Following on from the first part of his commentary on last week's Intelligence Squared Debate, when he told us about the performances of Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe MP, Hitchens Watch's very own man inside Opus Dei, TOMAHAWK, looks in detail at the contribution made by actor, comedian, ubiquitous public intellectual, unabashed atheist and Renaissance man Stephen Fry. The tension of waiting for Hitch to strut his funky stuff is making this almost as exciting as waiting for Led Zeppelin to come on at Knebworth in '79! — Greywolf.
OUR PASSIONS FORGE OUR FETTERS A Hasty Commentary Re. a Debate on the Catholic Church (Part 2) by TOMAHAWK
Fry followed Widdecombe and looked rather uneasy doing what he was doing. His soothing tones came as something of a relief following CH and Ms Widdecombe, who is cursed with a most unfortunate voice. Fry, unlike Hitchens, seems to think of Jesus Christ as a jolly good chap. And he "respects" religious people. That said, he can be a pretty formidable misrepresenter himself. Not long before the debate Fry appeared to tell Channel 4 News that right-wing Polish Catholics were responsible for Auschwitz! He did so in the course of laying into a right-wing Polish party that dares to disapprove of the public promotion of sodomy. As this makes Mr Fry jolly angry he thinks that lying about history (or Making UP History) is fine (although to his credit he has since apologised after being “outed” on the issue by reputable historians of the era). He also solemnly announced that the Church had "tortured" Galileo and seemed to be under the impression that Galileo had proved heliocentrism - thereby revealing further ignorance of both history and science—safe in the knowledge that most of his audience would lap all this up too (for details see Galileo, Science and the Church by Jerome Langford or The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. And there are many other scholarly volumes on this).
On he went. Child abuse was brought up—strange how Hitchens and Fry are so horrified by sexual wrongdoing and yet both in this debate and elsewhere promote the kind of sexual libertinism and perversity that actually makes all of these problems worse (Fry himself, raped as a schoolboy, elsewhere thought it wise to glibly announce that he liked the experience and that there was too much fuss about this sort of thing (see his interview on Shrink Wrap with Pamela Stephenson)). Is the rape of boys only wrong when priests do it?
Homosexuality came up and Fry effectively defined his essence as homosexual, ergo anyone condemning homosexual acts must be saying that Stephen is, inherently, evil. Ironic how this self-styled "empiricist" has recourse to the idea of essences when it comes to falsely identifying himself!
The Church, of course, does not say that anymore than it identifies any man with his vices. If Stephen chooses to identify himself with his vices then that is tragic. But he doesn't have to do that anymore than the rest of us do. Of course, it is the fact that the Church has a fully consistent and rational sexual ethic than enrages Fry who, in his rather emotional terms, takes it "personally". There is little debate to be had here with one who identifies himself with his vices. Perhaps sexual sin, more than any other sin, disposes the one who commits it to identify his essence as one bound up with that sin. Who knows? The proposers did not really deign to outline the true basis the Church's position on sexual ethics and human dignity and thereby further weakened their position.
Fry, who mocked the idea of transubstantiation (his words betrayed the fact that he had no idea of "substantial form") and also called for the Church to sell of Her riches etc., sounded surprisingly like a retro Protestant. Quite why the former should bother him so much and quite why an intelligent man like Fry thinks that historic Church property being alienated from believers will somehow help the poor (the Archbishop took this up), I'll leave to psychiatrists.
Then, as with Hitchens, Fry came back to condoms and, preemptively, got jolly cross with Widdecombe lest she contradict him that condoms were absolutely crucial in combating AIDS—a problem largely caused by the very sexual promiscuity promoted by Fry and Hitchens (for which they have yet to repent—in fact they repented for nothing all night—for, in their eyes, their "side" has nothing to repent for, especially when it comes to sex).
Finally, Fry, the king of sexual innuendo, accused his opponents of being obsessed with sex ("coming from you!" cried an audience member). His analogy of food/sex where only the obese and the anorexic are obsessed by food was both crude and telling. For Fry, celibates are perverted (Hitchens thinks so too). Apparently chastity/celibacy (wasn't Fry a proud celibate for 16 years?) are perverse, but any sexual activity that is consensual isn't. This is strange indeed. One is reminded of the words of GEM Anscombe:
"There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually—sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex—chastity—is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives.
Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life. There is an opposite extreme, which perhaps we shall see in our day: making sex a religious mystery. This Christians do not do. Despite some rather solemn nonsense that's talked this is obvious. We wouldn't, for example, make the sexual organs objects of a cultic veneration; or perform sexual acts as part of religious rituals; or prepare ourselves for sexual intercourse as for a sacrament. As often holds, there is here a Christian mean between two possible extremes. It is: never to change sexual actions so they are deprived of that character which makes sex so profoundly significant, so deep-going in human life...
Sexual acts are not sacred actions. But the perception of the dishonour done to the body in treating them as the casual satisfaction of desire is certainly a mystical perception. I don't mean, in calling it a mystical perception, that it's out of the ordinary. It's as ordinary as the feeling for the respect due to a man's dead body: the knowledge that a dead body isn't something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up. This, too, is mystical; though it's as common as humanity.
Fry added a gross misrepresentation of a Church instruction on secrecy, the confessional and minors (had he read the instruction or a false report on it?—try and guess) and demonstrated his ignorance of the concept of limbo in Catholic teaching (and got jolly cross when Widdecombe picked him up on it—sadly Widdecombe got it wrong too!). He finished with a rather nauseating peroration on the carpenter from Galilee who Fry thinks of as a jolly good chap (minus, presumably, what He said concerning the moral law, His foundation of a Church, etc. etc. etc.).
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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