Thoughts> Secular win for human rights

Yesterday in the UK we had a piece of the most important and positive news in a long time. The government completely overrode any exemptions for religious institutions from the gay adoption law. Whereas gay rights in general are an important human rights issue, this decision reflects something more important - a perfectly secular, political decision behind a public service.

The Church reacted defensively yet honestly. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of Catholics in England and Wales, said:

We are, of course, deeply disappointed that no exemption will be granted to our agencies on the grounds of widely held religious conviction and conscience.

And this really boils it down. We are refusing to make exemptions based on beliefs. This sets an excellent precedent for many questions around religious behaviour and displays in the public space, especially publicly funded institutions (recently in the UK, schools and public transport have been sources of rows over religious insignia). The precedent is important because this is a country with a state church, and because recently especially the Conservatives have raised the failure of multiculturalism as the main reason behind alienation and radicalization of minorities - especially muslim communities.

In yesterday's Breakfast show on BBC, David Cameron stated that in the UK, we should stop treating people as members of a certain group, and instead start treating them as individuals. It would be impossible for a part of the country to be under Sharia law and part under English law - we have one law, "and we all must obey", Cameron finished.

That's all very well, as long as that one law is a secular, impartial set of rules, and slowly but surely, that's how it's being interpreted. In my view, disregard and even moderate civilized intolerance for religion - any and all religion equally - is welcome. Intolerance based on race, nationality, gender, or sexual preference is unacceptable and barbaric. The difference here is, of course, that the former is an imaginary grounds for discrimination, whereas the latter ones are real (though still of course unacceptable) grounds for discrimination.

Words> Partial reading list for my RTW trip

The below list of 10 books includes classics most of which I've never read. They should be easy enough to get my hands on anywhere where books in English are sold (airports will be a good place to turn over the 2-book library I aim to carry). I may grab Silmarillion first, just to be on the safe side. I know it's not exactly a top 100-novel, but I want to catch up on my Middle-Earth lore. And Shantaram just intrigues me, being a travel story.

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
E. M. Foster: A Passage to India
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer
J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch
J.R.R. Tolkien: Silmarillion
Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram

log> moblog test

Seeing if I can make this mobile blogging thing work.

EDIT: nope, didn't work completely, Blogger doesn't like attached images. And the Blogger Mobile failed too. Hmm. I really close to switching over to TypePad again...