Equal rites, or just marital madness?

Thank goodness for Brenda Cannell – the only MHK with the gumption to ask an obvious question. i.e. ‘Why SHOULD the clergy's right to refuse to perform a marriage ceremony for a transsexual be enshrined in law?’
Sadly, she doesn’t appear to have actually asked it during the Keys debate. Even sadder, her colleagues wasted time with far dumber questions. See http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Clergy39s-rights-over-transsexual-weddings.5015015.jp for more.
For example, Geoff Corkish, the duly elected timewaster for Douglas West, who asked: 'Given that a member of the clergy cannot be compelled to conduct a marriage service where at least one partner has changed sex, if the person concerned withholds that and you can be fined £5,000 for making an un-authorised disclosure, doesn't this constitute a fine for telling the truth?'
Geoff, I know you used to do PR for the Steam Packet, so you have all the intellectual capacity of a short plank, but the answer is ‘No, it’s still illegal, even for an over-privileged, cross-dressing, superstitious windbag’.
Furthermore, the very purpose of the bill is to ensure the basic human rights of transsexuals, including the right to marry, therefore a transsexual has no need to give ammunition to a certified bigot, and it is none of said certified bigot’s damn business anyway.
Got that?
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why any sane person chooses a church marriage.
Think about it – if you were signing the contract to buy your home and the advocate started talking to an imaginary friend, what would you do? Even amongst Manx advocates (some of whom are demonstrably unbalanced and only in practice because of family ties), such behaviour will get you a stay in a nice room with padded walls.
Yet we think nothing of it when (sometimes not even with a shotgun pointed by an angry father) adult couples legally commit themselves to a lifetime together at a ceremony overseen only by a bloke who asks them to make their pledge using a fictional character as their witness.
If you think there’s equality before the law in the Isle of Man, let’s test it.
Try getting married here by a bloke dressed as a white rabbit, using Winnie the Pooh as your witness.

Ken Knowles, ODC

I was sorry to learn that my fellow local Amnesty campaigner, Ken Knowles, had died recently.
Ken was one of the last of the island’s most endangered species, the Ordinary Decent Christian. A retired schoolmaster from Ireland, he was one of the little band around a local liberal clergyman who started the Manx Amnesty group, and who is himself no longer around. They saw absolutely no contradiction between vigorous human rights campaigning and their faith, so it might be inevitable that they found themselves in the minority in their churches while able to work comfortably with non-Christians who are simply unwelcome elsewhere in what passes for charitable activity on the island.
As Ken’s health deteriorated he offered to host the Amnesty meetings at his house to stay in touch, and when a ‘proper’ venue opened we saw less of him. I didn’t find out he’d also lost his sight until he rang out of the blue after I’d had an item in the paper supporting another good friend - Pat Kneen, the Manx assisted suicide campaigner. Ken was irate about the local church attitude to the issue, in particular the way in which four leading churchmen took it upon themselves to put the church ‘view’ to government without ever seeking it from their congregations, and had even dictated a letter to the papers by phone.
He was amongst those who left their regular churches at the time, distressed by the lack of discussion and kneejerk attitudes. I’m not sure he ever found another church community, which was heartbreaking for him but a greater loss to local churches. They lost a thoughtful, sincere man who simply could not be silent about human misery.
But the discourtesy of his fellow-believers did nothing to diminish Ken’s faith, and I also remember him disagreeing sharply in print with my fellow Freethinker Andrew Dixon’s quip about ‘bronze age belief systems’.
A lesson for us all locally here. This isn’t the UK, and you can’t cut yourself or others off because you disagree with their views on one topic. The churches do it all the time, then wonder why they’re dying or why the voluntary sector whose policies they insist on dictating is a sick mess. But then some of my Freethinker mates won’t work with ‘people of faith’ either, unable to see that some people just cannot frame their view of humanity except through a prism of faith.
Folk like Ken and I just plodded on, looking for a middle way on the things that matter most to us, agreeing to disagree on other topics and moving on.
I could take a dim view of the island, having witnessed the public treatment of either of my late friends, Ken Knowles and Pat Kneen. I think I’d rather take something positive from having known two remarkable men in a small community in a few years. That either of them were able to speak up, and that neither of them were broken by the bigotry or apathy that surrounded them.
I think I’ll take an example from that.

Our Father, bang bang..... Amen

We shouldn’t laugh, really, we shouldn’t, but I defy anyone to read a tale of Californian faith-centred lunacy picked up by the sharp-eyed Feòrag over at Pagan Prattle.
In brief, a guy walks into a notorious evangelical ‘Cathedral’ in California while visitors are being told about the church’s ‘excellent’ suicide-prevention program. He hands a note to an usher, walks up to the cross……then shoots himself.
The bit I love in the report is that when church helpers heard the gun go off, they thought nothing of it, thinking he was just praying.
Worshippers pray with handguns in California? How scary is that!!
Turns out that it isn’t the first suicide by shooting in the church either. No wonder they have a suicide-prevention program – just a pity it doesn’t go beyond praying and collecting cash.
To be honest, even if I was faith-inclined, I think I’d also be a little wary of a ‘family-oriented’ church in California where one of the staff is called Manson. That really WAS a case of the family that slays together staying together, as I recall.
You can read all about it at http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/19/america/Crystal-Cathedral-Shooting.php ......and I do defy you not to snigger!

Open and shut case

My joy today on reading the beginning of an article suggesting the island’s only purpose-built, professional drug & alcohol rehabilitation facility might finally open properly (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im:80/news/BUDGET-Drug-and-alcohol-unit.4989065.jp)
didn’t last long.
Because as the next to last sentence reveals, it ISN’T opening.
And as the last sentence reveals, when or if it does it isn’t going to be staffed by professionals either, because the whole operation is being put out to private tender. No prizes for guessing who’ll snap that up then.
Incidentally, ‘recruitment constraint’ is a bit of a misnomer too.
The DHSS were told two years ago by the tiny team of medics who try to keep a service running exactly what the going rate is for professionals already trained and living here. But the DHSS doesn’t want to pay. Similarly when a year ago the professionals provided their services to a private contractor on a DHSS contract, that contractor wouldn’t pay either. That’s why the trained professionals are still working in semi-skilled jobs instead.

The mugs don't work

Our Department of Education now seems determined to help fundamentalists feed off parents, not just small kids. Unsurprisingly, they don’t really admit that in their press release. See http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/parentstoreceive.xml for more details.
It’s also worth pointing out that Carolyn Shipstone cannot be a national representative for Care for the Family, firstly because it isn’t even a Manx charity, secondly because it uses separate England & Wales, Scottish and Northern Irish registered charities to hide the true chain of command and flow in and out of funds.
CftF often issue vague and misleading statements which ignore the very existence of this ‘family’ – odd for a ‘family values’ group, I always say. But then, if one of your branches used to be close to a pro-life group whose founder (a convicted terrorist also with recent firearms offences to his name) went on the run after a fire in a family planning clinic you wouldn’t mention that either.
Just as you only find out from the English charity register that one of the English branch’s trustees is also a trustee for CARE (Christian Action, Research & Education), one of the most rabidly homophobic and in fact generally misanthropic bunch of social inadequates ever thrown up by British evangelism.
As I’ve hinted before, (e.g. How To Win Government Friends And Screw Up Kids ) the whole sad and sorry saga of how such a freakshow ever got a foothold on the island goes back a few years.
As I said then, I don’t even expect my seven year old to take losers like that seriously, and having seen both the fundamentalist 'drug projects' operating on the island in action I assure you that their combined ‘expertise’ could safely fit on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for….a one word blunt appraisal of the main product.
If any parent is dumb enough to take up this kind ‘offer’ you really do need professional help, but then so do most government ‘experts’ trying to drum an inferiority complex into local parents. Whatever you do, stop worrying about your kids and start laughing at these self-seeking panic merchants instead.
Honestly, mugs…they’re just not worth it.

Death on Wheels

On Friday I had another startling insight into the bats-in-the-belfry mentality of local voluntary groups.
The insight came from an unlikely source.
I sit on an ethics committee charged with formulating hospital policy in the event of pandemic flu. It’s unusual in my experience of government advisory committees, in that it’s formed by dedicated professionals who seek only to do what is best for the public. There are no chancers from pseudo-charities seeking grants, no stooges of other government committees to force pre-arranged agendas, and no civil servants pushing us towards the rubber-stamping of government apathy.
We discuss scenarios put to us by health professionals as a means to set ethical policies. These deal with the most appalling moral decisions they may have to take in an emergency.
It is frightening stuff, and some of it gives me nightmares for days afterwards. But I am impressed by the dispassionate yet considerate way in which my colleagues listen carefully, comment frankly, and do their level best to reach conclusions which could help doctors, nurses and administrators take life or death decisions.
Then sometimes there’s a lighter moment. For example a colleague who told us about a curious request at a sub-committee to co-ordinate health and voluntary workers in emergencies.
For some peculiar reason, and against all prior evidence, the government (like other parties to the plans who are yet to look at actual evidence) is obsessed with the idea that the public will riot in emergencies and mob rule will prevail. Perhaps this might explain why one of the local twin set and pearls brigade wanted to know, in all seriousness, if meals on wheels drivers could be armed in emergencies.
I have this surreal vision of a meals on wheels van careering through, say, Onchan, at top speed. Wing-Commander Cholmondely-Barking, DFC and bar, sits white-knuckled at the wheel, cornering on two wheels, while in a roof gun-turret Mrs Constantine Effingham-Smyth, OBE, blazes away with both barrels at a horde of zombie chavs.
Only in the Isle of Man could someone at a government consultation group hold such whacked out views about the majority population. More worrying, only in the Isle of Man could they be taken seriously by politicians.

De-bag the rotters

You may have heard about the Pink Knicker protest planned for Valentine’s Day in India.
It’s a witty and apt reply to a nasty bit of sexist violence.
Briefly, a Hindi Nationalist outfit called Sri Ram Sena (Lord Ram’s Army), attacked young women last month in a pub in Mangalore, a college town in the southern state of Karnataka. The bigots thought that women in a pub was just ‘un-Indian’. Apparently Valentine’s Day gets their undies in an uproar too. Strange people.
A lively bunch of Indian ladies who call themselves the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women are hitting back. Via a Facebook site, now over 10,000 strong , they’ve vowed to send pink knickers to members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the biggest and oldest group in the Hindu nationalist movement, which includes the SRS and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.
This is because RSS members are nicknamed ‘chaddi wallahs’ for their habit of poncing about in baggy khaki shorts. Old viewers of Goodness Gracious Me will recall that ‘chaddi’ (or ‘chuddies’) is Anglo-Indian slang for ‘underpants’. You can read more about the campaign at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5702370.ece or http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7880377.stm (which also has footage of the SRS in action).
I couldn’t help thinking of Roderick Spode, the would-be fascist dictator who is a bane of Bertie Wooster’s life in P.G. Wodehouse’s books. Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley, leads the Black Shorts (in real life Mosley led the Blackshirts).
There’s another curious coincidence with the SRS case. Spode’s downfall is rapid when it becomes known that he made his fortune as "founder and proprietor of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs", the fictitious Ms. Soeurs being a designer of ladies' lingerie. Finally it is revealed that Spode IS ‘Eulalie Soeurs’.
In a memorable passage, Bertie Wooster tells Spode: ‘The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"’
Quite!