Survey: Keep Religion Out of Politics
Declan and I are still looking for a place to sleep (on Thursday night we returned to the porch we have been sleeping in since 3 November 2006 to find an unlocked trellis gate; and on Friday night the gate was locked). Still, a part of me welcomes leaving the porch behind. It shouldn't be difficult: I have been assaulted there three times; and as recently as 2 August I was urinated on. Also, the City of London police have woken us on numerous occasions mainly to put us under pressure to go into a homeless hostel, meaning Declan would have to 'sign on' for benefits, and consequently withdraw his application to the European Court of Human Rights (see blog "A trellis gate is installed in the porch" for Declan's most recent letter to the Registrar of the Court). And when these police visits didn't have the desired effect, a City of London Police 'No sleeping' went up on the back wall of the porch (see blog of 25 June "Police ‘No sleeping’ sign in the porch").
Today, a year ago, Declan submitted his application to the European Court with a request for priority under Rule 41 of the Rules of Court: in a letter of 22 November the Court stated that it was not necessary to consider Declan's first request for priority because it would be examining his application "shortly, possibly by the end of January 2008"; seven months later, in a letter dated 16 June (see here), it is "as soon as practicable" – coincidentally, two days before Declan received this letter from the Catholic Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre, his main bag, containing all our money and documents, was robbed in the centre (see here). On 4 July, he submitted a second request for priority, drawing to the attention of the Court a violation of Article 34 and requesting that the Court take this matter up with the Government – Article 34 establishes a duty on Convention states not to subject applicants to any improper indirect acts or contacts designed to dissuade or discourage applicants from pursuing a Convention remedy.
On Thursday, LiveScience reported under the headline "Survey: Keep Religion Out of Politics" that, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, for the first time in more than a decade a majority of Americans think religious organisations should stay out of politics. In addition, an increasing number are uncomfortable when politicians talk about how religious they are. Overall, 52 percent thought that churches and other religious institutions should stay out of politics, an increase of eight percentage points since 2004, when the last US presidential election was held. A huge shift came from voters who described themselves as conservative, with 50 percent saying churches should stay out of politics compared to 30 percent in 2004. Among Republicans, 51 percent held this view, up from 37 percent in August of 2004. And among Democratic voters, the percentage who wanted churches out of politics was almost unchanged since 2004 at 52 percent. Commenting on the results, the Pew Research Center said: "Where there was once a substantial partisan and ideological gap on this question, there is now far less of a divide."
Perhaps there are parallels between this development and the emerging anticorporate attitude among many young activists that prompted journalist Naomi Klein to write the book titled “No Logo”. Klein explains in the introduction to the book that as she was doing some research on university campuses in the mid-90s, she began to notice that many of the students she was meeting were preoccupied with the inroads private corporations were making in their public schools. They were angry that ads were creeping into cafeterias, common rooms, even washrooms; that their schools were diving into exclusive distribution deals with soft-drink companies and computer manufactures, and that academic studies were starting to look more and more like market research. They worried that their education was suffering, as institutional priority shifted to those programs most conducive to private-sector partnership.
“Successful multinational corporations are increasingly finding themselves under attack,” Klein writes. But what are the forces pushing more and more people to become suspicious of or even downright enraged at multinational corporations, the very engines of our global growth? Perhaps more pertinently, what is liberating so many people – particularly young people – to act on their rage and suspicion? Klein provides some answers to these questions. “That corporations have grown so big they have superseded government. That unlike governments, they are accountable only to their shareholders; that we lack the mechanisms to make them answer to a broader public,” she writes.
Consider, for example, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown turning up in the US on a three-day visit from 15 to 18 April, only to be upstaged by Pope Benedict XVI (MacAskill, Guardian, 15/4); or the Pope’s rejection in July of an invitation to address the European parliament, prompting Mary Honeyball MEP, a labour spokesperson in the European Parliament Women's Rights Committee, to write in the Guardian that the pontiff was “effectively holding the EU to ransom” (Honeyball, Guardian, 25/7). As for accountability, there is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops: despite recent statements by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the National Academies and the International Society for Stem Cell Research emphasising that studies of all types of stem cells should continue in parallel, the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website continues to display their two recently released print ads describing embryonic stem research as “obsolete” (the ads were distributed at the Democratic Convention in Denver and at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis/St Paul by pro-life groups, according to LifeSiteNews.com).
