Religious Hatred Bill – bad for Asians
Sunny Hundal, editor of Asians in Media, writes about the effects of the proposed Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill.
Bad for writers:
If the Behzti controversy were to happen tomorrow then the legal eagles could launch a series of lawsuits that would keep the producers in court for months, even years. Who will have the stomach to fund even a slightly controversial play or a book in the future then?
The government claims it is unlikely there will be many prosecutions under the new law. Clearly they don’t know the Asian community well.
Bad for women:
Writer and activist Rahila Gupta recently pointed out that it will have an impact on women and “weaken” their position.
“When minorities ditch race for religion as a marker of their identity, the pressures on women increase a hundredfold. A ‘cultural’ practice is difficult enough to challenge but one which has been given the dubious honour of being ratified by a holy book, open as that may be to interpretation, is even harder to resist,” she said.
Bad for the Asian community:
Labour’s myopia results partly from its habit of allying closely with Asian religious organisations that it seems to believe represent the views of most of the Asian community and will deliver the ethnic vote.
Once the true implications become clear however, it will not only have lost that support, but possibly caused plenty of damage to our voices.
Sunny has written before about the competition between religious groups for the title “Most sensitive to criticism” in an article well worth revisiting.
That’s right.
Remember, particularly where the religion is “submission” – Women are inferior to men and subject to their orders (it says)
And so, for that matter are non-submitters.
In other words, if you are a submitting male, everyone else is inferior to you, and your holy book, the recital, says so.
Now, I think this might be a cause for prosecution under the religious hatred law, don’t you?
Erm, err, …….
I believe it is called the law of unintended consequences!
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