lavendersparkle

Two things have got me thinking about polygamy. The first is enjoying the first season of Big Love from LoveFilm. The second was hearing Baroness Warsi calling for the government to combat polygamy.

I've seen Baroness Warsi speak before and most of the time I admire her down to Earth approach to living in a diverse society, but this time I think she's gone a bit wrong. I think this is because people face a problem when faced by how to legally approach polygamy. On the one hand you say "live and let live" and tolerate polygamy even if you don't necessarily grant polygamous marriages legal recognition, or you make adultery illegal, because there's no sense in making plural marriage illegal if plural sex isn't, especially when some religions view sex as a way of forming marriages. Baroness Warsi seems to favour a muddle in between in which all religious marriages have to be registered and you're only allowed one at a time. This is a ridiculous unworkable solution and an attack upon religious freedom and the right of people to have private family lives. There are lots of reasons why people choose to get religiously married but not legally married. Some Christian friends of my parents got religiously married without being legally married because they were moving to Alaska and bizarrely if they got legally married before rather than after they moved, they would have had to spend 6 months apart.* One of my regular readers has said that she would prefer not to get civilised to her wife both due to anarchist leanings and the tax advantages of being legally flat mates. It seems an integral to religious freedom that people should be allowed to engage in covenants and ceremonies without unnecessary state interference. Apart from anything else, religious institutions can sometimes not quite translate into English law. How should the law treat a Pagan or an Islamic fixed length marriage? How should a concubine be legally regarded? How on Earth could it cope with Mormon bindings, which whilst closely related to marriage can sometimes be conducted between two people who are both dead? Does Baroness Warsi really want to conduct raids on polyamourous hand fastings?

I think we have to accept that if we think that sexual practices between consenting adults should be left up to those consenting adults, that's going to have to include plural marriage. That's not because of 'cultural sensitivity' but out of respect for the right of adults to have relationships without government interference. If some polygamists have a habit of abusing their wives, we need to combat partner abuse directly, not practices which we think might be correlated with it.

*Ah, the wonders of the US immigration system.

Another thing that gets me down at pro-life events is that they are dominated by conservative Catholics. I've nothing against conservative Catholics, but spending a whole evening as a minority of one is tiring. Sometimes I get the urge to just leave them to it and let pro-life soc become a subgroup of Fisher House where people can preach to the choir about the evils of contraception and gay adoption. Over dinner there was an animated discussion about This case of some grandparents who were refused custody because they were 'too old' and whose grandchildren were instead adopted by a gay couple. Now, I think that, if the details of the story are correct, it shows the great problem of social services not taking into account that keeping children within their extended family or with friends of their family, is usually better than adoption by strangers. This story would be just as much a travesty if the kids had been adopted by the Brady Bunch. However, my comrades in the cause of life concentrated on the gay aspect and the 'PC gone mad' aspect of allowing two men to adopt.

I know queer pro-lifers. I know people who were raised by queer parents. I want them in our pro-life soc tent. We're not going to change any minds if pro-life soc is the place you go to let off steam agreeing with the homophobic story you read in the Daily Mail. Why don't they just start a homophobic soc and let me get on with winning people around to pro-life feminism.

I'm a bit confused about Anglican sexual morality. I know that there is a lot of diversity in views. I get that at one end there are some conservative evangelicals who are practically shomer negiah before marriage and avoid being alone with a member of the opposite sex they're not married or related to and at the other end there are Anglicans who think that polyamoury and one night stands with strangers are fine as long as do so in a nice way (making them tea before they leave is probably mandatory). There are also people who are celibate for life but they're hard to place because they may have all sorts of views on what sorts of things other people get up to. What I don't know is the distribution of views and behaviours. What's the median Anglican's views on what sexual behaviour is appropriate and acceptable? What sorts of things would the majority of clergy feel comfortable doing before marriage?

I've noticed that the Church of England manages to get itself into a bit of a tizwoz about what boys are or aren't allowed to do with each other without really addressing the issue of what heterosexual or bisexual or female Anglicans should get up to (or not). When are 'full genital expressions' of heterosexuality appropriate and, whilst we're at it, what the hell is a 'full genital expression' anyway?*

So wisdom of the internet, please explain to me.

*At the moment I'm imagining a cross between the Vagina Monologues and Puppetry of the Penis.

Why exactly is Radio 4 allowing people on it's programmes who don't just believe in but have actively participated making education and employment conditional upon stripping for real women and talking to him as if he's a normal rational human being rather than a racist shit bag?

I have one thing to say to all the people who very calmly intellectually discuss how they have a lot of sympathy for the French policies which would exclude me and my children from education and almost every job I've ever held:
Fuck you!

Since I have gotten married I have been covering my hair. I mostly favour head scarves, usually tied in a 'bun' style, although I'm also wearing the occasional hat. Here are some observations on this so far.

1) Wearing a head scarf, even if it's made of man made fibres, makes my hair far more manageable. My hair was low maintenance to begin with but now it rarely gets tangled. Also, even if it is a mess no-one can see.

2) Head scarves require hair clips to stay anywhere close to covering most of my hair. If I forget this I end up constantly pulling the scarf forward and once buying emergency clips.

3) Wearing a head scarf most of the time has stopped me shedding hair everywhere. The flip side of this is that all the hair ends up in my hairbrush but this creates less hovering.

4) A couple of people have lost the ability to recognise me from not front on. I suspect this is because they have gotten used to recognising me a 'kippah girl' and it will take a little while for them to recognise me by my scarves.

5) Outside of Jewish settings, it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that my scarf might be a religious thing. A couple of times people have started talking about how much they dislike religion giving me the feeling that it doesn't occur to them that the woman with her hair covered might be religious. Alec said this is because I'm the whitest person in the world so they assume I'm not Muslim and have never heard of other religions that do hair covering.

6) Amongst people who realise that it's a religious thing the reaction has been positive. I as expecting flack because I'm not Orthodox and my husband isn't Jewish, but actually my local Chabad rebitzin said that she thought it was really good for me to cover my hair and no-one at my Reform shul has been negative about it.

I'm not sure how many people are aware of a legal change which is due to occur in November. In November the government is planing to put up the age for obtaining a marriage visa from 18 to 21. I have heard about this because it's big news in amongst Jews because the legal change is set to have a big effect upon some Jewish communities, where marriage in the late teens and early twenties are the norm and shiduchs frequently cross national boundaries.

The government claims that the change is to reduce forced marriage. What a classic New Labour move. Bad Thing is happening. Should we actually address Bad Thing? No, we'll make a relatively innocuous activity illegal, which is easier to stop but also easy to get around if you're determined to do Bad Thing. That's try to get at what the government's actual motivation is by looking at the likely effects of the legislation. Will the legislation reduce the number of forced marriages? There are differing opinions but the legislation doesn't stop people marrying off their children, it just stops their new spouse entering the country. So forced marriages will still occur but both partners will now live in the country of the foreign spouse. I don't want to slander other countries, but surely if you were genuinely worried about people in forced marriages, it might be better for both partners to be living in the UK rather than Pakistan, if you want to be able to help people out of the situation? What will the legislation do? Reduce immigration and encourage British ethnic minorities to emigrate. Am I the only person who heard about this and immediately thought "What a transparent attempt to reduce the number of darkies in the country."

I hate this fucking racist authoritarian government.

In my perusing of the wedding planning part of the internet I'm getting increasingly irritable with non-religious brides who want to have an Anglican wedding so that they can get married in a pretty church but then bitch about unfair it is that the church:
a) won't let them get married in a different church to their parish church just because it's prettier and/or was in a film.
b) strongly encourages them to come to church a whole three times to hear the Banns read.
c) makes them meet with the vicar more than once and dares to try to explain Christian ideas of marriage during those meetings.
d) won't allow them to do things which it deems inappropriate during the service.
e) makes them use the liturgy of the Church of England.

The Church of England is a religious body, not a wedding and pretty building preservation service. Would these people wander into a Mosque because it was pretty and then get all uppity about how the imam wouldn't let them wear a strapless dress for the ceremony?

I read it on a blog so it must be true. I thought some of my readers would be amused to hear that Thomas More is the patron saint of civil servants*.

*and adopted children, diocese of Arlington, Virginia, court clerks, difficult marriages, large families, lawyers, diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee Florida, politicians, politicos, statesmen, step-parents, widowers. My he must be a busy saint.

I'm enjoying the bizarreness of I and most of my religious friends celebrating festivals on the same day, which have completely different feels to them. This year, Purim and Maundy Thursday/Good Friday coincide. So this evening, whilst my Christian friends are commemorating the last summer and garden of Gethsemane, I will be wearing fancy dress, drinking and generally being silly for religious reasons. I'm guessing in times gone by the consequences of this potential overlap were a lot more serious than friends being in different spiritual head spaces. A rowdy drunken festival on Good Friday in which we celebrate having executed some guy on a stick, probably wasn't the best way to not be murdered by angry Christian mobs.

It's when Jewish and Christian festivals coincide that the difference between being a member of the majority national religion and a minority religion becomes most obvious. A friend of mine just posted about her plans for the week end and I thought 'Oh, she's taking Friday off to go the church' before remembering that most people have Good Friday off. The BBC, which is usually vaguely secular in a default C of E sort of way, tends to get into the spirit of Easter, usually by broadcasting some kind of radio play of a Lenten narrative in which all of the disciples have Northern English accents. Sometimes I find this interesting but sometimes their annoying because, in keeping with the Gospels, the Pharisees sometimes take on a pantomime baddie quality. This is fair enough in other people's holy books but it's a bit much hearing it coming out of the radio unchallenged. The Pharisees are the people who formed my religion. Some of them were horribly martyred because they tried to keep the religion alive in oppressive times.

On the other hand there are advantages from being a minority. As with Christmas, the annoyance with Easter must surely be that most people's practice of it are wrong in an annoying way. The general cultural encouragement to gobble chocolate during Lent and Advent must be irritating to those who observe these times as penitential times. The way popular culture treats both festival as ending on it's first day rather than acknowledging the days of feasting involved in each one. It's probably much more annoying to be surrounded by people who are getting your festival wrong than by people who just don't know that your festival exists.

When I was chatting to Alec last night he told me about what he'd been up to that day, most of which had been spent preparing for a youth group he's leading this evening. he took a long time preparing it because he hasn't met this youth group before and because he was given a topic rather than a Bible verse. His topic is freedom and he's going to be studying the song of Zechariah, prophesies about what the messiah would be like and Paul's explanation of what the messiah was. Part of the song of Zechariah talks about being able to serve G@d without fear so Alec was looking through examples of people who were in some way not respectable who approached Jesus i.e. the Samaritan woman. One of the people he was looking at was the centurion who asked for healing for his son/slave/servant/friend/lover (isn't Greek a wonderfully ambiguous language).

This lead Alec into reading lots of online exegesis claiming that this story said showed the Jesus didn't think gay sex was wrong. There seem to be a number of problems with this exegesis:

1) It's not clear from the text that the centurion is actually in a gay relationship. The word used to describe their relationship could mean servant or slave or friend. It could mean boyfriend but it could not.

2) Even if the sick man were the in a sexual relationship with the centurion what does Jesus healing him show? That Jesus thought people shouldn't be excluded from medical care because they've had gay sex? I hope even the most conservative of Christians would agree with this. The Gospels describe Jesus healing lots of people, all of whom were sinners. This doesn't imply that he tacitly approved of all of their sins.

I think this points to a wider problem with a lot of Christian and Jewish justifications for why gay sex is allowed even though the Bible might seem to say that it isn't. I have heard several of these explanations put forward again and again:

1) Before {pick date of your choice between 0CE and today} there were no consensual, mutual homosexual relationships. All homosexual relationships in that time were abusive and about domination so when the Bible says 'don't lie with a man' it means 'don't have an abusive relationship with a man'.

There a couple of problems with this. Firstly, what evidence is there that mutual consensual gay relationships were invented at {insert date here}. Call me a hopeless romantic but I think it's quite likely that there have been consensual mutual gay relationships since time immemorial. Just look at the story of David and Jonathan. You can't have them as the poster boys of 'G@d loves gays' and then claim that Paul disapproved of gay sex because it was always abusive. Secondly, what about heterosexual relationships? Surely they have always been far more likely than gay relationships to be abusive because the scriptures were written in patriarchal and sexist societies. If G@d was so concerned about power imbalances, why prohibit gay sex but not heterosexual sex? Surely that's the wrong way around unless we're willing to say that the Bible is pretty much saying it's OK to rape women but not men because women are in some way second class citizens.

2) When the piece of scripture was written, gay prostitution was a really common way of worshipping the pagan gods so when it says 'don't lie with a man' it means 'don't engage in elaborate idolatrous rituals that just happen to involve ritualistic gay sex'.

This seems to be a slightly better line of attack. There are quite a few Torah prohibitions which seem to possibly be trying to prevent practices associated with idolatry, e.g. cooking a kid goat in it's mothers milk, marking the skin with tattoos or scars. However, even if we think that's might be the root of them, most Jews err on the safe side and still don't get tattoos or boils kid goats in their mother's milk because there may be other reasons for these commands that still hold today, such as compassion for animals and acknowledgment that one's body belongs to G@d. This line of attack works better for Christians who quite happily pick and choose which bits of the Torah apply to them and which don't. A greater problem is again, is there any evidence that big gay orgies were a regular part of religious practice in Ancient Egypt or Palestine. I have heard this claim again and again from religious liberals but never from and Egyptologist. Surely if you discovered evidence of the big gay orgy cult you'd be write some nice salacious popular history books about it and definitely get a Channel 4 documentary with tasteful, not at all for titillation, reconstructions of said gay orgies.

3) If we love each other and it doesn't hurt anyone else then it must be good.

I know I'm on slippery ground with this one as I'm dating someone my co-religionists would definitely say I shouldn't be in a relationship with and it would be quite easy to interpret Paul to say that Alec shouldn't be dating me. However, let's just look at the logical consequences of this idea. There are an awful lot of prohibited sexual relationships in Judaism some of which are retained by Christianity. Under the 'mutual love is enough' argument we would allow: cohenim marrying converts and divorcees, mumzirim marrying non-mumzer Jews by birth, marrying out, and incest. Depending upon what stream you're in you might be OK with some of those relationships but I've yet to hear a liberal Christian or Jew advocate tolerance of incest. If 'love is enough' what argument is there against incest that doesn't amount to 'urgh, it's just wrong innit' or depend upon eugenic arguments.

I'm not saying that I think gay sex is wrong. I'm saying could we please come up with some better justifications that aren't full of more holes than a swiss cheese.