Purity rings and vicious circles
The price of liberty isn’t just eternal vigilance. It’s also not minding being wrong-footed.
Getting 16-year-old Linda Playfoot to take her school to court for not letting her wear a “purity ring” to classes was as clever a way of wrong-footing liberal folk as I’ve seen. Strict adherence to school uniforms is the sort of thing religious schools are famous for. A liberal is far more likely to want to allow a child to wear what he or she wishes than is an evangelical Christian. So a case was designed to make us look like the persecutors, trampling on the right of the young to proclaim their faith.
You could argue – I do argue – that schools shouldn’t ban jewellery. School uniforms, almost extinct in the seventies, have made an unwelcome comeback in the era of Thatcher and Blair, just as faith schools have also increased their influence. So when my children went to school, my son’s teachers sometimes seemed to have little better to do than write me long letters about the length of his hair (it was too short, just as mine, forty years ago, was too long.) My daughter once refused to wear a coat to school on a freezing December day, because the only one we could find was dark blue and she knew she would get into trouble because it wasn’t black.
I’d like to free teachers from the task of policing their pupils’ apparel, so they could get on with teaching. But that’s not what those manipulating Ms Playfoot want. They positively like policing apparel. They just want to police everyone else’s. They’d be the first to insist on the banning of other people’s jewellery. They want their ring to be the only one allowed. And if that leads anywhere, it leads to people being forced to wear the purity ring.
Getting 16-year-old Linda Playfoot to take her school to court for not letting her wear a “purity ring” to classes was as clever a way of wrong-footing liberal folk as I’ve seen. Strict adherence to school uniforms is the sort of thing religious schools are famous for. A liberal is far more likely to want to allow a child to wear what he or she wishes than is an evangelical Christian. So a case was designed to make us look like the persecutors, trampling on the right of the young to proclaim their faith.
You could argue – I do argue – that schools shouldn’t ban jewellery. School uniforms, almost extinct in the seventies, have made an unwelcome comeback in the era of Thatcher and Blair, just as faith schools have also increased their influence. So when my children went to school, my son’s teachers sometimes seemed to have little better to do than write me long letters about the length of his hair (it was too short, just as mine, forty years ago, was too long.) My daughter once refused to wear a coat to school on a freezing December day, because the only one we could find was dark blue and she knew she would get into trouble because it wasn’t black.
I’d like to free teachers from the task of policing their pupils’ apparel, so they could get on with teaching. But that’s not what those manipulating Ms Playfoot want. They positively like policing apparel. They just want to police everyone else’s. They’d be the first to insist on the banning of other people’s jewellery. They want their ring to be the only one allowed. And if that leads anywhere, it leads to people being forced to wear the purity ring.
posted by Francis Beckett at
12:43 AM
1 Comments:
IS this a case with parallels in the whole religious / school uniform / family values debate that is poisoning relations between the Judaeo-Christian version of civilisation and the Islamic? Purity rings, veils, burqahs, to cut or not cut hair as a Sikh or Amish, female circumcision,arranged marriages, honour killings - they all have roots in one culture that grate or worse in another. Had a debate today with some intelligent - but too conservative for you Francis - friends, and the general thesis ended up in agreement that the breakdown of the liberal concensus in Western Europe is opening the way to a clash between resurgent right wing western nationalism and proseletysing eastern cultures. The centre ground prefers to hope that the problem will disappear with immigrant absorption, but ignores the fact that until recently immigants had to integrate, for lack of access to any other culture - whereas today an immigrant can maintain his roots with his own country and customs and have no need to integrate. In many of the lands that maintain influence of their diaspora the cultural influences are increasingly anti-Western, but the liberal concensus has no commensurate means of marshalling its own resources to create even a debate - let alone plan - about what is or is not anappropriate response to the changing nature of the political agenda of cross-cultural migration. Philip
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