Category: Moral Policing

Fools Rush In – The Papal Faux Pas

Please note, before you read further, that I do not have any religious affiliations. Nor do I have anything against any religious establishment or personality. (My religion is the business of me and my God.) This post deals with an idea, not a person. A certain religious personality is recurrently mentioned in this post. I respect that person for all that he is.

If you are an ardent Roman Catholic or very fervently hate condoms, do not read further. Don’t blame me later: you’ve been warned.

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What do you do when you have a problem?

If you were a simple, normal and sensible human being, you would analyse the situation, find out what caused the problem, and then try and fix it. If the problem involves other human beings, you would try to think like them, so you could have in perspective everyone involved. And if you still couldn’t find a solution, you would submit the problem to someone better equipped than you are – resource-wise, knowledge-wise and intellect-wise. If you were a simple, normal and sensible human being.

When some people bypass all these steps in problem-solving and jump to conclusions on an issue they hardly understand, the results are often amusing. Sometimes, sometimes, they are outrageous. A recent remark made by the Pope has evoked a similar response from me and my friends. And I realised reading the papers today that we were not the only ones.

Pope Benedict XVI said in front of the international Media and an aghast medical community that condoms are useless in the battle against AIDS in Africa – they’re not weapons, but may actually aggravate the problem.

I say, respected Sir, what are your references? Have you published any research papers to this effect, or read any? If you think the solution to this problem is imparting a spiritual education to people and asking them not to be promiscuous, what is your experience in this field, and what is its success rate? If you start a campaign now around Africa on this mission of shoving spirituality down the throats of millions of people, would you guarantee the eradication of the virus in say, fifteen years? Do you have any experience in Sociology that prompted you to make a remark such as you did? What do you know about the habits and lives of millions of Africans living in conditions hardly imaginable for a majority of the world’s population?

If you indeed have an idea better than what the rest of the world thinks, can you devise a workable plan involving the required personnel, counsellors, etc, fund it, and prove to the world that you are right?

The distribution and use of condoms has proven to be effective in combating the spread of the AIDS pandemic, however slowly. Thousands of healthcare personnel are spending their lives in this endeavour. An irresponsible statement made by someone who wields immense power over the thought processes of millions of people worldwide can jeopardise the whole process.

We are not fools, Your Holiness. Please do not pull an issue too far. If you don’t like condoms, please don’t use them. But please don’t say they don’t work. You don’t have the knowledge or the experience. You don’t have the right. To solve a problem of global proportions, you need to have these. And if you say that what you have against a deadly, constantly mutating immunosuppressive virus is just a few magic words – well, thank you very much – we have the condom.

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I don’t have an email address for hate mail. Do pour it all in the Comments.

Moral Policing – Who Will Guard the Guards?

A speech I made recently as part of a debate. Not all my arguments on the topic are here: only those that I could fit into four minutes of speaking.

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I think it was Mark Twain, one of the greatest wits we have ever known, who once said, “Morals are an acquirement – like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis – no man is born with them.”

Honourable chair, respected judges, ladies and gentlemen – Moral Policing and why it is an abominable folly. Why the people who call themselves the guardians, the watchdogs of morality, can never be trusted. This is one of the oldest of philosophical debates with its roots in our very definitions of morality, our perceptions of self. I stand here vehemently opposing moral policing in all its grotesque forms.

Now why do I do that? Let’s talk about the origin of moral policing. To explain it very crisply, here’s a simple flowchart:

1. Someone thought there were absolute rights and wrongs that apply to all human beings in general – all human beings who have ever existed. This is a flawed philosophy.

2. The same someone thought, because they were absolute, the rights and wrongs can be actually, practically, imposed on their fellow human beings. This is flawed morality.

3. To prevent people from falling away from these principles, they thought they could use instruments of fear, of emotional, religious blackmail. Hence moral policing.

Ladies and gentlemen, absolute rights and wrongs? Slavery, war crimes, suttee by widows – regular practices in one age condemned vociferously in the next. Values change, my friends. And morality – true morality – is something that resides in the deepest reaches of a person’s heart and soul that it cannot be reached, let alone be guarded, by anyone else.

In the past, all people who assumed responsibilities of moral policing had their own glaring fallacies. We all know what happened to the Christian Church just before the Reformation, what happened to the Taliban.

And where do people who assume guardianship find themselves today? In the most ludicrous of all positions – burning Valentines’ cards, prohibiting casual clothes, and taking to task actors who say that consenting adults having sex is their own business. By far, ladies and gentlemen, the moral nadir of the moral police in all history.

Whether a girl wears full length clothes or casual wear is her own business – what she derives from her own principles and choices. The way I choose to love someone who also loves me, is my business. And for that matter, whom I love, a boy or a girl, and whether I sleep with him or her – now that’s the height of it! Whether I kiss her in a park, give her a card or even a car, is nobody’s concern either.

Directives forcing people to stick to one set of clothing styles, prohibiting them from dancing together in hotels – what, marriage next? – and banning bar dancers, these are the acts of the worst of a generation who feel threatened by cultural variation and assume it their responsibility to bring things back to cultural antiquity.

All such regimes are marked by persecution. There’s always been a master morality and a slave morality. Where do these police get their ideas from? Wherefrom their principles and ideologies? What happens to people who don’t accept them – who happen to be a majority?

This is where the police go wrong. They are based on a conceited presumption that one human being can decide and dictate terms to another human being as to how to live their life and what to do with it. Because values change – one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

And, if there is a Heaven and there is a God, then on the day I stand up to answer his questions, not one human being is going to hold my hand and feed me words – my morality and my reasons are my own.

KISHORE KUMAR