The ‘Tolerance of Intolerance’
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2019
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The row in Birmingham over primary school lessons that teach an accepting attitude to homosexual relationships has been making headlines for most of this year, and now the courts are involved: the City Council has applied for a permanent ban on protests at the school gates. So far this escalating dispute about 'tolerance' has not displayed much of it – on either side. Muslim parents have been portrayed as backward and bigoted, while the local authority has been labelled Islamophobic.
Behind this head-on clash is a moral problem that stretches far beyond Birmingham and far into the past and the future of this country. It's about negotiating a settlement between a liberal democratic state and those religious groups who reject its principles. How far can the state afford to accommodate beliefs, teachings and practices that 'enlightened' opinion abhors? Some would draw the line at the point where religion refuses vaccination or blood transfusions to children. Others are worried about the wider social consequences of being too 'tolerant of intolerance'. How much should non-religious citizens reasonably expect to be free from religion?
Religion is central to our cultural heritage; it created our great institutions, held communities together and fed the roots of the values we profess. But the European Enlightenment set out to establish a social order based not on religious superstition but on reason, equality and human rights. If that's not quite how it's turned out, what's the solution? Is it to strive more fiercely still for a secular consensus, or to make new space for dogma some of us had thought was dying if not dead? How much does co-operative living ultimately require the stretching of our moral imagination?
Featuring Anna Carlile, Assad Zaman, Dr David Landrum & Dr Stephen De Wijze.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:04.0 | Good evening. A primary school in Spark Hill, Birmingham, has become the unlikely focus of the most fundamental moral issues of this or any other age. |
| 0:13.3 | Religious freedom and human rights, liberal values clashing with traditional beliefs, parents against the state. |
| 0:20.3 | All but a handful of the pupils at |
| 0:21.7 | Anderton Park School are Muslims, mostly of Pakistani origin. They've been having lessons |
| 0:26.8 | designed to encourage acceptance of LGBT lifestyles. They feature books about cross-dressing |
| 0:33.2 | and gay families. One's called My Princess Boy. Many of the parents don't like it. |
| 0:39.3 | They say the lessons actively promote homosexuality, which is contrary to their religion |
| 0:44.2 | and their family values. They've staged noisy protests, and a High Court judge is |
| 0:49.1 | currently deciding whether a temporary ban on demonstrations near the school should |
| 0:53.4 | become a permanent exclusion zone. |
| 0:56.1 | We may live in a post-enlightment liberal democracy, but our ethical framework still rests on religious foundations, |
| 1:03.0 | a Christian religion, it should be said, whose Bible suggests homosexuals should be put to death. |
| 1:08.7 | How far should the state accommodate the beliefs, teachings and practices, current secular thinking dislikes? Are our values so absolute, no exception should be allowed? Or should we stretch our moral imaginations to make room for views which were, after all, the law of the land a generation ago. In short, how far should we tolerate what |
| 1:29.3 | some regard as intolerance? That's our moral maize tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, |
| 1:34.0 | social commentator at the Times, Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and interreligious |
| 1:38.2 | studies at Edinburgh University, and McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, and the satirist |
| 1:43.4 | Andrew Doyle. |
| 1:45.2 | Mona, do you think that your co-religionists, some of your co-religionists in Birmingham, have a point? |
| 1:53.0 | Well, as a Muslim who has grown up in the West, I know from a faith perspective that there is no one view on anything Islam and that diversity is the very essence. |
| 2:02.7 | So while people have the right to express their views, when it comes to issues around education |
| 2:08.0 | and inclusion, no, I don't think they have a right to demonstrate. |
... |
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