bigideas

Just a quickie this, inspired by a Philips missive I came across by accident this morning while looking for something else. The main subject doesn’t excite me much: the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester.

The paragraph that caught my eye was this one:

Meanwhile the Government is flirting with changing the Act of Settlement so that it no longer ‘discriminates’ against Catholics – for all the world as if the monarchy is a council diversity outreach programme. But Protestantism is a core element of this country’s identity.

Now, we all know Ms Philips’s position on Anglicanism; that’s fine, she’s an op-ed columnist and she’s entitled to think and say precisely what she likes. What interests me is the use of scare quotes around “discriminates”.

Let’s be clear: like it or not, the Act of Settlement does discriminate against Catholics. It says very clearly:

That all and every Person and Persons that then were or afterwards should be reconciled to or shall hold Communion with the See or Church of Rome or should professe the Popish Religion or marry a Papist should be excluded and are by that Act made for ever incapable to inherit possess or enjoy the Crown and Government of this Realm and Ireland and the Dominions thereunto belonging or any part of the same or to have use or exercise any regall Power Authority or Jurisdiction within the same

Indeed, it goes on to say

[t]hat whosoever shall hereafter come to the Possession of this Crown shall joyn in Communion with the Church of England as by Law established

and so it discriminates not only against Catholics but all non-Anglicans, including Protestant nonconformists too, not to mention the hundreds of other religions as well as agnostics and atheists.

Perhaps Ms Philips wants to go back to the Restoration and insist in law that everyone in the country take communion in an Anglican church on a regular basis, and root out and prosecute everyone else as traitors to the crown. If not, the Act of Settlement as it stands really makes no sense at all. But even if you disagree with me on that, you have to agree that the Act does discriminate against Catholics. That’s just a fact.

So what’s with the scare quotes? Why not write

Meanwhile the Government is flirting with changing the Act of Settlement so that it no longer discriminates against Catholics

if that’s what’s meant? Ms Philips want her readers to believe that “discriminates” is in fact out of place here; that it’s the kind of word a bleeding-heart liberal might use in this context, but not her kind of word. It lives in the same register as “diversity outreach programme”. We’re supposed to wrinkle our noses at “discriminates” because we smell milquetoast.

As an aside, a Google search for “diversity outreach programme” returns sixteen hits, of which five are sarcastic (three of those are copies of this very article). Only one is from a council, and that’s an obscure document about council housing written in admittedly hilarious local-government-speak. But that’s not important.

What Philips is doing here is drawing a sketch of a character, a loony left PC-gone-mad councillor yabbering on about “discrimination” when none really exists. Except no such person exists, and the discrimination in question undeniably seems to me to be written into the Act. Indeed, the second sentence in the original quote is hard to understand if it wasn’t. She’s ventriloquising through an imaginary lefty bogeyman sock-puppet. What makes the situation complex, and undercuts her argument, is that some of what the puppet says is intended to be taken as true and some isn’t. Only a lot of context enables us to disentangle the two.