St George’s flag banned but ISIS flag is fine, cops have been accused of double standards for not arresting a man draped in an Isis.
More here..Guardian Report
Does it matter that the Roman Catholics of Europe and north America overwhelmingly reject some of the church’s sexual teaching?
We learned last year that there are still men in the Vatican who don’t think it matters because they haven’t noticed that millions of Catholic disagree with them.
The questionnaire sent out in advance of the synod on the family last year contained some questions that would never have occurred to anyone who had actually talked about these things to a heterosexual lay person at any time during the last 30 years. On the other hand it did contain enough realistic questions for the results to be suppressed by the bishops’ conferences in most countries.
The synod on the family has a clear set of changes to make if it is to deal with the families that actually exist today.
In particular, regular churchgoing Catholics reject the ban on communion for remarried divorcees.
Completely reject the ban on artificial contraception.
And are relaxed about equality for gay people.
This is partly a result of their demographics. Like most Christian groups in the rich world, English Catholics skew old. There are younger ones who see in the teaching about abstinence an exciting and countercultural sign, but the older ones, in whose generation numerous marriages have failed or been built on the ruins of earlier ones, take a more realistic view.
Two recent surveys each of between 300 and 400 committed Catholics, one conducted by the liberal pressure group Acta, the other by an energetic parish in Wolverhampton, show a comprehensive rejection of some aspects of the official doctrine. Of the Wolverhampton parishioners, 80% wanted communion extended to couples who were merely living together, and 90% of them wanted it extended to remarried divorcees (who are of course in official doctrine merely living together as well, not properly married at all).
When it came to gay people, similar majorities wanted gay people in relationships to receive communion, and while only a third of them wanted the church to recognise gay marriage, it was only another third of them who were clear it should not.
A clear majority favoured the recognition of civil partnerships.
This is a long way from the “intrinsic moral evil” which Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI thought to detect in homosexuality.
It is much closer to Pope Francis’s celebrated question “who am I to judge?”
Similar figures came out of the Acta survey.
So it looks as if the synod on the family, when it resumes this autumn, has a clear set of changes to make if it is to deal with the families that actually exist in the world today.
You can also read Pope Francis as being very sympathetic to that programme. Yet things are not so simple.
There is a substantial bloc of clerical resistance to any change. Even in this country 500 priests signed a petition urging the church not to change its teaching on the matter – a far higher proportion of conservatives than you would find in the laity. The higher up the church you go, the greater the desire to hold the traditional line.
It is clear that any open change in doctrine would provoke a ferocious row and possibly a formal schism.
At the same time, any failure to change the practice could have almost equally disastrous effects.
The ban on artificial contraception no longer matters since all the evidence both of surveys and of relative population sizes shows that Catholics simply ignore it.
But in countries with high rates of divorce and remarriage, like those of western Europe, the ban on remarried couples taking communion does alienate large numbers of the laity.
In this country it is largely circumvented – when it seems right to the priest – by the argument that refusing a couple at the communion rails would cause a scandal much more damaging than the original offence.
That judgment is not just casuistry.
Any attempt actually to enforce the official teaching on sex causes real outrage among western Catholics: in April, more than 100 prominent Catholic lay people in San Francisco signed an open letter asking Pope Francis to sack their conservative archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, after he tried to make Catholic schools teach that homosexuality was “a grave evil”. Since the church is financially dependent on lay people, that sort of row cannot, literally, be afforded either.
So it does matter a great deal what ordinary Catholics think of their church’s teachings. But it probably doesn’t matter enough for the doctrines to shift. They will simply lapse, by not being enforced. This will please neither liberals nor conservatives but I don’t see how else a global church can be held together.
Bigrunner - Roman Catholics and Sex.
No it doesn’t matter if everybody rejects the sexual teachings of the church, their role we are told is to teach everybody to plan for the rapture of an afterlife.
Nothing but superstition that they try to impose on everyone.
But it falls short of convincing everyone in a big way, because millions of more enlightened and open minded people reject it.
If the clergy really believed the teachings of their faith then they would in an instant cast off all their fine robes and badges of superiority and get out of their palaces and large government subsidised houses, they would forfeit the luxury of gardeners and chauffeurs and cleaners, they would get themselves onto the streets and into the slum areas and practice what they preach, they would show some humility, live amongst and with the poor, give up the life of privilege, abandon the hypocrisy of their lives and help the downtrodden forgotten and disenfranchised people who are in many cases unable to help themselves.
But it seem the life of the clergy is above all that, they have far more important things to do, like feathering their own nest.
Owen Jones from the Guardian
Our politics are forged by a complex, often contradictory range of factors: the values of our parents, our experiences and ambitions, and our social circles, jobs and circumstances. Our communities too – and that certainly goes for my corner of Stockport, close enough to Edgeley Park to hear the roar of Stockport County on a Saturday afternoon.
Like so much of England, it may as well be a different country to London: friendlier, although more suspicious of difference. My ward was the second poorest in the borough (though before I’m accused of affecting a nonexistent working-class upbringing, my father was a white-collar local authority worker and my mother a university lecturer) – and here, in a community with few immigrants, Ukip – a party that blames low wages and the lack of secure jobs and affordable housing on immigration – came a triumphant second in May’s local election.
Here is a failure of the Left. People want answers to their unaddressed everyday concerns, fears and insecurities: a vacuum has to be filled.
Which brings me to Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership. This quietly spoken man has provoked two main responses.
On the one hand, his increasingly energetic and enthusiastic grassroots campaign has now been endorsed by Unite, the country’s biggest trade union, which organises predominantly private-sector workers. His Labour opponents are genuinely rattled; this is not going according to the script.
From the right, on the other hand, it is all belittlement and ridicule, portraying Corbyn as a guarantor of interminable Tory governments. It is worth responding to this.
The right, in triumphalist mode, is bemused and irritated that the left should even still exist, and will spin anything to its advantage. If Corbyn does badly, it will be taken as evidence that the left is all but extinct; if he does well, it will be evidence that Labour is unelectable.
Politics should, of course, be about policy rather than personality – but that is not the world we live in. There is a long tradition of left figures who are charismatic and deliver rousing speeches but who – like George Galloway – are easily portrayed as demagogic. They can rouse the affections of the already convinced, but few others. When they are the object of personal attacks, they attract little sympathy, and tend to respond in kind.
Corbyn, on the other hand, has a good shot at the title of most self-effacing and humble politician in parliament, and certainly for being the lowest expenses claimer among his colleagues. That helps shield him from the personal attacks that are normally dished out to figureheads of the left. While other leadership candidates compare each other to the Taliban, Corbyn eschews the vitriol that is standard fare in modern politics.
But the test of the Corbyn campaign, for me, is the extent to which it can rebuild a left with popular appeal that offers a coherent, viable, attractive alternative to the status quo. That means winning over some of those who voted Ukip, even some who plumped for the Tories, and certainly those who did not vote or who opted for the Greens or the SNP. Indeed, if Labour is serious about winning in Scotland again, it would have been disastrous to exclude Corbyn. The SNP would relish nothing more than a Labour contest composed of three pro-austerity, pro-Trident candidates, enabling Nicola Sturgeon to convincingly tell ex-Labour voters that there is no place for them in their old party.
While other candidates compare each other to the Taliban, Corbyn eschews the vitriol that is standard in modern politic
It also means popularising marginalised policies and ideas. On issues from the living wage to public ownership, public opinion is on Corbyn’s side. The challenge is to overcome the sense that such policies can never be delivered.
The left will win by building an alliance of low-income and middle-income people: that is, the majority of society. A living wage is good not just for workers but for businesses, with better-off customers, and taxpayers, who will spend less subsidising poverty wages. A homebuilding programme not only reduces the social housing waiting list, it creates skilled jobs and means less public money wasted on private landlords. Policies could promote home ownership without flogging off desperately needed social housing.
Emulating the industrial strategy of Germany would not only create skilled jobs, but a thriving research and development sector for graduates. Public investment banks could support local businesses currently starved of loans. Concerns over immigration could be addressed through an “immigration dividend”: extra public money for services going to communities with higher levels of migrants. Middle-class commuters resent some of the highest rail fares in the western world, and their taxes are splashed out on far higher subsidies than in the days of British Rail. Public ownership – this time democratically involving passengers and workers –would benefit them.
The left is generally portrayed as archaic, infantile or both: a coalition of the naive (if young) or of dinosaurs (if old), with few inspiring ideas relevant to the complexities of life in 2015. The risk is always of playing to these stereotypes, resorting to slogans and defensive postures (“Stop the cuts! Stop privatisation!”), rather than going on the offensive with a compelling alternative.
But – without sounding all New Labour – there is now an opportunity for forward-looking policies that benefit and appeal to working-class and middle-class Britons alike. A rare platform is on offer to the left that confounds expectations by looking modern and dynamic, not trapped in a remote and unfamiliar past.
Corbyn faces incredible odds, and will continue to be belittled or demonised as the occasion suits. But I think back to those people I grew up with. They need hope and better answers than those peddled by a ragtag bunch of rightwing charlatans. Maybe – just maybe – if the left gets its act together, that hope might finally be on offer.
Bigrunner to Owen Jones report
What a mess Labour is in…if Corbyn wins it’s taken as evidence that left is all but extinct, but if he does well Labour is unelectable.
Well nobody really cares about the Labour party anyway, and whoever wins the Labour leader election battle will probably fall at the first sign of any disagreement in policy, there’s a lack of cohesion and credibility.
Labour party MPs are not going to support Jeremy Corbyn, because this man would be in favour of putting the working class and the poor first, and that’s something Labours not done for many years.
