PennyOrange?

Laurie Penny gets a lot of stick, much of it undeserved, and a good deal of it downright sexist. But really:

Say what you like about the last guy, but at least he didn’t pretend to be progressive. Right now, I find myself actually missing Benedict XVI, with his snazzy red shoes and squinty evil grin. If you’re going to be Pope, you might as well do it properly. If you’ve waited your whole life to be despotic commander with millions of followers, you should at least enjoy yourself.

Say what? Millions of Catholics worldwide are simply blind followers of a despotic commander. Is the interaction between politics and religion really that simple? Has Laurie been recruited by Richard Dawkins and his ilk? Her piece reads horribly like it:

What the pope says and does influences policy in Catholic countries. One of those countries is Spain, where lawmakers are voting on a plan to allow abortion only in the most extreme cases – where a pregnancy is the result of rape, or is likely to cause death or serious injury. In any other circumstances, Spanish women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and go through the pain and physical risk of childbirth. Similar struggles are going on in Ireland, the United States and everywhere that right-wing politicians are trying to rally support by trampling on women’s rights.

Yep, poor befuddled Roman Catholics are too stupid to think for themselves, and simply act blindly on every word issuing from the papal mouth. Leaving aside the fact that in the US it is certainly not Catholics, whose views do not differ significantly from mainstream opinion, who are making the running on anti-choice politics; leaving aside that both polities in Ireland, including the one not famous for being a Catholic confessional state, have restrictive abortion laws; leaving all of this aside, the tone of Penny's article echoes historic bigotry against Catholics in Britain and damages the pro-choice cause.

I think the stuff about the response to the Pope is also pretty vacuous, betraying an approach to politics (broadly construed) that won't look beyond the narrow cultural confines of the white liberal metropolis, or indeed take culture or 'belonging' seriously as political sites (culture goes deeper than Doctor Who, right?) And I think this matters, not simply for what it makes people say about Catholicism (although that matters, especially once one strays beyond the M25), but because it makes us less able to think through the politics around other, more oppressed, groups in contemporary Britain, especially Muslims, or to have a useful debate about, for example, national questions around Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

But I guess all that's for another post.