So the Bishop gets of for actually hurting somebody’s life and the three foul mouthed, aggressive Muslims go to gaol despite the fact that they just shouted nasty things and offended everyone. Shouldn’t the bishop go to prison and the Muslims just be told off for abusing other people’s sensibilities?
Public service dilemma of conscience versus bigotry
Simon Fanshawe
Wednesday February 21, 2007
Guardian
My friend Brendan is a doctor, and a Catholic. I have another friend, also a Catholic, called Seamus, who is an adoption social worker in a Catholic agency. They have both been wrestling with their consciences in the past few weeks.
The NHS grants Brendan an exemption from performing abortions on the basis of his beliefs. And all three of us think that is absolutely right. On the other hand, the government has denied Catholic agencies an exemption from providing adoption services to gay couples. And we all think that’s right too. So when is conscience really conscience, and when is it just cover for bigotry?
Ian Fife is 62 and always wears a small sailing cap. It started, he says, because his girlfriend likes to sunbathe and, since he’s pretty thin on top, he was getting burned. He is a property journalist for South Africa’s Financial Mail, and one of the sharpest and most interesting property developers in South Africa.
His chosen area to acquire buildings is a district called Hillbrow, which sits above the city centre of Johannesburg. Nowadays it is almost always described in the news as “the drugs and crime capital of the city.” In the 50s and 60s, however, it was the most bohemian area in the country and the site of South Africa’s first gay bar.
Leroy is 19. He told me his story at a conference I was chairing about community conflict. After the opening, the delegates all went off to yak about the policy in hand and I went to meet four young people I was going to interview in the plenary about actually living the issue.
Good manners have become unfashionable. It’s thought authoritarian to point out that someone’s behaviour is bad, that there is a right and a wrong way to do things. Being called judgmental is an accusation. There were good reasons for this. Many of us used to be judged by who we were, not how we behaved.
But in the last century, we saw an explosion of personal freedom, which enriched our lives beyond measure. However, we have come to value individual freedom far above the collective good. As a result, we are in danger of having no manners at all.
Alan Ayckbourn was explaining how his plays become hits to a man who runs amusement arcade slot machines in Scarborough . First, they’re tried out in the resort’s theatre, next they transfer to the West End, “then, if I’m lucky, they go to America or Holland or wherever. And each place they go, I get paid.”
There is something intimidating about Stephen Sondheim. It’s not him. It’s his reputation. “Possibly the greatest lyricist ever,” says Cameron Mackintosh, who made his first real money in the theatre from the 1976 revue, Side By Side By Sondheim, and who produced the London revival of Follies in 1987. “For me there is no other,” enthuses the actress Julia McKenzie, his most brilliant interpreter in Britain. “But when I meet him, often my syntax breaks down.” Frank Rich, known as “The Butcher of Broadway” during his 14-year tenure as the New York Times theatre critic, and by no means a consistent admirer of Sondheim, wrote “he has changed the texture of the musical as radically as Oscar Hammerstein, and may yet leave our theatre profoundly altered”. What goes before Sondheim is an extraordinary string of shows, in particular those from the 70s - Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd.
This column is usually about other people. But this time, as the tag line for the worst of the Jaws sequels said, “it’s personal”. In this season of Gay Prides, I have been trying to work out how gay I am. And, at this time of year, Brighton, as you can imagine, is in full pink swing.
The other night I went to see a friend in the local Gay Men’s Chorus. On the way, a remark popped into my head. A rather patrician American grandmother of a friend of mine once saw an ad in a magazine that her grandson had shown her for a “gay yachting club”. She said, with more innocence than tartness: “Why can’t they just go yachting with everyone else?”
Normally, this column is about an individual. This week, it’s about a doorbell. And a gym and a bus. To tell the story, we have to go back to 1975, when the IRA bombed the Caterham Arms on the southern boundary of Croydon. Up to that point, the nearby army barracks had been as much a community facility as a military establishment. There had been a swimming pool and a cricket green, and the locals had had open access. But after the IRA attack the barracks were closed, and the Grenadier Guards finally left in 1995. Three years later, Linden Homes bought the site, and formed a partnership with the Guinness Trust.
Local interest was pretty high, so a planning weekend was organised in February 1998 to ask the people what they wanted on the site. By then the barracks had been sealed for years behind an eight-foot fence - and who wouldn’t be curious to have a look at the site again? So over 1,000 people showed up. It had already become clear that the original brief was unrealistic unless more houses were built. The community concurred. Within two days the architects were able to produce a masterplan based on their ideas. Linden and Guinness would build almost 350 houses and also shops, kids’ facilities, a restored cricket green and pavilion, and a restaurant.
This piece is full of prejudices and preconceptions - mostly mine. I first saw Charly in a photo, standing next to a policeman and an 80-year-old woman on an estate in Brighton. Nothing unusual in that, except that Charly’s hair overflows with multicoloured extensions that look like paper chains for school Christmas decorations, she has an Indian symbol on her forehead, a ring tattooed on her finger and a couple of other new-agey ones on her arms, turquoise eyeliner, and a rainbow explosion of beads around her wrist.
Frankly, she looks more like a Traveller than the chair of the local community safety action team. My prejudice. But she is the chair. And crime in her area - with the help of the “fantastic” police working with residents and others in the community, such as the youth action team - has fallen by 30% in four years, car crime by 50%, and burglaries by 40%. Oh, and they’ve banned swearing in public on the estate, too.