SDG here making a rare foray from occasional-blogger semi-retirement spurred by a recent screening of V for Vendetta, scripted by the Wachowski brothers from a graphic novel by Alan Moore.
The scene: In the English-speaking West, a happy couple sits at home, minding their own business. Suddenly, jack-booted Lifestyle Police swoop in and arrest first one, then the other.
Q: Who are these people and what is their offense?
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Conservative homeschooling parents guilty of withdrawing their children from mandatory kindergarten sex ed and diversity training about different kinds of families.
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Lesbians guilty of violating the religious lifestyle laws of the fascist conservative Christian theocracy.
If the question is which of these two scenarios represents a more reality-based fictionalization or projection of actual current trends in the English-speaking West or anywhere in Europe, it seems to me that the obvious answer is A. Every so often I get a bulletin from the Homeschool Legal Defense Association detailing incidents from around the country of government harrassment of homeschooling parents. If there’s a GLBT Legal Defense Association dedicated to combatting government harrassment of that constituency, I’ve not heard of it.
But of course it’s scenario B that we find in V for Vendetta, which imagines a world in which homosexuals are actively hunted down, owning a Koran is a capital offense, the media is a mouthpiece of the conservative government (!), high-powered Catholic bishops conspire with the government and have kinky sex with child prostitutes, and razing the bastions of Western civilization (e.g., blowing up the English Parliament building) is a moral victory.
Alan Moore, the writer of the original story, has taken his name off the film, which he claims the Wachowskis have turned from an ambiguous story of anarchy vs. fascism into an allegory of the American Right (Evil) vs. the American Left (Good).
In principle, I suppose that Moore, who considers himself an anarchist, would be equally against any form of coercive, overbearing government intrusion into people’s lives, beliefs and expression, whether liberal or conservative (though this is just a guess and I could be wrong).
As Moore complains, though, the film turns the story into a parable of the American left (good) vs. the American right (bad), completely blowing over the facts that [a] both sides are capable of intrusive oppression of dissenters, and [b] right now, in spite of certain conservative trends in recent years, it still looks like being conservative is more likely to get you in trouble in one way or another than being liberal — at least, in the English-speaking West as well as throughout Europe.
At least, that’s how it seems to me, although I tend to be pretty isolated from political issues (which is one reason I avoided reviewing most of last year’s crop of politically themed films, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, Munich, The Constant Gardener, etc.).
I seem to recall hearing about, e.g., Catholic leaders in Canada running afoul of the law over the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. It also seems to be that while university professors are typically free to advocate the most radical and extreme leftist points of view, there have been a number of incidents in universities in which individual professors or other faculty members have been internally persecuted and forced to apologize or resign over expressing politically incorrect views.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: Earlier this week, apparently, the Netherlands instituted a "tolerance test" for would-be immigrants that requires applicants to buy and watch a video that includes footage of two men kissing in a park and a topless woman bather, in order to ensure that they’re all right with such behavior before the Netherlands will accept them.
On closer examination, it turns out that this law seems specifically targeted at conservative Muslims, since there are apparently generous exceptions to the requirement for Americans and Australians as well as citizens of EU members, making the Middle East the obvious target of the law. But this merely illustrates that discrimination against Muslims is not the province of the conservative Christian right; here are ultra-liberal, anything-goes secular lefties doing this very thing. But of course that’s a provocative nuance you would hardly expect to find in an ideologically oriented Hollywood film.
Anyway, I’m writing my review tonight, and would like to be able to cite a few well-chosen specifics on the subject of liberal/secularist government/institutional opposition to, harrassment or punishment of, or otherwise discrimination against conservative/religious individuals, values, expressions, etc. So this is ultimately an info-bleg post. Help me out, politics watchers Who’s oppressing who, and how, and where?
