The Rashomon Effect

Have you ever seen the Japanese movie Rashomon? It's a Kurosawa classic, and what stands out is this theme ... if a number of people experience the same occurrance, you can be assured that each will have a different view of it.

I bring up the movie because I've just read two articles oabout the same issue .... gay adoptions/the Equality Act in the UK ... one in The Tablet, and the other at First Things. Thier takes are so different, it's hard to believe they're discussing the same thing. By now, you must know which side I throw down on (the Tablet's :-), but below is a little from each article.

*********************

Moralism and UK Adoption Laws, from First Things ....

Overweening moralism is, if you believe most of what you read in the newspapers, the unique sin of conservative religious people. Of course, it isn’t actually true—as witness this latest example of moralism, a secular-liberal moralism imposed by law, from Great Britain .....

In this case, the religious believers are clearly on the side of conscience and freedom, while secular liberals are promoting a state-imposed moralism that coerces everyone, at least everyone who desires to cooperate with the state for the common good. Thus, the Anglican archbishops of Canterbury and York, in solidarity with their Catholic brethren, wrote to Blair: “The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well meaning.” .....

The law doesn’t really imagine that Catholic adoption agencies are somehow preventing gay and lesbian couples from adopting elsewhere. The proposed law is, instead, a device to rebuke the Church, to tell the Church that its teachings about homosexuality and marriage are false, a way for gay-rights activists to attack Christianity under the mantel of nondiscrimination .....

The stance that the government takes toward same-sex marriage will have implications not only for state marriage law but much else—including religious liberty. Legal moralists on the left won’t have it any other way.

************************

And here are a few bits from the Tablet article, Sex and the secular liberal .....

In the past week it has been disconcerting to read about the way the "gay adoption" issue seems to have been tackled by the Catholic Church in England and Wales, which made it clear to the Government that it could not accept equality regulations that would put same-sex couples on an equal footing with heterosexual couples as adoptive parents .....

These aspects of the adoption row obscured a very important point of principle under the surface, one which in a calmer discussion could have been brought usefully to the fore. The Labour Government's commitment to equality is genuine and has grown as more traditional socialist values have lost their persuasive edge ..... The primary duties of the new Commission centre on working for "equality" and "diversity", the first being statutorily defined as "equality between individuals", the second as "the fact that individuals are different" ......

Liberal society is leavened through with toughness: it has plenty of state powers to resist subversion from within as well as from without; it has a whole cohort of laws punishing hate speech and other kinds of unacceptable talk. It now has anti-discrimination laws to prohibit not all kinds of discrimination but rather only those that offend against its model of tolerance and broad-mindedness - like refusing to accept same-sex couples for adoption, for example. In the post-socialist age, non-faith-based progressives are deadly serious about imposing their liberalism, as the Catholic hierarchy has now found to its cost.

How should the Church react to the challenge of this liberal vision of society? It should recognise, first, that it is much better than the rampant capitalist world of competing selfish individuals that might otherwise be on view, and second, that it seeks a much better world than one in which all are allowed to discriminate to their heart's content. And finally, with one large exception, the liberal vision of society is very close to that of the Church, with progressives and Catholics being almost always on the same side on such key issues as esteem, dignity and opportunity for all. The one exception, the radically different approach taken to sexuality, is often more to the fore among the senior church leadership that it is on the ground at parish level.

The liberal vision of a tolerant society based on mutual respect but also on a rejection of intolerance is not one to be feared. Rather, it is an offer of partnership that the Church should joyfully seize. But first it has to work out how on earth to manoeuvre itself out of the cul-de-sac of sexuality into which its universality has forced it. Liberal society knows exactly where it is going; does the Church?

********************

Wikipedia says of the Rashomon Effect that it epitomizes the subjectivity of perception, by which observers of the same event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it. It seems that nowhere can such an effect be more noted than where the issue of what is "right" is up for grabs.

Read Roger Ebert's review of Rashomon here