I have officially lost my Trekkie status

Some time back, a student once told me in shocked tones that he had just found out that Gandalf was gay. After a puzzled pause for thought, I replied, "Ah, you mean Sir Ian McKellan is gay, not Gandalf. Gandalf is not a real person, and even if he were, I don't think he has a sexuality of any kind. Sir Ian, on the other hand, is famously gay."

I had a similar moment just now when (thanks to insomnia) I found that George Takei has just married his partner Brad Altman, and my first thought was "Sulu is gay? Well I never!" Yes, I've been a Star Trek fan since the 1960s and didn't know that George Takei is gay. Shame on me. Anyway, may the happy couple live long and prosper.

Are Muslims the new Catholics?

After witnessing a bout of Islamophobia in, of all places, a Stoic forum, it occurred to me that Muslims today occupy a place in popular demonology equivalent to that held by Catholics in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From popular broadsheets to Gothic novels like The Monk, Catholics were favourite bogeymen, and the popular view of Catholics had some uncanny similarities to the way Muslims are often perceived now.

1. Catholics abroad are bent on attacking our countries; Catholics at home owe loyalty to the Pope, not the King. Muslim nations are "rogue states" (unless we want to buy oil from them). Muslim immigrants are a fifth column whose loyalty is to mad mullahs rather than our democratic governments.
2. Catholics are always hatching evil plots. Guy Fawkes was the Osama bin-Laden of his day. Muslim clerics are the Jesuits of our day.
3. Catholics are simultaneously ascetic and licentious. Popular fiction of the day (either Protestant or, in the French case, secularist) often featured philandering priests, poking fun (with some justification) at the contradiction between the celibacy preached by the Church and the sensualism of some of its members. Similarly, Muslims are condemned simultaneously for restricting sexual behaviour and indulging in it. Again, Orientalism aside, there is some justification for this, but we should not forget that it is a nigh-on universal phenomenon found amongst Protestants too.
4. Catholics are irrational, superstitious and opposed to science and social progress. In the seventeenth century, science was strongly identified with Protestantism (see Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment) and Catholic dogma was seen as its antithesis. Now it is Islam which is seen as a dark force trying to drag us back to pre-Enlightenment days.

On this last note, here is part of what I posted to the forum. ( Read more... )