Anti-Brexit bishops jump on Boris burqa bandwagon
by Archbishop Cranmer:
This isn’t a post about Brexit; it really isn’t. Nor is it a post about banning the burqa. It isn’t even a post about Boris, or whether what he said about women who wear a burqa was funny or not. Opinions on these things vary from ear to ear: humour is manifestly in the mind of the auditor. It isn’t a post about jumping on bandwagons, or whether those who jump can tell their burqa from their niqab, or either from a hijab. It isn’t a post about religiously illiterate politicians, letterboxes, bank robbers or crass similes. It isn’t about hate speech, kneecapping, or witch hunts. Nor is it a post about bashing bishops. Really, it isn’t.
It is simply a polite question.
A number of clergy (quite a few, actually) have expressed their disgust at Boris Johnson’s joke about disparaging of women who wear a burqa. In comparing them to letterboxes and bank robbers, he clearly caused offence (or people chose to take offence), and cries have gone up of Islamophobia (notwithstanding his being of Turkish-Muslim heritage).
The Bishop of Liverpool said Boris’s similes were “dreadful” (or is saying Boris is dreadful?); the Bishop of Bradford said his similes were “harmful“.
But this isn’t a post about Boris, bishops or similes. Nor is it a post about bandwagon-jumping.
It is simply to ask these bishops (and other anti-Boris bandwagon-jumping clergy) why they so readily pour scorn and brimstone upon Boris’s head, but remained totally Trappist when Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry said she wouldn’t let a woman wearing a burqa look after her child or elderly mother; and when the Guardian mocked the garment mercilessly as a scary Halloween costume, a fire-blanket and a letterbox; and when the BBC broadcast that very same ‘letterbox’ simile; and when Polly Toynbee said the burqa was like something sinister out of a horror film (or three horror films, actually), and “an instrument of persecution.. a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality [because it] transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen”?
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