You'll probably have noticed that of late, when reporting on the most recent inanities and inherited bigotries of fundamentalists of various sorts, my default mood as recorded on the LJ posting has been "écrasez l'infâme," "crush the infamy." I feel this in relation to what Andrew Sullivan has just reported (
"The Party of Death") about the take of too much of the American right on vaccines against lethal STDs.
"Religious conservatives are unapologetic; not only do they believe that mass use of an HPV vaccine or the availability of emergency contraception will encourage adolescents to engage in unacceptable sexual behavior; some have even stated that they would feel similarly about an H.I.V. vaccine, if one became available. 'We would have to look at that closely,' Reginald Finger, an evangelical Christian and a former medical adviser to the conservative political organization Focus on the Family, said. 'With any vaccine for H.I.V., disinhibition' - a medical term for the absence of fear - 'would certainly be a factor, and it is something we will have to pay attention to with a great deal of care.' Finger sits on the Centers for Disease Control's Immunization Committee, which makes those recommendations."
Let's not forget
Bill Napoli, the South Dakota politician who can only accept abortion for those women who are religious, virgins, unmarried, and psychologically fragile. Presumably he's so specific because every other woman is a whore whose sufferings are unimportant. Isn't it a nice age when people using the logics of serial killers of women to determine public policy? An excess of religion, backed by the power of the state, hurts.
It can also kill. The slogan "écrasez l'infâme" was formulated by the great 18th century French writer
Voltaire in reaction to the judicial murder of
Jean Calas, a Huguenot of the city of Toulouse. Being a
Huguenot in France almost a century after the 1685 termination of the limited toleration of the
Edict of Nantes was not a good thing, as Calas found to his great grief.
Jean Calas, along with his wife, was a Protestant. France was then a mostly Catholic country; Catholicism was the state religion. While the harsh repression of Protestantism initiated by King Louis XIV had largely receded, Protestants were, at best, tolerated. Louis, one of the Calas' sons, converted to Catholicism in 1756. On October 13-14, 1761, another of the Calas' sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead in the ground floor of the familial home. Rumors contend that Jean Calas killed his son because he, too, intended to convert to Catholicism. The family, interrogated, first pretended that Marc-Antoine had been killed by a marauder. Then, they declared that they had found Marc-Antoine dead, hanged; since suicide was then considered a highly heinous crime against oneself, and the dead bodies of the suicided were defiled, they had arranged so that their son's suicide would look like a murder.
On March 9, 1762 the parlement (appellate court) of Toulouse sentenced Jean Calas to death on the wheel. On March 10, Jean Calas died tortured on the wheel, while still very firmly claiming his innocence. Voltaire, contacted about the case, after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism, began a campaign to get Calas' sentence overturned.
Voltaire's essay
On Toleration in Connection With the Death of Jean Calas was a central text in the posthumous rehabilitation of Calas. He warns of the dire consequences of the public license of fanaticism:
If the white penitents were the cause of the execution of an innocent man, the utter ruin of a family, and the dispersal and humiliation that attach to an execution, though they should punish only injustice; if the haste of the white penitents to commemorate as a saint one who, according to our barbaric customs, should have been dragged on a hurdle, led to the execution of a virtuous parent; they ought indeed to be penitents for the rest of their lives. They and the judges should weep, but not in a long white robe, and with no mask to hide their tears.
We respect all confraternities; they are edifying. But can whatever good they may do the State outweigh this appalling evil that they have done? It seems that they have been established by the zeal which in Languedoc fires the Catholics against those whom we call Huguenots. One would say that they had taken vows to hate their brothers; for we have religion enough left to hate and to persecute, and we have enough to love and to help. What would happen if these confraternities were controlled by enthusiasts, as were once certain congregations of artisans and "gentlemen," among whom, as one of our most eloquent and learned magistrates said, the seeing of visions was reduced to a fine art? What would happen if these confraternities set up again those dark chambers, called "meditation rooms," on which were painted devils armed with horns and claws, gulfs of flame, crosses and daggers, with the holy name of Jesus surmounting the picture?1 What a spectacle for eyes that are already fascinated, and imaginations that are as inflamed as they are submissive to their confessors!
This willingness to torment flawed others, he concluded later in his essay after a possibly flawed survey of tolerance in the past and in the wider world, was the only thing that justified intolerance to Voltaire.
If the Franciscan monks, carried away by a holy zeal for the Virgin Mary, go and destroy a Dominican convent, because the Dominicans believe that Mary was born in original sin, it will be necessary to treat the Franciscans in much the same way as the Jesuits.
We may say the same of the Lutherans and Calvinists. It is useless for them to say that they follow the promptings of their consciences, that it is better to obey God than men, or that they are the true flock, and must exterminate the wolves. In such cases they are wolves themselves.
One happy net result of this was the liberation, at least a half-century earlier than in Britain, of
state sanctions against and state-sanctioned bigotry towards the largest and most unpopular religious minority in France, and eventually against all of these minorities. France had its own traumas, to be sure, but at least it didn't suffer anything akin to the Irish situation.
I like Voltaire, despite his flaws; I like the Enlightenment, despite its own issues. I think that we need them both now, for the wolves are again out in the field and circling the flocks. It isn't just religious fundamentalists who are at fault, in America and Iran and India and yes, even in Canada. It's all of the fundamentalists of race and ethnicity who want to maintain hermetically sealed memberships who are at work, too, and all of the ideological fundamentalists who won't allow for any compromise in the name of humanity. If there's any common thread uniting all of the news items I've been reading of late, it's the willingness to place the Other outside the bounds of humanity, as an existential threat to be dealt with.
The wolves have to be stopped. I'm deathly afraid that they won't be before it's too late. I hope I'm wrong.
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