Mrs. Robinson sure has balls or Oh Dear, Oh Dear:
In Northern Ireland (and I’m sure my readers will correct me), the political system is way unrelated to the rest of UK politics – its own microcosm. You have a multiple divide in politics there – ethnic, religious, class, minority/majority issues, republican versus monarchist, and who smote who first and last.
When you get these sort of fracture lines, you can either end up with the Judean People’s Liberation Front/People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea (a bunch of various sizes of political groupings and parties, each with a oddly varying agenda) or Big Front Parties (Reds v Fascists) – but you end up with lines, hard lines of us v them, right v wrong, those worthless punks versus our soldiers of God.
In Northern Ireland, the Unionists (the people who were for maintaining a union with the UK) also tended to go right-wards and religion-wards – to harder-line know-nothing flat-earth stuff. And, of course, the leaders of such a movement have to be pure as the drivel – uh, driven snow, a shining example of rectitude for their followers.
Enter the political team of Peter and Iris Robinson, MPs (UK government) and Northern Irish Assembly members (legislature for NI); Peter is the ‘First Minister’ of the NI government. Very hard right politically, very fundamentalist religiously and mixing the two together with a big pot-stirrer.
The problem with mixing hard religion into politics is that someone’s idea of what God means us to do becomes (1) enforceable by the state, and that (2) God’s will as decided by the state is unquestionable and expressed as ‘divine law’ challenged only by heretics and unbelievers (view the video at the end of the news article for the quote about ‘the word of God’).
This means that people are quite happy to make the rules and enforce them on you, according to their religious belief, and be as hidebound as they feel on the subject – they are the true children of God, and above you in the system of things, etc., etc.
Ask the Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses about their treatment under the Nazis. Ask Catholics about the way that they were treated in Britain after the reign of Elizabeth I. Ask the Huguenots about their treatment under the French Kings.
This is why I am totally for the separation of church and state. My Rittenhouse ancestors came here as religious dissenters, settling in Pennsylvania in the 1680s because it was open to such folks. Much of my own religious odyssey involves religious dissent and my extended family includes religious groups who have been persecuted in their own time.
However, as we discern here in the United States with the hard-right politicos, stating your public beliefs and acting ethically and morally behind the scenes are two very separate things.
In the case of the Robinsons, they were hip deep in the MP-finances scandals, pulling off improprieties for private gain and a mansion near Belfast, and finally having thunder-against-the-wicked Iris Robinson admit to an affair with a teenager and the boy’s father and funneling tens of thousands of pounds from land developers for a restaurant the boy wanted to open.
Benjamin: Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think, I think you’re the most attractive of all my parents’ friends. I mean that.
Of course, you’d say that Mrs. Robinson needed to have real balls to make statements about the unholiness of others while stealing from the state and the public and screwing around; and so she does – big chocolate ones. Tasty, I understand.
