"Unless they intend to begin checking the bare backsides of every person coming into that country to find that tattoo that says 'Property of WBC' - they will have no way of identifying who is from WBC."
Fred Phelps is a man with bare backsides on the mind. The BBC reports that he and his daughter, from the famous Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, have been banned from entering the UK to protest against a play called the Laramie Project in Basingstoke.
If the BBC is right, it seems Mr Phelps will go to extraordinary lengths to put his anti-gay views to the people of Hampshire. But should we be keeping him out of the country on that basis?There are two main lines of objection to protest tourism.
The first is that nobody - British or otherwise - should be allowed to campaign against a play on the ground that it offends their religion. This would make the decision to bar him easy, but I hope it is untrue. It was untrue when Sikh protesters succeeded in getting Bezhti off the Birmingham stage in 2004. A variation on this is the Border Agency's claim that Mr Phelps, through his long record of campaigning and websites, has incited hatred.
The second is that foreign nationals should not be allowed to come into the country to lobby British people. I'm not convinced by this argument either. While the British government has a greater responsibility to British citizens, other voices have a place too. We allow foreign newspaper proprietors and permit foreign news outlets to advertise and broadcast.
I don't share Mr Phelps' views. But why should he not be allowed to come here and express them?
Thursday, 19 February 2009
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1 comments:
I think you've answered your own question, in your "variation" on your first line of objection - neither of your "two main lines of objection to protest tourism" applies in this case.
On the first, you're absolutely right that people are entitled to protest against a play if they are offended by it, on religious or whatever grounds. On the second, you're absolutely right that foreigners are allowed to come to Britain to lobby British people.
The WBC exclusion is on neither of these grounds - it's because the WBC regularly incites hatred against a number of groups (I don't think this claim is controversial, whether or not you think this should be grounds for their exclusion from the UK - "God hates fags" is about the most concisely hate-inciting slogan I can think of). This isn't a variation on the first point, it's a separate, third point: "inciting hatred is bad" rather than "protest is bad". It's similar to the grounds of exclusion of Geert Wilders last week, or of several "murder music" singers from the Caribbean over the years.
Obviously people can disagree about whether excluding people on grounds of inciting hatred is ever justified or not, and about where the threshold for "inciting hatred" should lie - but that's a separate issue from identifying the arguments that are actually being used in this case.
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