Rowan Atkinson is right that laughing at religion is our right — we’ve fought for it
ROWAN ATKINSON is absolutely right.
He is right that we must be free to make fun of religion.
He is right that freedom of speech must include the liberty to laugh at religious ideas.
And he is right that Boris Johnson should not apologise for his risqué comments about the burka and niqab.
“All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them,” the actor said. And, again, he’s right.
The Blackadder star’s intervention into burkagate, into the furious controversy over Boris’s mick-take of the burka, is a breath of fresh air.
It came in a letter to The Times. Breaking with the choking PC consensus that says Boris comments on the niqab and burka were tantamount to a speech crime, Rowan said that they were actually pretty funny.
In his newspaper column last week, Boris said it would be wrong for the Government to ban the niqab or burqa in public places.
But we should feel free, he said, to express disapproval of these “oppressive” cloaks, of these medieval, women-hiding veils. And then he did just that, in typically colourful Boris-speak.
“It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes,” he wrote.
It is not good if young women turn up to Uni “looking like a bank robber”, he said.
The result? All hell broke loose.
Boris was branded a bigot, an Islamophobe, a borderline fascist. Twitter went into nuclear meltdown. The commentariat fumed.
There was even a protest in Boris’s constituency of Uxbridge, where a gaggle of Muslims and lefties gathered to holler for his sacking.
Calling for someone to be expelled from public life because he criticised a religious practice? Remind me again what century this is.
I guess we should be grateful no one has proposed putting Boris in the stocks and pelting him with rotten fruit for his blasphemy against Islam. Well, not yet.
Before long, even his own Conservative Party was calling on him to issue a public retraction — like those heretics of old who were made to self-flagellate in public for their thought crimes against religious orthodoxy.
His words “clearly caused offence”, said Theresa May.
This is no doubt bound up with Tory infighting over Brexit.
The Prime Minister is still peeved at Boris over his resignation as Foreign Secretary after she unveiled her softer-than-soft Brexit proposals last month.
But the Tory fury with Boris, alongside the Boris-mauling Twitterstorm, also tells us something important about the state of freedom of speech. It reveals how flimsy the establishment’s commitment to this essential liberty is.
Indeed, the witch-hunting of Boris is far more shrill and intolerant than anything he actually said.
In his column, Boris actually defended Muslim women’s rights.
He said that however much we might dislike the niqab or burka, we should not ban women from wearing them. He made a liberal argument.
His detractors, in contrast, are the definition of illiberal. They want Boris shamed and sacked on the basis that he committed an act of “wrong-think”.
The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as someone who is “intolerant to those holding different opinions”.
That is a better description of the anti-Boris mob than it is of the man himself. This Boris-bashing bigotry confirms that the chattering classes have turned their backs on free speech — especially when it comes to Islam.
The use of the term “Islamophobia” to demonise any criticism of Islamic beliefs, and the shushing of open debate even about Islamist terrorism or Muslim grooming gangs, suggests Islam is increasingly being ring-fenced from questioning.
We are witnessing the return of blasphemy law by the back door, only now it protects Islam rather than Christianity.
Into this fray, brilliantly, comes Rowan. He might be best known for playing dweebs — Mr Bean, Johnny English — but we now know he is brave.
To defend the politician after a week of Borisphobia — we can all play the “phobia” game! — took real guts.
And, of course, he is not only defending Boris — he is defending freedom of speech.
For years he has been raising concerns about how new laws against offensive speech could make comedy impossible.
And as a “lifelong beneficiary of the freedom to make jokes”, as he described himself in his Times letter yesterday, he finds that scary. As we all should.
This Boris-bashing bigotry confirms that the chattering classes have turned their backs on free speech — especially when it comes to Islam
Our ancestors fought for press freedom, political freedom and, yes, the right to blaspheme and disbelieve in gods and prophets.
It is a freedom expressed by Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and Irish comic Dave Allen’s routines mocking the church.
We cannot now cast these historic liberties aside in the name of never causing offence to Muslims, or any other social group.
So thank you, Mr Atkinson, for standing up for free speech and its naughty offspring — the right to be offensive.
Lessons on gender for 5-yr-olds is textbook PC
CAN you think of anything dafter to say to a five-year-old than: “Your gender is what you decide”?
The Scottish government is planning to educate primary-school kids about gender diversity.
Teachers will tell pupils the doctor who said “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” when they were born might have been wrong because, sometimes, people decide later in life that they were born the wrong sex.
Children think in binary terms. Mother/father. Girl/boy. Pink/blue.
That is how they make sense of an otherwise confusing world.
Sometimes political correctness is just cruel.
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- Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked Online.