'Race' and God people

Not only in Canada institutions of higher learning have long been sensitive to concerns that students, staff or faculty might be subjected to unfair discrimination by virtue of their 'race', sex, sexual orientation and any number of other features. These concerns are well justified. You don't want anyone discriminated against just because they are of a particular skin color, or because they're female, or gay. The only thing that should matter, surely, is whether someone is best qualified for a job.

Of course, as we all know, common sense as this view undoubtedly is, the reality is quite different in many parts of the world. To my biased mind, it's not entirely coincidental that violations of this common sense rule are most frequently committed in developing countries. Also not coincidentally, to my biased mind, these violations seem to occur most likely in countries where religious ideologies are more rather than less influential. No wonder then that Muslims and Christians happily engage in genocidal acts against each other in Nigeria, gay folks are routinely subjected to mob 'justice' in Jamaica, women reportedly lose their lives during pregnancy in Nicaragua because Catholicism reigns supreme in that neck of the woods, and the list goes on and on and on.

Anyhow, I digress, so there's this Ryerson University in Toronto. It duly commissioned its own racism report. True to international form the writers of this report embarrassingly conflate racism (ie someone goes after you because of the color of your skin and other arbitrary ethnicity related features that are beyond your control) and discrimination because of something you choose (in this case your religious ideology). To be clear: I am not suggesting here that it is acceptable to discriminate unfairly against someone because she or he is Muslim, Christian, Jewish or subscribes to any number of other monotheistic ideologies. Quite rightly so, in a free society people are entitled to make those sorts of choices. The nice thing though, is that in a free society (unlike those men's outfits like the Vatican or Iran) people like myself are also entitled to make fun out of folks buying into such religious claptrap. Many religious people and their leaders don't like this bit at all, hence their attempts to get the same types of anti-discrimination protections that people are entitled to because of who they are as opposed to what kind of religious ideology they choose to believe.

It is deeply offensive to conflate in a report on racism racism with discrimination against people who make the choice to believe such stuff, and who then go out of their way to let the world know that they do (eg by putting black cloth over their heads, or wearing any number of religious knickknack around their necks etc). If you belong to an ethnic minority and you have been subjected to racism you will be permanently scarred to some extent or other. You will continuously wonder when the next shoe's gonna drop. Well, compare that to people who choose to wear religious paraphernalia in order to identify themselves as adherents to an ideology they have chosen. Surely this doesn't exactly fall into the same ballpark. Again, my issue is not at all that unfair discrimination against people because of the ideologies they subscribe to is fair game. Quite to the contrary.

Anyhow, back to the racism report at that Ryerson place. Here are some of the highlights that the experts who drafted the document included. Evidence of racism... a student quote:

“I am Muslim, and once I was fasting and there was an exam and I had to do my prayers and I felt like the Professor was not very accommodating, that he/she seemed to make it look like this was something that was my problem and I should just pray after the exam is done and I didn’t feel like that was fair.”

Here then is the difference between racism (eg a professor saying 'you can't attend my seminar because your skin colour is a tad bit too dark'), and the accommodation this student is clamouring for. The student chose to adopt an ideology as her belief system that requires her to stop eating at a certain point in the calendar, and to talk at a certain time to a higher entity that no one has ever demonstrated actually exists. It is clear to me at least that this indeed is the student's problem and not the professor's. Nobody forced her to make the choices she made. The ideology that she chose is her own responsibility, and so is her private matter. It's a bit like me choosing a membership in a political party, the boy scouts, or wherever. In case I wish to attend a party meeting, or go and stuff party political materials into letter boxes I have no reason to assume that my line manager would have to accommodate me. Equally though, as long as I do my job, she has no reason to discriminate against me either. The idea though, that my membership in a voluntary association should kind of trigger a special dispensation - as the Ryerson student seems to think is her God given right - is patently absurd.

Here's another bit from the Ryerson racism report,

Some Muslim students complained about the number of times jokes about sex are used by the instructor and students in class, and how, especially when they seem irrelevant to the subject matter at hand, this makes them extremely uncomfortable. One professor, for example, told a class one day that journalism is all about lots of sex and beer. Another professor who was teaching students how to modulate their voices for radio told the class to pretend they were having sex and to imagine the voice they heard when they experience “pleasure.” Other students joined in and began making “very weird noises,” leaving some students very uncomfortable. They suggested that cultural sensitivity is important in the classroom.

So, the idea here is that as professors we should not talk about sex anymore because it might affect our adult students' sensibilities. I take it, talk of evolution might just have the same effect, so perhaps we should consider dumping that, too. I mention things like abortion in my bioethics classes. Another culturally sensitive issue (and seemingly now a proper topic for a report on racism) obviously. Potentially my Christian students could be upset by what I have to say, or even by some of the language I might choose to describe a few hundred fetal cells (ie the Christian person equivalent). Wow, I can see already that I will find myself quoted in some other insane racism report.

To my surprise the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente truly nailed the Ryerson report in an OpEd. I don't say this lightly. I have cancelled my subscription to the Globe and Mail because too many of its editorial writers (Wente being one of em) are so utterly below grade. Anyhow, to give credit where credit is due, she wrote a brilliant OpEd on this occasion. Here's bits and pieces from her piece:

“I pulled my hair when I saw the coverage,” says Kamal Al-Solaylee, an assistant professor at Ryerson's School of Journalism (and a former Globe theatre critic). “I've never worked in a more accommodating environment in my life.”

Mr. Al-Solaylee is a brown-skinned Muslim who is openly gay. He thinks the entire exercise is a frivolous diversion. “There are things that I need from the university, but this isn't one of them,” he says. “I need computers that don't crash all the time. I want students who don't have to hold bake sales to raise money for their graduate projects. There should be money for these things, not equity officers.”

Sensitivity to perceived discrimination is so acute these days that it can lead to perverse results. One instructor at the University of Toronto was told not to criticize foreign-born students for their poor language skills, even if they were unintelligible. Some aboriginal students say they shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards as everyone else, because they have different ways of knowing. Yet, as Mr. Al-Solaylee sensibly observes, his students will be working in an English-speaking, Eurocentric world. So they might as well get used to it.

The most bizarre revelation can be found in the report's fine print. Among the students, racism and discrimination scarcely register at all. Only 315 students (out of 28,000) bothered to respond to a task force questionnaire. Half the respondents were white, and half non-white. On the question of whether Ryerson treats students fairly regardless of race, the vast majority of both groups – more than 90 per cent – believed it did. Fewer than 30 of the non-white students said they had ever experienced discrimination. That's a 10th of 1 per cent of the student body.

Naturally, the task force has an explanation for this: People are too scared to speak out! That's the great thing about systemic racism. You don't need any evidence. Every negative proves a positive, and the absence of evidence just proves how bad things really are."

Go Margaret go! My qualm about this whole sad saga is not that it's unreasonable to have a conversation about reasonable accommodation of God folks, but please do not permit anyone to confuse this with racism. It's beyond pale, and, frankly, unworthy of a university.

Atheist bioethicists?

As most readers of this blog will know, I am an atheist. I am also a bioethicist (everyone needs a job, so don't hold that one against me), and a journal editor. I came across a semi-interesting blog entry where someone was critical of Russell Blackford and myself for 'coming out' as atheists in our book 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. The gist of the blog entry (written, I hope I'm not getting the minutiae wrong, by a woman who once was a Reverend of sorts and quit her Reverend day job because she realised that the admission of women to Reverend jobs is mistaken) was that it's a bad idea for bioethicists to admit to being non-religious. The reason given was that this would give bioethics a bad name in the USA where people don't like non-religious folks and where many have become suspicious of non-God based bioethicists anyway. My good mate, the creationist Discovery Institutes propaganda chief on bioethics, Wesley J Smith could probably take some credit for this, assuming the empirical claims made are correct to begin with. Of course, our ex-Reverend has no evidence for her claim one way or another. She may or may not be right about US Americans' attitudes to bioethicists. It's probably fair to assume that among conservative religious people like herself that view might be somewhat more prevalent. You know, the types of people who refer to married gay couples as 'family' in inverted commas, who really really really hate hate crimes legislation, and who tend to subscribe to the view that abortion is akin to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

The question though is not unreasonable to ask: Should bioethicists who happen to be non-religious try to hide that view in order to avoid putting off creationists? Or even just putting off people who are vaguely religious? You can also turn that question around and ask whether bioethicists who happen to be religious should try to hide that view in order to placate non-religious people who can't handle any more 'God' business? So, if they submit an article to the journal that I edit, should they hide their views in order to make what they conclude palatable to me?

In Bioethics (one of the journals that I edit), kindly and rightly identified as a leading journal in said critical blog entry, we had articles by openly religious people arguing their case. Even stuff on a thomistic understanding of personhood (ie what someone who believes St Thomas Aquinas is a brilliant guy makes of modern notions of personhood in the context of that thinker's theology). Basically, as a journal editor you try to ensure that you're fair to content submitted to your journal. Surely that wouldn't be achieved by sending a piece that's situated in the context of Catholic moral theology to the atheist Russell Blackford for review. But that's about as far as it goes.

It's unclear though, why I as editor of the journal should not be entitled to hold my own views on the God question and why I should not be permitted to publish those views. Strategic views about the status of bioethics among evangelic Christians in the USA notwithstanding, the objective of any paper surely should be to make the strongest possible argument for one's case. Ideally you'd try to persuade both those who come from an ideological basis similar to yours, as well as those who com an entirely different angle of your views.

So, to sum up: Journal editors are entitled to hold strong views on matters affecting their field. They must not permit those views to prejudice fair process for submitted content that is in conflict with their strongly held opinions. Concerns about how that goes down with a particularly partisan section of the wider public are irrelevant.

Christian weirdos in Kingston

Guess what, I went for a walk with two guys (one gay, one straight) along the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Kingston. Here is how we became victims of a vicious Christian ambush. Three youngish women (perhaps teenagers) surrounded us.

They had been thoroughly trained to identify 'sinners' and make them repent. So, they asked us whether we all believe in God (at which point my slightly smarter and faster German friend quietly disappeared in the direction of the water, aiming to demonstrate that he can walk on the same).

Well, I have lived in anglosaxon countries for a bit too long, so I am a tad bit politer, even when I interact with weirdos. Anyhow, the God gals went over their cue cards and explained to us that God loves us. They knew that they were speaking to gay guys, and we all know what God thinks of gay guys, don't we? Well, God supposedly loves us because God loves all sinners (to be fair, that makes sense to me, because - from what I gather - sinners live kinda more interesting lives then those who manage to live without sin, so why shouldn't God love the more adventurous crowd?). Well, eventually the God girls decided to go for the kill. They realised that probably the self-identified atheist gay guy (your's truly) might run away, screaming in mental anguish. So they resorted to grabbing my friend's and my hand. There we stood in a circle holding hands. (Honestly... I was looking for a hidden camera somewhere as it was all too farcical to be true!) Straight guys would probably have loved that scene, reasonably attractive young women holding hands with two guys they never met before in their whole lives, at the Lake shore, the sun going down, you get the picture. Back to the God squad going for the kill... - One of the girls started reading a kind of confession, and asked God for forgiveness from another one of her cue cards. She asked us every few lines to repeat after her. It was truly hilarious. I duly repeated after her the stuff about sinners and forgiveness and God loving me (I never met God, but they seemed quite certain that God really loves me, so who was I to argue with them???).

So, beware, if you're wandering along Lake Ontario in Kingston, Ontario, and you go peacefully about your business (eg enjoying the tranquility of the lake), there's odd Christian weirdos out there hassling you for no particular reason. They also think it's perfectly appropriate to invade your space and privacy. No big surprise in that, I suppose, seeing that were on a mission. They invited me and my friend to meet the rest of their forgiving crowd during church times. It didn't seem to occur to them that their sanctimonious self-rightous bull*#@# could sensibly be construed as highly offensive by halfway educated people who don't think about sex among consenting adults in terms of sin but in terms of fun. As most selfrighteous people, however, they seemed very comfortable about their own holiness.

Kingston beware! Nobody knows how many of them have been let loose by their local pastor. I think Tourism Kingston ought to warn visitors coming to town that there is Christians out and about that are on a mission. May be some kind of Christians-on-a-mission alert? Telling tourists that there is no need to call the mental health services or the police. These Christians are harmless. They will leave eventually.