Quote:
Originally Posted by Mirabell
I see. Well, not that I would have expected anything better from you, Mister...
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I have to agree, Mirabell.
What seems extraordinary (or perhaps not) is that Eric appears to think that he knows better about such matter than those people who are directly concerned.
It is very easy to see certain groups as more dangerous than others – and therefore to ignore some. Which is dangerous itself.
My personal opinion is that
all these groups are dangerous – and Christian fundamentalism is growing, not reducing. In particular, Christian Voice has been increasingly successful in not only getting attention, but in having an impact. It's being joined by various other groups – particularly from the evangelical churches. I'm slightly involved in a situation in the north west of England where a large evangelical church is putting out feelers to the council about getting a local bookshop closed down, because it's all 'New Age'/witchcraft stuff. They're dotty people who run it (I've met many of them), with dotty beliefs. But a shop selling rather well-made cake and decent coffee, plus crystals and stuff, is no threat to anyone (for information, I'm helping to advise them on how to use local media if and when the church in question takes things further).
What we have is an increase in the idea that people have a right not to be offended.
There's a history of it in the UK that goes back (at least that I am aware of) to the early 1960s, when Mary Whitehouse launched herself onto the scene as a self-appointed guardian of public 'morality'. Although she's subsequently been viewed as someone who was obsessed with getting sex and violence off our screen (and creating the coupling of those two words, 'sex' and 'violence' in the public mind), she started her campaigning purely on a matter of hearing an opinion voiced that she disagreed with. It was a late-night BBC2 discussion programme, where Dr Alex Comfort, the author of
The Joy of Sex, was being interviewed. In the interview he stated his opinion that "adultery has kept the institution of marriage going". Next day, Whitehouse started her campaign.
Censorship is not only about avoiding the propagation of views that one doesn't like – but also about imposing views that one does agree with. In the UK, this has grown in the last decade or so from beyond Whitehouse and her campaign (which could so easily have been dismissed in the way that Eric does – and has been) to see increasing numbers of other groups taking on things that they don't like.
Anyway, on the subject of censorship (and rather than start a new thread), I have just heard (from the owner of my local, independent bookshop) that, last month,
Iain Sinclair was banned from talking about a book at Hackney Library, because he'd dared to pen "an off-message piece on the [2012] Olympics".
But ultimately – and here is an interesting question for discussion, I think: does anyone have a right
not to be offended?