the survival of a child born early possible. I am fairly agnostic about where the line should be drawn but I do know that you have to draw it somewhere around the time that life changes from potential to possible.  Moreover these rights are surely absolute and are not withdrawn if the foetus is discovered to have a hare lip or some other defect which makes the future Justin or Justine less than perfect.  We do not withdraw the right to life for living disabled people and neither should we do so for those who are not yet born.

This is a practical rather than an idealistic approach. There is no future in criminalising sin: apart from anything else we do not have room in our prisons for all the sinners in our society.  The pro-life movement probably has a better chance of eliminating abortion if it concentrates on the personal morality involved in the issue rather than the role of the state.  I have a hunch that eventually they will win the argument as people turn away from terminating pregnancies.  There is already evidence that fewer doctors are willing to work in the prestige-free zone of providing them. 

In a recent post in my other blog (http://diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.ie/2018/05/that-was-then-this-is-now.html) I wrote that if we judge people in the past by the standards of today we will be judged by people in the future by the standards of tomorrow and will almost certainly be found wanting.  Maybe the pro-life movement will gain the upper hand in the moral war while it is losing ground in the political one. In a hundred years from now, as contraception improves and conception declines, abortion may be virtually unknown and our use of it might even be regarded as a genocide of the innocent unborn.   I will not be around to see that, however, and need to live in the present.  So, regard ending a pregnancy as a sin by all means but do not make it a crime. 

* That is what the Irish decided by a margin of two to one in the referendum.

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

STRANGE FRUIT

Winnie Mandela - flawed heroine

One of the questions they ask in the Guardian Saturday profile is “Which person do you most despise?”  Just in case I am asked to take part (not yet) I have my answer ready: “I try not to despise individuals but there is something ugly about a mob.”  Everyone has a few redeeming features – even Donald Trump is a good father to his children – but something about a group of people whipped up into hatred is particularly ugly and frightening.  Individually they can be decent people; collectively they descend into the depths.

Lynching is probably the clearest example of this. There was a powerful piece in the same paper today about the subject and it showed the memorial to nearly 5,000 people killed by mobs in this way in the USA  (https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial).  Almost invariably this was white on black killing, often accompanied by the most gruesome torture, including burning and skinning alive. The victims could be women or children accused of the most minor crime – basically forgetting their place in society – and never with the bother of any kind of a trial.

Sometimes a song can express these feelings better than a statement.  Listen to Billy Holliday singing Strange Fruit (youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI) to feel that shudder down your spine.

Before we start feeling superior about how we are better than the Americans, think about the people who were surrounding Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool where Alfie Evans lived out his final days.  You have to admire his parents who were determined to keep their son alive even when he is obviously nearing the end, but not the mob who surround the hospital and abuse the hard-working and often badly-paid staff who have kept him going this long.  No-one has been killed yet, but plenty have been threatened with death by people who would never abuse doctors and other health professionals if they were acting alone but whip themselves up to it when in a group.

This is one of the main downsides of the internet.  It is a place where mobs can be formed easily, where people go online and start goading each other into ever more aggressive attitudes.  Mark Twain said that lies are half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.  Now lies are out there before the truth has booted up.  The superficial becomes the serious with the bogus respectability of the web.  We even have a word now for someone who sows misinformation on the web – he (usually) is a troll.

But it is trials not trolls which establish the truth.  I have just finished re-reading Bleak House with all its powerful satire on the law and its workings.  The book begins with a fog descending on London, the image of how lawyers line their pockets by obscuring the issues in a fog of detail and deliberation.  Nobody does this better than Dickens.  For him the law is a kind of mob with everyone involved in it putting their own professional interests above common decency until the entire Jarndyce estate is exhausted in the payment of endless legal fees.

But, for all its faults, no civilised society can live without the law.  The reason that it is surrounded by ritual is so that it is not drowned in emotion and clear decisions can be taken on the basis of verifiable facts.  I have often thought that the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence are the most important of the differences between a democracy and a dictatorship.  In dictatorships they just lock up troublemakers and throw away the key.  In democracies it is necessary to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of a crime before they are punished. This is why Amnesty International, for all its faults, is such an important organisation.  They do not advocate releasing everybody locked up for political activities but of giving them a fair, open and honest trial by an independent court, not one controlled by the government which wants the accused out of the way. 

This is also why I could not regard Winnie Mandela, who died recently, as an unalloyed heroine.  It is funny how you can change your mind just by watching someone in action.  I had regarded her as a pretty good egg, a bit strident but understandably so in the light of what she had to put up with from the upholders of apartheid.  Then I saw a video of her saying to a crowd how they would achieve freedom through the use of 'necklaces'.  These are burning tyres put around the necks of victims which suffocate and burn them alive simultaneously - a particularly nasty way to go and one reserved for those who are deemed to be collaborators or traitors - without, obviously, the benefit of any kind of fair trial.  Say what you like, but all the perfumes of Araby cannot wash that particular stain off Winnie Mandela's memory.

The worst thing about necklaces is that they were used on black victims.  In most cases to be accused was to be convicted.  To be convicted was to be condemned.  And to be condemned was to be executed often in the most brutal and horrible fashion. And don't talk to me about revolutionary justice.  Lynching is lynching whether it is done by a racists or by revolutionaries.

This is not the way to achieve a fairer world in which everyone can expect to be treated fairly. Lynching does not suddenly become ok when it is practiced on people who would otherwise be regarded as victims. In fact, it is in a way worse because you expect better of people who want to create a fairer world.  So, let’s stick to trials with all their absurdities and ignore - if not silence - the trolls.  As for the lynch mobs, let us remember their victims and condemn the perpetrators - racists or revolutionaries.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

WHAT'S WRONG WITH WOMEN PRIESTS?

The new female Bishop of London Sarah Mulally - it is just a matter
of time before a woman is ordained as an Archbishop of Canterbury

I asked this question of the priest as I was leaving church recently.  I am an occasional church goer and find spending an hour a week there worthwhile even if I am not a strong believer and find the idea of an afterlife pretty unconvincing - pretty dull even. Others were waiting to say their goodbyes so there was not much time to deal with the issue properly  but his one sentence response was: “Because it mucks up our relationship with other churches.”  This is fair enough as far as it goes but it does make it seem that it is more important to be popular than to be right. It also makes the pace of change very slow.

Churches were excluded from the legislation which the UK enacted to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of gender - and presumably sexuality.  The CofE (Church of England) has adapted very slowly to the idea of having women priests and, although plenty of its vicars are known to be gay, they are not officially allowed to live in a homosexual relationship with another man, only a platonic one.  I wonder if many of them actually obey the rule not to have sex with their live-in partners for the sake of obeying the letter of the law.  If so, they have more self-control than most of us.  It is probably more a case of ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’.

There is certainly nothing in the Bible which definitively prohibits women from becoming priests, although there are texts which, as usual, can be interpreted differently.  (For more on women in the bible go to http://www.philosopherkings.co.uk/Womeninthebible.html)  Your interpretation usually reflects rather than decides your view.  In sport video technology is now used increasingly to decide issues which the on-field referee may not have seen clearly.  Has this stopped the arguments and led to peace breaking out?  Of course not.

One of the attractions of church, of course, is its unchanging nature. It is reassuring to go to a familiar building and join in the same type of service every week wherever you are in the world.  Indeed, in the relentless competition between churches, it is often the ones that change the least which attract the most loyal devotees, while the ones which always try to be up to the minute and relevant soon lose their appeal. 

So, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  The trouble is that the Catholic church is increasingly broken.  It is all very well Saint Paul telling the followers of Christ to refrain from sex, but the kind of dedication needed to achieve that has worn off in two thousand years.  The pressures on men to find some form of sexual gratification led to so many Catholic priests being accused of sexual abuse and a whole lot of trouble for their church.

While the Catholics cling to an increasingly untenable insistence on an undeliverable level of abstinence, the good old CofE wins gold medals at fudging the issue.  When we stand up to say the creed together after the sermon we refer to ‘the holy catholic and apostolic church” with a small ‘c’.  This makes it seem that the English church is an offshoot of the Roman one which conducts the same service but allows the priests to marry.  Once you let the wives in to become ordained as well as the husbands, you have torpedoed any hope of the two churches coming together in one body.  For many traditionalists, it is better to do without women priests than to make that final break with their capital ‘c’ Catholic cousins.

So, we have effectively two Anglican churches, one which allows women to offer the bread and blood of Christ, the other which will only allow them to read the lessons from the Bible.  I am not being cynical here.  No Archbishop of Canterbury wants to lose half his flock over the issue of female ordination (or gay priests) so both sides are accommodated within one large tent, even if they live on opposite sides of it and only occasionally nod to each other. I cannot blame him (not her yet) for keeping a lid on this particular pressure cooker.

After we have said our prayers, sung the hymns, listened to the sermon and recited the creed (which I do with a large pinch of salt nearby) we extend to each other the sign of peace, which is just a handshake with strangers.  It may not seem much but it is a way of saying that we are all equal in the eyes of God, that the size of your bank balance (or your ego) means nothing when you stand before the Almighty.  I may not believe in Him (or Her) very much but I have always felt this was worth doing on at least one day of the week, which I still set aside for thinking about things besides my personal ambitions and desires.

Then we go to the altar and kneel for communion.  I was slow on the uptake and did not realise for a long time that it was always a man who handed over the wafer and tipped the communion cup towards the communicants at this particular church because they had decided to stay out of the women priests' club.  Most of them are elderly white men: pale, male and stale is the less flattering way to put it. In time I suppose, they will die off and be replaced by younger priests who do not share the view that you have to be male to bring people to God. I would have no problem if this were to happen tomorrow but I will not boycott the church just because it has a purely male priesthood.  Sometimes it is better to agree to differ than to pick a fight.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is: diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

COLOUR BLIND CASTING

Ade Hastrup, black actor

I have written before on the issue of colour blind casting, arguing that racism will never be properly finished in this country until we have a white man playing Othello without anyone batting an eyelid (http://menfriday.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/black-and-white.html).  Recently I have been thinking about the issue again. largely as a result of seeing two plays and a film.

The first play was The Winslow Boy, a thoroughly old-fashioned conventional story about a family's fight for justice for their son, who is accused of stealing a postal order.  The play was fine, well-acted and involving even if the set, costumes and staging were unadventurous.  The only slight frisson was when the family solicitor Desmond appears on stage played by a black actor.  The character is a stuffy cricket-playing solicitor and the name is common enough amongst black men in Britain - as is playing cricket - so the casting would not have excited comment except that the play was set a hundred years ago in the build-up to the First World War.  (The actual character on whom the play was based died at the age of nineteen in the trenches.)  Fair enough, however, we seemed to think in the audience.  It is an well-known play by Terence Rattigan who is coming back into fashion, black actors need opportunities and you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept this piece of casting, even if in practice a black man would not have become a family solicitor a hundred years ago.

Second up was Queen Anne, set three hundred years ago about the relationship of Anne and Sarah Churchill, which had been central to the power balance in Britain but then went sour.  In this play, Sarah's husband the Duke of Marlborough was played by a black actor.  While it was just about possible Desmond could have been black, history tells us that John Churchill was definitely white, wealthy and privileged.  Again, you put this fact out of your mind in watching the play.  Something about a show on the stage means you stop being pedantic about skin colour and get on with enjoying the story.

That does not work so well on film, however, where a higher standard of realism is expected.  Film-makers spend millions on computer generated special effects (CGI) which are often unconvincing and distancing.  I start to switch off when I imagine a nerd sitting at a keyboard expecting me to believe that a skyscraper is collapsing or a spaceship exploding.  Sadly this means that opportunities for black actors have to be restricted to roles they might be expected to fill in real life - or in the alternative superhero universe of Black Panther.  

The film was about the Duke's descendant Winston Churchill.  I have been a bit Churchilled out recently and was going to skip it but we went for date night and it was actually a reasonable representation of an important time.  Even the make-up which, like the CGI, is so often unconvincing worked well enough.  What did not work was the part in which 'Winnie takes the tube'.  It sounds like a Pooh story and is about as realistic.  This absurd scene ends with some lines from the historian Macauley begun by Churchill and completed by an unknown black character, who gets a pat on the back from Winnie.  Çhurchill then goes off to rouse the House of Commons and stride off in triumph as the credits start to roll.

Everything about this is wrong.  Churchill was a leader not a follower and he would not have been seen dead on the tube. He did not need the support of the common people he supposedly met there to be convinced that he was right.  Moreover, Britain simply was not a multicultural country at the time and a man of colour would not have been in the position to offer his opinions to the Prime Minister of the day. Let us give Churchill the benefit of the doubt and say that he was not an out and out racist, but he was definitely an imperialist who had no time for Indian independence, for example, and despised Gandhi.  Shoehorning a black character into an already unrealistic scene simply made it impossible to believe in.

The actor who played the unnamed black man on the tube is called Ade Hastrup and I wish him well in his career.  He faces plenty of obstacles, not least the fact that it is not easy to rewrite history.  On the stage, maybe.  On the screen, no.

This essay was written just before the Oscars ceremony - in which Oldman won for Best Actor - and so it did not cover the concept of the 'inclusion rider' which Best Actress winner Trances McDormand referenced.  This is something I will deal with in a future post.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

RIPPED JEANS AND SNAKES AROUND THE NECK

Ripped jeans - £45 from Top Shop
(Three times the cost of whole ones at M&S) 

My partner fell over and ripped her jeans the other day.  Very fashionable, I consoled her.  We both come from a generation that wears jeans for practical purposes – decorating, gardening and other jobs around the house in my case, looking after her horses in her case – and we tend to buy them cheaply (£15 for my latest ones from Marks and Spencer).  For us a rip in the jeans is a sign that they should be replaced, for more fashion conscious wearers a sign that they should be purchased. 

I first became aware of the trend when the footballer Christiano Ronaldo was pictured wearing jeans with holes while his then teammate at Manchester United, Wayne Rooney, was wearing a suit at an event held to honour the former player at their club Bobby Charlton, who would never be seen in public wearing jeans of any type, ripped or whole.  The savvy young continental player did not need to bother with things like suits and ties when honouring an older one, while the more conventional and conservative British one did.

Nowadays it is almost impossible to take a journey on the London Underground without sitting opposite someone – usually a woman around half my age – exposing flesh through jeans.  Sometimes it is a few square inches, at other times quite a considerable acreage.  How is it that a feature which not so long ago would have made a garment unsellable has now become virtually a prerequisite of purchase?  We buy and wear clothes to demonstrate who we are – or maybe who we want to be.  As we get farther away from manual labour, we want to look more and more like workers.  Occasionally you see an actual labourer in the tube and they will usually be wearing unripped trousers, tears being potentially dangerous.  They will probably also have a tool bag strapped to or sitting next to them, a sure sign that they are on their to or from actual physical work.

Maybe it is to do with sex, partially exposed flesh being an indication that this body might be available to the right person, a promise of barely hidden treasures.  Although the fashion seems to be on the way out now, it was recently quite common for young and - let's admit it - black men to expose their boxer shorts above the line of jeans which drooped down their legs.  What did this show?  That they could afford to buy a fashionable brand of underwear, the name of which was conveniently; that it was a short step to what lay barely hidden below; or – and this was the ‘official’ explanation given – that they identified with the black prisoners in American jails who were not allowed to wear belts so found that their trousers dropping down involuntarily? 

The issue is fraught with racial dynamics and dangers.  In my fiction writing days, I once wrote a story in which a female character compared the modesty of young Moslem women, who would not expose even their hair let alone their undergarments to anyone but their husbands, and young men who exposed their underwear to all and sundry as though they were ready for sex with anyone at any time.  I was ticked off for this by a writing judge who said I ought to be more careful about racial sensitivities.   It seemed to me that it was just the sort of thing a young woman in tune with clothing and fashion might say but it appears you cannot even imagine a fictional character making this kind of comment these days.

At the same time as we are trying to look like the workmen we are not, we are refusing to dress like the office workers we are – or used to be.  I have a weakness for a neck tie but usually only wear one when I am going to work as it seems like a mark of respect to those you are working for to dress properly for them and, as a man, you simply have not finished dressing until you have put that tie around your neck and done it up.  On one level this is, I know, ridiculous as most workplaces do not demand a tie these days and it serves no practical purpose to wear one.  They are even banned in hospitals now as they are considered germ-carriers. So why half strangle yourself with a snake around your neck, as one tie-hater put it?  Because leaving that top button undone and uncovered shows that you cannot be bothered to complete the process you started when you began covering your flesh.  I would feel faintly ridiculous wearing one to anything other than the most formal social occasion but I have a decent collection of ties and, rather than let them rot, I wear them as a sign that I am operating in a professional capacity.  So, tie on means money being earned while tie off means money being spent.

Ties used to be tribal, adorned with the symbols that indicated which school or regiment you had been a member of.  Now they are individual, patterned in a way that gives you the opportunity to be dandyish.  I have a weakness for Liberty patterns, which can be almost witty in their detail without descending into irritating whimsy or gimmickry, ties with pictures on them which you wear once but never again.  (It is hard to be taken seriously wearing a tie with Homer Simpson or the Beatles over you belly.)  As I work less the opportunity to wear a tie is diminishing, which Is in itself a shame.  I could put one on to write this piece but would frankly feel like a prat wearing one unnecessarily.  We are more subject ot the pressures of fashion than we often realise or acknowledge.

I have not yet bought a pair of ripped jeans.  There would be little to see through the rips except hairy legs and varicose veins, nothing to persuade a passer-by that were great treasures beneath the denim.  If there is one thing more embarrassing than dressing too formally it is dressing too fashionably.  Maybe this is why I am baffled by ripped jeans.  I am just too old to look cool in them.  I will stick to that snake around my neck. 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Apologies for the late posting of this essay.

Edwin Lerner