One man in a shed
The Times and The Guardian have finally cottoned on to the fact that the Jerry Springer: the Opera tour is back on. 21 out of the 28 theatres originally slated have stepped in with an offer of £125,000 towards the marketing costs, and the tour begins on Jan 23rd.
Stewart Lee suggested that Christian voice was no more than “one man in a shed”. Green, as usual, refused to say how many were in his organisation.
It is a crazy fringe group which lists on its website which police forces have gays in them […] It discredits itself by its own rhetoric. Since Mary Whitehouse died there is a space and it has been filled by Stephen Green.
John Beyer won’t be pleased to hear about that.
It is true, however, that CV gets media attention disproportionate to its size. This is partly because it was wrongly credited with organising the 60,000 pre-broadcast complaints to the BBC about JS:TO. In fact, an anonymous email circular, which Green admits was nothing to do with him, and a campaign by Premier Christian Radio, were far more influential. Christian Voice only became linked to the campaign because they put the producers’ names and addresses on their website. Green, of course, saw no reason to disabuse the media of their misconceived perception of his great power. In fact, he seemed to believe it himself when he threatened the cancer charity, allegedly telling them that CV had 50,000 supporters.
Speaking to The Times, Green once again refused to put a figure on CV’s
membership, and promised to hold vigils outside theatres.
I think that disparaging and humiliating our God and our Saviour on stage in Britain brings judgment on us all. […] There are some choices that we are not morally equipped to make.
In Stephen Green’s case, that last statement is certainly true.
UPDATE: You can hear Stephen Green avoiding the death-threats question on R4 today.
The Listen Again link is broken Monitor – there’s an extra break tag in it from somewhere.
Thanks, Andy. Fixed now.
Even if Christian Voice were one man with or without a shed, Christian Voice is only one of numerous bodies opposed to JSTO. For example, I would be surprised to meet a single one of the black Christians who make up 51% of London churchgoers who were not opposed to it. Surely SL must know that there are plenty others opposed to it – so how is his point relevant?
Even if your stat is accurate, how does this have any bearing on wether the show should be shown?
“You should not be allowed to see it, because it offends us, even though most of us haven’t actually seen it”.
“. For example, I would be surprised to meet a single one of the black Christians who make up 51% of London churchgoers who were not opposed to it.”
Ah, I’ve got a church-full of these brain-dead just round the corner.
They have united three whole roads of people, who have not spoken to each other for years.
United in blind rage, in wishing that the stupid bastards will F838k off to Arizona (Where their white boss – who takes all their money – comes from) ….
I think Stewart Lee hasn’t thought this ‘one man in his shed’ thing through…
If he is in his shed, then that’d expose his computer to an unnecessarily great risk of being stolen, and he’d have to run power lines and modem cables down to the shed too.
He’s probably in his mum’s back bedroom.
…
Christopher, saying that because black christians in london (bcil) are opposed to something that makes it bad is treading on thin ice there.
After all, how did Victora Climbie die, but at the hands of the aforementioned, who thought she was posessed by the devil, and whose priest encouraged this. And she’s not the only child who’s been tortured by bcil. You really should choose more carefully who you choose as argument backups.
Even if they do agree with Green, we don’t hear of UCKG press releases campaigning obsessively against this do we? Green is just one obsessive man, who probably has a psychiatric disorder and who certainly should get out more.
Of course, what you say about bcil is true. But bcil are such a vast body that one can no more generalise about them (on the basis of the behaviour of some minority) than one can generalise about (for example) white male city workers in their twenties.
And let’s now forget that the BBC’s automated system counted (I suspect thousands of) emails in favour of JS:TO as complaints…1
What is the basis of your suspicions that 1000s were in favour, Will?
And so the reason you did exactly that in post #3 was…?
christopher – one can happily generalise about white male city workers in their twenties.
there’s a good reason why ‘merchant banker’ is cockney rhyming slang for wanker
Hi Andy-
Because Ive yet to find one counter-example, even though I rub shoulders with hundreds of them every week.
Hi Tom-
Happily: yes. Accurately: no.
Reminds me of 1987-8 when Derek Pringle was picked for the World Cup team and his county captain assured us he would be a banker with bat and ball. A few disastrous performances later, the penny suddenly dropped: ‘Are you sure he said ”banker”?’
arf!
Of course, there are some generalisation that are usually accurate of any group, eg bcil being superstitious and lower case c conservative and white male city workers being greedy and upper case c conservative, but that’s all by the by.
I agree with that. I always wonder how black Christians vote -being so conservative yet so unConservative. Mostly I think they don’t vote at all! They show very little interest in politics whatsoever in my experience.
When I’m on the bus that goes by or just walking past a UCKG or similar church at kicking out time, it seems that most of the congregation have very strong west african accents and are thus probably fairly recently(ish) arrived 1st generation immigrants and are unlikely to have the vote anyway.
If they did, you can bet there’d be a whole load of craven politicians pandering to them the same way they do to the (again small c conservative) muslim community and the way that the c of e does to west africans and middle americans and their virulent homophobia, leading to the ludicrous positions they take on the gays.
Gosh! I always thought the C of E was about as unAmerican as one could get – Ive never noticed them pandering to Americans. Plenty of black and pentecostal churches,however, give disproportionate authority to rich American writers and preachers.
When I used the phrase c of e, I was talking about the anglican synod (I think it’s called, the head of which is the archbishop of canterbury), and the way the had to stop canon (geoffrey johns?) becoming bishop of oxford because he was gay and they were concerned that black african churches would split, thus losing them flock; and also about the gay weddings and ordinations going on in some parts of the USA and the concern the anglicans have over that and the potential split with middle-american churches shoot off and taking their cash with them.
As I understood it, that was a large part of their concern, although I could be mistaken. They could just be homophobic but afraid to express it vehemently because they’re cowards, rather than just greedy for money and power.
One thing I do know about the C of E – any generalisation will be wrong, because they are by definition maximally diverse – to the extent of being incompatible.
How is the cofe by definition maximally diverse?
I’d’ve thought that a church (so they all believe in god, well, not necessarily the vicars, but probably the congregation) of england (so they all originate or reside in a defined area) was rather minimally diverse, since they all think the same way about something they consider to be very important in their life and and all come from the same general area.
Eclectic link dump #14
Stephen Green – the self-proclaimed ‘National Director’ of Christian Voice (i.e. one man in a shed with maybe a thousand newsletter subscribers) was on Question Time last night. He said many ridiculous things but, most importantly of all, he establis…
If you compare political parties: the C of E would take great pride in including members from right across the ‘political’ spectrum. The term ‘Anglican’ refers to an international not national body. But even the ‘Church of England’ is diverse ethnically.