“Management” found a new game at her workplace
on Friday – taunting exiled Scots who, if they had a chance, would
have voted No anyway.
As she so aptly
put it, “I hear Mel Gibson's making a modern sequel to Braveheart
. It's going to be called
Slaveheart.”
Ouch! But couldn't you just predict that, once
finally given a chance, all those Presbyterian dullards would opt for
an English Nanny over free choice and responsibility?
A fear of freedom perhaps? I blame John Knox
myself. Once you've internalised the doctrine of Predetermination,
maybe you can never think and act for yourself.
If you do have enough self-respect to get involved
in a major contemporary political issue, get down to the Manx Legion
Club in Douglas tomorrow night (Monday 22nd) for this (see
http://positiveactiongroup.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=518:pag-public-meeting-disability-and-equality&catid=34:pag-meet
).
Gareth and Paul are two of my favourite Manx human
rights activists. Since coming here just a year or two ago, Gareth
has galvanised the whole local debate over disability and moved it on
decades. As in the UK until the 1990's, it used to be dominated
locally by patronising faith-led “charities” who would do
anything to help the disabled except get off their backs and stop
using them as an excuse for lifetime subsidised employment. Gareth,
by comparison, has a practical grounding in the Disability Rights
Movement, the kind of militant crips who, if you lay in a bath of
baked beans to buy them a wheelchair, would quite rightly smack you
in the mouth instead of thanking you.
Paul has been slogging away for as long as I can
remember on equality issues. He was key to the abolition of the
vacuous Section 38 (the Isle of Man's equivalent of UK section 28,
which prevented schoolteachers assuring kids that there is nothing
abnormal about homosexuality or gay relationships) and to various
moves to abolish institutionalised Manx homophobia in the 21st
century. More quietly, he was the sole advocate prepared to help two
Muslim guys refused bail because they could and would not attend
daily prayer meetings at the island's bail hostel, run by a Christian
charity. The case was also important because the Manx government's
answer to the first local request for asylum was going to be to
quietly ship them back to the UK and pretend the applicants had never
been here, thus ensuring a legal judgement would not be made and a
legal precedent could not be set.
But while Paul and Gareth will raise valuable
issues, this Equality Bill is a much bigger deal and we all need to
be thinking about how it might affect us.
For example, luckily I was married in a civilised
country, and if my daughter ever gets round to being married or
entering a civil partnership I will want the same for her. As long as
a superstitious cross-dresser, calling on his imaginary invisible
friend as witness, is deemed to be a fit person to pronounce her
legally married but a responsible and rational adult is not that
ceremony is unlikely to take place on the Isle of Man. I will advise
her to go to Scotland or the Irish Republic instead.
Similarly, we all have to pop our clogs sometime,
and I would rather my friends do not suffer the indignity of seeing
me off in a room dominated by the amanita muscarita-inspired
ramblings of ancient Middle Eastern goat herders, thank you very
much. Some will say that as I will be dead at the time it does not
matter, but, honestly..... Yuk! I would not EVEN be seen dead in a
drab dump where the furnishings are that tacky, P-U-L-L-E-E-A-S-E!!!!
Maybe we should all get serious...or maybe not.
When even some of my loved ones' jokes bear more serious analysis
than what passes for the serious contemplations of the average Manx
politician it may only be necessary to be awake, laughing and active to
make a difference.
10 years ago
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