pope gone homo
finally, finally, catholic world youth day week fiasco (deceptively marketed as world youth day) is behind us. all that is left is a few stray red orange yellow backpacks wandering around and a general sense of trauma. and, hopefully, a precedent for ridiculous laws to be challenged, and some atheist pride.
i didn’t really do much about the organising. i went to the meetings at newq, but i didn’t put my hand up for much, and i didn’t go to many meetings at other venues, including the important one, that happened to be on my birthday. the group i started so recently went on without me. i keep feeling like i should be apologising, but in fact it’s a spectacularly good thing, that i kick started something that is able to run without me.
i also didn’t get to most of the events i wanted to, even when it was no longer illegal to be ‘irritating’, and i stopped hiding under the bed waiting for it to all go away. i missed the world truth day event, world heathens day at unsw, the welcome, the kiss-in, and even the heretics’ bbq that sydney atheists put on right at the end. the time got changed a couple of hours beforehand, so i drove in early to check for people wandering around lost, but both gates were blocked off, so i wandered off to meet alex and we went and sat in a park in newtown. when the new time came and we tried to go back, there were roadblocks everywhere and we ended up going in circles. i got summoned by sms so we tried again, and it was even worse – half a dozen road blocks, with a river of pilgrims passing in front. some you could pass, if you waited, but you would always find another.
the one event i did get to, though, was the big protest on saturday. that was good. queer people and atheists, and queer atheists, which is a beautiful sight to see. and some who weren’t queer or atheist – the friendly catholics, the raelians (yes i know they call themselves atheist), the polish news team with their wyd lanyards flying agressively. standing around at taylor square went on for long enough to chat to most people i knew, and marching to the park felt positive and strong. not so being let into the enclosure, ringed with police, chanting across the barriers at the tide of pilgrims swarming down the mardi gras route. just wrong, really. we were using old forms of showing our displeasure, with watered down, ‘friendly’ messages. the tshirts may say pope go homo, but the message of the day was exhorting them to protect themselves. i don’t think many of them would care, even if they could hear and understand what we were chanting for all of a few seconds as they walked by our contained protest. mostly, from what i saw, we were laughed at and blessed, which was very unpleasant, as we watched in horror as the hordes just kept coming. if anyone was looking for a show of strength, i was certainly reminded of the way the world works. despite a respectable turnout, as protests these days go, they outnumbered us, by probably a thousand times. they also out-niced us, as wishy washy as our vocal messages were. of course, that’s not quite such a reflection of their church. still, there was one incident, to keep it lively; a pilgrim managed to jump the fence, get past the cops and take a swing at one of us. and for the first time ever, the police defended us, and took him away in handcuffs. handcuffs that he held up in victory, but handcuffs nonetheless. the police in this country have been helpful when i’ve been broken into or had my bag stolen, but not so great when i’ve been assaulted or crashed into. i have had them be sometimes friendly, sometimes incredibly abusive on the road, and when i’ve exercised that old democratic right to protest, i’ve seen them range from officious to menacing to planting a horse’s hoof five centimetres from my face. so sometimes it’s nice to see them doing their job, and think that maybe here, unlike many places, i won’t be dangerously discriminated against for being an out atheist.
run for the hills
when people don’t understand why i hate the whole christmas period so violently, i explain patiently how i was brought up jewish, where christmas is a symbol of the persecuting and evangelising dominant other, and how i’m an atheist, which makes christmas also a symbol of the irrational and brainwashed dominant other. then they say, wide eyed, ‘but christmas isn’t about christianity any more, it’s about family and presents’, and expect me to find christmas as a symbol of the conservative and wasteful dominant other to be comforting and cheerful.
stock up on anything you’ll need from the shopping centres. november is coming.
atheism: just not ‘cool’ enough today?
i was listening to a panel of speakers the other day at camp betty. it was called Barbarism Begins at Home, and whilst many interesting things were mentioned, and important issues raised, i found myself increasingly irritated by so many people’s lack of ability to talk about racism without making more generalisations. i think this is not a minor consideration, but a fundamental problem in how we deal with such issues.
unfortunately, due to the necessity of warmer clothing and my reliance on others in finding my way around, i couldn’t stay for the questions. on the way home, however, i thought more about another issue that had upset me. like the generalisations, i had sat there feeling irritated, but also feeling that i didn’t have the right to be. when i talked to others though, it came out as something important.
the second issue was with the very final statement of (i believe) Hegemony, Homonormativity and the ‘War on Terror’, which my memory has paraphrased as ‘maybe religious belief is the most radical thing left’.
i’ve heard this before. i’ve muttered about its obvious flaws of logic before. i’ve been scared that people actually seem to believe it before. there are some religious people you just can’t argue with, but when lefties and nonbelievers start saying things like this and expecting it to aid anti racism or religious tolerance, i start to get very uncomfortable.
i have two serious problems with this argument, as i have heard it previously. i wouldn’t want to make too many assumptions about this particular speaker, when i didn’t get to discuss it with him personally. the first problem is the smug belief of many people living within the bubble, that if something is not common within our little radical community, that actually makes it extra radical. i had trouble being accepted in the queer community when i had long hair. that is a serious problem, but it does not make my hair radical, even though hair does have the potential to be a radical issue. i felt marginalised when i lived in epping and nobody would come and visit, or help our campaigns at macquare because they said they needed a passport to get there, though i made the journey several times a week. maybe perservering with the losing battle at club mac could have been seen as radical; suburban living was just depressing. unusual does not mean radical, and we really don’t have enough hegemony to make something radical just because of its position within the bubble, when it is actually boringly common in the outside world.
i can understand that someone with a serious religious belief may also have difficulty fitting into the queer radical bubble of which i have become so fond since moving to newtown and achieving hair that gives out fewer wrong signals to this particular community. i sympathise, especially when that religion is one like islam, which is marginalised most places around here, not just in the queer community. though i’d like to think we’re better than some as we keep ourselves aware of the issues, there are certainly still many problems around inclusiveness which we need to keep dealing with. a difference, or a person, doesn’t need to be radical to deserve respect.
on to the second objection: i don’t want to rehash arguments against religion – there are many places you can read them, especially now we’re in a nice little nonbelief publishing boom. yes, religion tends to be heirarchical, patriarchal, warmongering, unprovable, incredible. what i want to know is why, when everyone knows these things, does noone stand up for atheism?
any left wing person, nonbelievers and religious people alike, can criticise the church. hillsong, opus dei, the mormons, jehovah’s witnesses, scientologists, catholics, anglicans, whichever form of orthodoxy they’ve even heard of. christian union, evangelical union, student life, css. the one one their neighbour adheres to, the one they were brought up with, the one they attend every week. the pope, pell, jensen, the archbishop of nigeria, fred nile, catholic labor parliamentarians, the liberals’ prayer group. conservatism, evangelicalism, evangelism, views on women, reproductive rights, discrimination loopholes, tax breaks. islam is a little tricky with all those issues relating to racism and imperialism, but we’re getting there now that spokespeople have been saying unfortunate things. in australia, judaism is fair game in some contexts, though in europe thoughtful people treat it just as carefully as islam.
why, then, don’t we stand up about our own fundamental beliefs about the world? there are stacks of atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers, skeptics, rationalists, dissenters, deists, unitarians, pastafarians who profess to believe in the flying spaghetti monster, devotees of the invisible pink unicorn, adherents to jedi, even pagans, wiccans and satanists. almost anyone who identifies as any of these is a nonbeliever, or at least friendly.
phew! the rest of the argument needs more composition – not an easy question. watch out for the rest of the post!
