When did it become 'okay' to bag Christianity?

By STEPHANIE BROWN. Published by www.mamamia.com.au on 11 September 2012.

The mother in my radius this week was discussing her reasons for wanting to move out of the area in which we live. Top of her list, the thing she dislikes most about our leafy suburbia, is that everyone is religious; she perceives we live in a bible belt.

She went on to talk about the large percentage of parents and children in her son’s class who were involved with a church. She vented about feeling in the minority, saying that although people didn’t talk to her about their faith, she felt they were ‘preachy’.

All in all, it seemed that there was little evidence of actual problems or encounters, quite simply she didn’t like it, she didn’t like them. People weren’t like her and this made her uncomfortable.

The reactions were mixed. Some nodded politely, and some had confused looks on their faces. Some went as far as to point out that their experience was quite different, but no one directly challenged her, and I believe she would have walked away thinking people were in agreement with her.

I sat there pondering. I couldn’t help but feel I was caught up in a moment that could be somewhat farcical. If she had said she wanted to leave an area because she didn’t like that there were a group of Asian or Middle Eastern people, it would have been met with shock.

If she had said she was miserable because there were so many homosexual people she would have been heatedly challenged. If she had singled out any other group, even any other religious group, I think it would be seen as being narrow minded and intolerant, and she would have been put in her place.

In contrast, it seemed it was socially acceptable to isolate and attach negative stigma to people involved in the Christian faith. In essence, it was stereotyping and placing prejudice on a group of people without knowing or experiencing them as individuals.

Without getting into the nuts and bolts of whether the area is in fact a bible belt, I have felt uncomfortable about that conversation. It seemed to reinforce a trend, where people with a Christian faith in Australia are free game to be joked about or spoken of negatively in the paper, on the radio and in comic sketches.

You only have to look at regular columns in mainstream papers to find numerous examples of this kind of treatment. The jokes and criticism are often entertaining, and in some cases valid, but I have some level of concern. If the mainstream media took this approach to any other group it would be inappropriate and unacceptable. So why is it tolerated in this case?

Is it because Christianity is perceived to be the institution so many have experienced and are rebelling against? Is it acceptable to generalise and stereotype because most Australians have had some personal contact and experience so, as they see it, they are insulting their own and not a vulnerable minority group? Or do people really have such horrid experiences relating to Christians that their treatment seems valid? I really don’t know the answer, but I have some hopes that things will change.

Surely we should be aiming to remove stereotyping, generalising, pulling down, slandering and discriminating against any one group completely, not just selectively. I want my children to grow up in a world where these things are never acceptable, without exceptions.

I hope this mother can learn a few things. I hope she can learn to put aside her own experiences and prejudices and treat these people like individuals without projecting a uniform typecast on them. I hope she can teach her son that although he may be in the minority in his class, he will still have many things in common with his peers and to look for those commonalities rather than the differences.

I hope she can stop publicly making negative statements about a broad group of people based solely on their belief system. I hope she can extend the courtesy and respect to others that she demands for herself.

And more than anything, at ballet this week, I hope I can find the words to challenge her, because although it sounds more politically correct when couched in an atheistic viewpoint, to be that prejudiced and generalising towards one group is still pretty ugly.

Read more here: http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/why-ballet-and-religion-dont-mix/

David Soggot: Lawyer who fought for justice in apartheid-era Namibia

Published by The Independent, 17 June 2010.

By Denis Herbstein.

David Henry Soggot, lawyer: born Johannesburg 7 August 1931; married firstly (two daughters), secondly (one son, one daughter); died Johannesburg 24 May 2010.

David Soggot's induction into the political life of the colony of South West Africa (now Namibia) was brutal and bloody. It was 1973, and the Anglican suffragan bishop in Windhoek, Richard Wood, unable to find a local lawyer to act on behalf of Swapo nationalists being flogged by South Africa's black quislings, had telephoned the human rights advocate in Johannesburg."I'll be on the next plane," was the response.

"Time was short," the bishop's wife, Cathy, recalled. "It all happened over a weekend. The victims came down the 300 miles from Ovamboland to our house, the Manse. They couldn't sit down. It was too painful. David took the statements in the living room while I typed them up." Church elders, schoolteachers and businessmen, men and women, told how they had been sjambokked in public, some of them 50 times, on their naked bottoms.

Soggot won a two-week injunction to halt the floggings. When he returned to the Windhoek court seeking a permanent ban he found that the judge had been transferred back to South Africa. The new bench of local men refused to renew the injunction, even refusing Soggot leave to appeal to the Appellate Division in South Africa. Though the movement was not outlawed, ordinary Swapo members faced further mediaeval punishment. Soggot persisted, and in time South Africa's chief justice ordered a permanent ban on arbitrary flogging.

David Henry Soggot was born in Johannesburg to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His father was a butcher while his mother brought up David and three older siblings. From Parktown Boys School, he studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was active in the Progressive Forum, affiliated to the Trotskyist Unity Movement.

He was not in harmony with the Communist party, where many white radicals found a home. His political contribution was in the courts. Over the years he advised the likes of Winnie Mandela; Terror Lekota, who later would launch the Congress of the People party; and Steve Biko, father figure of Black Consciousness and the country's most influential black politician.

In a lengthy show trial, nine leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement were charged in 1975 under the Treason Act, though it was their ideas rather than their deeds at stake. Biko was not charged and became a defence witness. As he was restricted to Eastern Cape, Soggot obtained permission for him to live in his home during the trial.

The lawyer's meticulous examination and his admiration for the charismatic leader offered Biko the chance to lay out as never before his political philosophy. Inevitably, all the defendants were convicted and sent to Robben Island prison. Biko was punished as well. In 1977, the police killed him.

Meanwhile Soggot had been briefed to defend a group of Namibians charged with murdering Chief Elifas, the Ovambo leader responsible for the floggings. Soggot wasn't able to appear in the trial but later defended Victor Nkandi, charged with driving the assassins to the bar where Elifas was killed. His tireless cross-examination revealed violent police interrogation practices, with prisoners suspended upside down from iron bars and electrodes clamped to testicles and women's breasts, conducted in a sinister waarheidskamer (truth room).

The case collapsed, the judge blaming "unreliable black witnesses", not the police. "There was not a single police witness," he said, "who did not make a favourable impression upon the court." The judge president was so annoyed with defence counsel that he threatened a contempt of court charge because the counsel's well-used robe was torn.

Justin Ellis, a Namibian friend, said of Soggot that he "understood that the courts could be used to create a very public drama, different from other media, showing something of what was going on in the country. Previously we had not had lawyers in Namibia who were willing, and fully able, to take on the South African government in this way. It was a real and courageous contribution to bringing that crazy and violent era to an end, and limiting the violence of the heritage."

There were other trials. Millions had seen television shots of young men "necklacing", hanging burning tyres around the necks of, a suspected scab. The death penalty seemed certain but Soggot found an American social psychologist who introduced the phenomenon of "de-individuation" to explain the frenzied behaviour of the accused. They were convicted, but with mitigating circumstances and so avoided the gallows.

His activities did not please the security police. There were menacing phone calls, his car tyres were shredded, and after he had exposed serious assaults on Robben Island prisoners in 1977 the Minister of Justice attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban him from contact with political prisoners. Not surprisingly, he was not made a judge in the apartheid years, nor would he have accepted the offer. After the Mandela thaw, he sat several times as an acting judge. Earlier in his career he had lectured in political science at his old university.

But life was by no means all blood and courts. When time allowed, he enjoyed flying his Piper Cub. A bon viveur, he spent a large part of the year in London with his second wife Greta, or in France, where he learned to speak the language as well as he did English and Afrikaans. In his final years, ill-health prevented him from indulging most of his passions but he found solace in painting.