Apathy Sketchpad

This has been kicking around my drafts folder for ages. Not sure why I never posted it, but here it is now anyway.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

This is what happens when you treat all ideas equally rather that arbitrarily calling some of them ‘religion’ and pretending that makes them better:

Lillian Ladele ruling is overturned on appeal

Threatening to fire a homophobic registrar who asked to be exempt from registering homosexual civil partnerships was not an act of discrimination by Islington Council, a court has decided. The ruling, published today by the Employment Appeal Tribunal, overturns a previous decision that found in favour of Miss Lillian Ladele. Miss Ladele intends to appeal today’s ruling to the Court of Appeal.

Lawyers acting for Miss Ladele say she was shunned by colleagues who mounted a witch hunt against her because of her homophobic beliefs on marriage. The original tribunal accepted the claims, but today that decision has been reversed by the EAT, chaired by its President, Mr Justice Elias. The EAT did accept that Islington had acted in an improper, unreasonable and extraordinary manner (paragraphs 62 and 77 of the judgment) but ruled it did not amount to discrimination.

The ruling

The ruling states: “The council were not taking disciplinary action against Ms Ladele for holding her prejudices; they did so because she was refusing to carry out civil partnership ceremonies and this involved discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. The council were entitled to take the view that they were not willing to connive in that practice by relieving Ms Ladele of these duties, notwithstanding that her refusal was the result of her strong and genuinely held homophobic prejudice. The council were entitled to take the view that this would be inconsistent with their strong commitment to the principles of non-discrimination and would send the wrong message to staff and service users. There were clearly some unsatisfactory features about the way the council handled this matter. The claimant’s prejudice was strong and genuine and not all of management treated it with the sensitivity which they might have done.”

Squeezing Christians

The case was backed financially by The Bigotry Institute. Colin Hart, its Director, said: “Gay rights are not the only rights. If this decision is allowed to stand it will help squeeze out homophobes from the public sphere because of their prejudices.”

Councillor John Gilbert, Executive Member for Human Resources at Islington Council, said: “The council is extremely pleased with this decision which it believes to be the right one.”

In order to keep an eye on things, I keep the news feed of the Christian Institute in my Google Reader subscription list. They’re normally surprisingly even-handed, reporting on news events relevant to Christians (assuming that Christians mostly hate the gays) in a relatively impartial way. For example, their coverage of the £35,000 grant given to the British Humanist Association was far less insane than the Telegragh’s. But today I think they must have got bored of that or just snapped or something because this ‘report’ is at best thinly veiled propaganda.

Elderly Christian woman surrounded by gay mob

I’m pretty sure that was a ‘mob’ of liberals of all sexualities, albeit angry shouting ones.

An angry crowd of pro ‘gay marriage’ protestors surrounded and frightened an elderly Christian woman in Palm Springs, California – live on TV. The group was protesting against the democratic result of a state-wide vote which defended the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.

I love that last sentence. It’s the poorest attempt I’ve seen in a long time to appear balanced. It opens with an implication that anyone who opposes gay marriage also opposes democracy and then lurches straight into abusing the word ‘defended’ where clearly the right word to use is ‘amended’. And to top it all off, it’s not democratic, because the whole point of the system of democracy used in California is that the people can’t simply enforce any random prejudice they like just by voting for it — that’s why there’s a constitution in the first place, and it’s why there are strict procedures that have to be followed in order to amend it, which in this case were completely ignored.

The incident, which occurred earlier this month, was sparked when a pro ‘gay marriage’ protestor attacked a styrofoam cross being carried by 69-year-old Phyllis Burgess. The cross was yanked from her hands and stamped on, leaving it in tatters on the floor.

Poor styrofoam cross.

Angry protestors surrounded the elderly lady, shouting abuse within inches of her face.

Yes, well, I’m not going to condone that, but if you are going to tell someone they can’t get married for a really stupid reason and then turn up at their protest with a massive foam symbol of that really stupid reason, how do you think they are going to react?

Really, the Christian Institute has no business even reporting this story. It’s about an event that happened 5000 miles away, and it’s not as if it’s representative of a wider problem facing Christians: it’s not really persecution if you deliberately walk into a large group of people who are understandably very, very angry at you for taking away their basic rights and hard-won equality because you think that the made-up opinions of an invisible wizard who lives in the sky are more important. And I notice she escaped entirely unharmed.

Palm Springs Police Department spokesman, Sergeant Mitch Spike, told American news network, FOX News, that no arrests had yet been made. ”The investigation is proceeding as it should,” Sgt. Spike said. Asked if the charges could be elevated to include hate crime penalties, he told FOX News: “That’s a possibility. That’s one of the things we’re looking at.”

From this we can conclude that despite having a clearly demonic name, Mitch Spike is a devout Christian. We know this because only a Christian could ever think that shouting at someone for hating gay people could possibly be construed as a ‘hate crime’.

The incident is the latest in a spate of disorderly protests by supporters of ‘gay marriage’.

Nice inverted commas there. I don’t even know why it’s such a big deal. It doesn’t remotely affect Christians, except for some gay ones who it actively benefits. It’s not as if the churches will be expected to conduct or recognise these marriages: it’s an entirely secular, legal contract. It has nothing to do with the wholly separate religious ceremony also called marriage. The tax status of homosexuals surely can’t be an issue to Christians? Aside from anything else, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the sex that they object to. Hint to crazy Christians: it’s only you that abstains from sex until marriage. Irreligious folk and most of the less crazy religious ones don’t bother with all that stuff.

The protestors are angered at losing a vote on the definition of marriage, known as ‘proposition 8′.

“Angered at losing”. Nice. Classy. Certainly that’s the only possible reason for them to be upset. It’s not as if they’re being treated like second-class citizens or anything.

American religious liberty legal group, the Alliance Defense Fund, has released a YouTube video giving a flavour of the protestors behaviour during the past month.

…which you have uncritically reproduced even though it’s utterly moronic. Seriously, it plays threatening music the whole time and ends in the phrase “whose rights are really being violated?” as if that’s an argument for their side. And for the record, the Alliance Defense Fund are not a “religious liberty legal group”, they’re a bunch of bigoted Christian thugs.

Come on. This isn’t good enough. When you report news like this you become part of the problem.