Distractions

This began life as a comment at Barb's Gift Of Gab. It kinda grew, though, beyond the sort of word-length considered normal for comments. So I put it here, instead.

So, your company is polluting the planet. How can you defend that? You can't.

Your company is using sweat-shop labour. How can you defend that? You can't.

Your company is dodging taxes to the tune of millions or billions of dollars per year. How can you defend that? You can't.

Your company contributed, directly or indirectly, to the current financial crisis by dodgy dealing and fostering an attitude of 'To hell with the consequences, as long as we make a buck.' How can you defend that? You can't.

So what do you do? Do you, perhaps, admit your "mistakes" and buckle down to correct them? Don't be silly. Maybe you publicly deny them, but quietly work to correct them, in hopes that no one will notice? Well, maybe, but you'll still lose make less money, so on consideration … nah.

What you do is you complain loudly that the market is magically self-correcting, and that government interference is 'meddling,' using provocative terms like 'big government' and 'nanny state' to demonise any attempt to correct the consequences of your selfishness.

But even that isn't enough. The average voter might just look behind the curtain and spot your hypocrisy for what it is. No, what you need is a distraction. So you look for something that unites as many voters as possible—the things they cherish most dearly and will fight most strongly to protect, if told they're under attack. So wheel out those old favourites; religion and family.

It doesn't matter if the attack is real, just as long as enough voters can be persuaded that it's real. And that's where religion serves a second purpose. Not only can you portray it as being under attack, but it already provides a great mechanism for making people believe without evidence—faith. Get the pastors, the imams, the gurus, the priests and the vicars on your side, and you're home free. No one asks a vicar whether what he says is true. No one asks a pastor for evidence. If the man in the pulpit says it's so, then it's so. No argument, no discussion.

Now we need some causes, some means of persuading them that family and religious values are being attacked. Again, there's a good stock of causes ready to go, which have always produced controversy in the more conservative religious quarters. You just need to get the pulpits on-side and turn them from minor talking-points into major issues.

Abortion. That's always a good one. Even defenders of the right to abortion don't claim that it's a great thing. The best thing maybe, in some circumstances, but never a nice decision to have to make, or an easy one. And boy, is it emotive. To people with a black 'n' white, good or bad, view of the world—most of whom will be sitting right there in the pews—if it can't be shown to be one hundred percent good, then it must be one hundred percent bad. End of discussion.

But women who've had abortions are often in difficult circumstances. It may be easy to demonise them en masse, but many people will be unhappy with doing so on a more personal level. In short, they don't provide easy scapegoats. And anyway, all too many religious people have had abortions, or have a family member who has. It's good, yes. It's emotive, yes, but ideally we want that scapegoat.

And that's where the LGBT community enter the picture.

Women's rights have been advancing for over a century now, and much of the major work has been done. That's not to say there isn't more to do, but things like voting, equal pay for equal work, the rights to divorce and protection from abuse and the like are—in principal if not always in practice—ensconced in our culture. Gay rights, on the other hand, are a relatively new phenomenon in public discourse and the public mind. Within living memory, being homosexual was an offence under law. The 'common-wisdom' of even fairly liberal people of the generation before mine was a grudging tolerance at best, in that (and I personally remember this being said) "they'd be okay, I suppose, if they'd only leave young boys alone." Gay people may have—again, in principal, though not always in practice—most of the same rights and protections under the law that heterosexuals enjoy, but culturally, they still have a long way to go before their sexuality is seen as not being any more worthy of comment than their hair-colour, say; especially with the more conservative types, and especially with the more conservative religious types.

Which is a long-winded way of saying 'easy target.' Or 'ready-made scapegoat.'

Those who are culturally conservative see family as Mum, Dad and the kids. Those who are religiously conservative can be easily persuaded that this is backed up by a few scriptural passages, with the added bonus that there's a few other passages which actually speak against a 'man lying with another man,' which makes subjects like same-sex marriage easy to portray as direct attacks on religion. Add to that the strong religious prudery surrounding sex, and gay people can be easily portrayed as being licentious, ungodly sinners. To people to whom "they'd be okay, I suppose, if they'd only leave young boys alone" still sounds like way-out sexual anarchy, who believe fervently that they have the right to judge others on matters of personal 'morality,' who believe just as fervently that their way is the right way for all to live, and who are already at least half-open to the idea that 'right-thinking' should be forced on those who disagree, the portrayal of teh gheys as licentious, immoral, amoral, Hell-bound sinners, out to enforce their licentious behaviour on everybody, is a simple matter. They already see their way of life as something they should have the right to force on others; it's easy to imagine that LGBT people think the same about theirs.

When emotions get strong enough, often as not, logic goes out the window. It doesn't have to make sense. One proposition doesn't have to follow logically from its predecessors. It merely has to be emotive enough to the conservative mind to act as a convenient distraction—something to shift attention away from immoral, and often illegal, corporate practices. And if the preacher, the pastor, the priest, the imam or the vicar says it, who are the congregation to argue?

And the best thing, the cream on the top of the whole rotten edifice of deceit, is that once it's become a religious cause célèbre, it will snowball without further input from you, bar allowing air-time and column-inches to your mouthpieces and the injection of a little cash here and there.

In short, the LGBT community, pro-choicers and the religious are all being cynically used, with no thought to consequences, by rich people who fervently wish to keep the spotlight on anyone but themselves, who don't give a flying fuck about 'traditional families' or human rights. The only thing they see as holy is the dollar bill.

Which isn't to say I have much sympathy for the religious. They have a choice to not let the pastor do their thinking for them; to look behind the curtains of Wall Street and see it as the thieves' paradise that it is; to imagine the world through the eyes of the people they'd gladly persecute; to really read their Bibles and Qur'ans and see them for the mess of outdated, contradictory, morally bankrupt claptrap that they are. No, my sympathy, as always, is with the oppressed and the persecuted.
—Daz

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
—Seneca

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
—Robert A. Heinlein