Are you distressing and discriminating against disabled and diverse people?

How Covid rules are oppressing the marginalised

If your country or state expects you to wear a mask in particular situations – perhaps even whenever you’re outside – then there should be exceptions.

I’m talking about England, but the principles remain wherever you are.

I believe in recommendation, not regulation.

I’ve discussed the dubious legality and medical veracity of masks in a previous post.

I’ve been checking with shops, transport and services about face coverings (note it’s not masks) and their knowledge of exemptions. In England, the rules are broad and vague. It even says that coverings – any kind will do – are to be worn where social distancing isn’t possible – which actually precludes most places.

The government website says that services must be understanding to those that can’t wear face coverings, and one of the non exhaustive reasons is simply those who would suffer distress. That isn’t defined. We’re (rightly) not required to prove or discuss it.

Some staff know the rules, some don’t – and yet they’ve threatened to debar entry without a mask. One train company was even stupid enough to say that if they suspect that people are making an excuse via claiming exemption, they’ll take action.

So will I.

Have they not heard of hidden disabilities? Is every physical condition you have something that everyone knows about you? Are we obliged to get these diagnosed by doctors? (NO).

And neither security nor police have the right to pry or to assess us.

I am very loathe to call autism a disability – I see it as a trait. But there are people in this wide spectrum who more ignorant people don’t recognise as such. Some might struggle with social distancing. It isn’t only those who may obviously appear autistic who get distressed by masks.

There are wider variations of neurodiversity – such as giftedness, high sensitivity, and empaths.

If you don’t recognise these in either sense, then you should not be someone who is front of house, making any decision about entry, policy, or enforcement.

There are people with what we (often unfairly) term mental illness.

There are those with anxiety, and who get panic attacks. I wonder if it affects those with epilepsy.

There are those we call learning disabled, although I’ve seen posters against such a term which can seem so derogatory.

There are those with hearing impairment who need to lip read.

We might also have been traumatised…attacked or abused…

I’m touching just on a few of the types of people who are very distressed by wearing a mask.

This is also true – and perhaps more so – of temperature taking, testing – especially drive throughs, where people are trapped and can’t choose. Having people swab us or inject us is a huge deal.

Some people really hate being touched, or having people stand near, especially aggressively.

Threatening or debarring these people is going to exacerbate.

So before you misjudge – remember: only police can enforce law, and if you call them or refuse entry or try to arrest or contain, you’re causing offence in both senses. If you pick on any of the above persons, you’ll additionally have a disability/diversity law suit and I encourage anyone who suffers to make it known and take it further. There’s already been litigation in the US.

In England, there are exemption cards you can download and wear from photosymbols.com, which are also available via local and national societies, eg for disability or autism.

Face covering is a bungled piece of legislature, but people who already have extra challenges and live in challenging times shouldn’t have that worsened.

I know of people with special conditions who are in tears and in overwhelm because of how hard going to a shop or cafe is, who’ve been bullied in a library, and who don’t dare ride on trains.

Now they can’t even have the comfort of attending an act of worship.

All because of inappropriate rules and ignorant aggressive staff trying to force them.

It’s not keeping anyone safe. If you harm someone in the name of stopping the spread of illness, it’s like shooting them to stop them getting run over. Especially if shooting is part of a larger agenda…

Yes, shops, services and transport also have pressure on them.

So the clear message to them, and to governments and their agents is:

If you want custom, not complaints; good publicity, and your business and administration to survive Covid

Stop oppressing your people.

If you’ve had trouble for not wearing a mask, contact tracing, or anything else, please write a comment

WONDER WOMEN: A Sermon For Magdalene Day 2020

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/wonder-women-a-sermon-for-magdalene-day

The church created this the 22^nd July, but although I’m writing this on that day, I’m delivering it on the following Sunday. I had hoped that this would be the first time that Between The Stools would meet personally – we will soon, when the time is right.

Four years ago, I made this day a launch of a different kind – of my first novel, Parallel Spirals, which I deliberately chose because of it being Magdalene’s day. Several people kindly ask when the sequel is coming – again, soon, when the time is right.

Mary Magdalene has been important to me for much of my life. As a nonconformist, we didn’t do saints and so the other Mary – she who bore the Lord – was downplayed to avoid sounding Catholic. In recent years, I’ve been open to learning what I may have missed out on.

Mary the Mother has always seemed less interesting to me than the other Mary. The BVM is good and obedient, but Magdalene is naughty: for those familiar with British cult children’s television show Rainbow, one Mary was George, but the other Zippy. And Zippy was always the more appealing.

By my 30s, Mary Magdalene was sufficiently appealing to undertake a research degree about her. My original thesis was that she had something in common with Queen Anne Boleyn, who I had also come to admire. These women, 1500 years apart, in different countries, were vilified bringers of a new religious age, and right hand women of a powerful male leader who usually got all the attention – although her own contribution was considerable. The fact that we were undoing their vilification and rediscovering their own contribution showed that we too are in a new age.

For my studies, I read Margaret Starbird’s The Woman With The Alabaster Jar. She went from devoted Catholic to pretty much swirling her saffron scarf whilst singing “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” And, I by the end of my essay, I wanted to join her.

Now, I literally have the scarf, learned the words to the song, and am proclaiming a New Age. I slipped from alternative Christian into a Christian and Woo Woo hybrid. It’s through Mary M that I discovered and joined some priestess communities, who additionally celebrate Mary in late March. She led me to begin the path of priestess.

I recently read the book of one of these priestess community leaders, Lauri Ann Lumby – a novelised Gospel of Mary called Song of the Beloved. Alongside, I read the huge tome that is Margaret’s George’s Mary called Magdalene. Both of these will inform some of my comments that I will make.

My thesis included many more books – these two weren’t then published – and depictions in film, two favourites starring Juliette Binoche (2005) and Rooney Mara (2018). I was interested in how Mary was portrayed in popular contemporary culture.

I get very cross to see Mary shown as a prostitute. Us Baptists knew that the Bible never names her as such – only as a delivered demoniac. Margaret George literally has Mary infested by seven very scary demons. Her comments at the end make a distinction between possession and modern understandings of illness, by which I assumes she means mental health. I promised in an earlier sermon that I’d touch on this. It’s a huge and sensitive subject, and not fully under what I want to talk about today, but I do want to say:

note the two top ways to discredit and shun women are both connected with Mary.

You’re either a whore, and so unclean and not to be trusted. And you’re dangerous.

Or you’re filled with evil – you are a vessel for the Devil, just as church fathers taught.

You’re also unclean, not to be trusted, and dangerous.

Today, the liberal Christian tries to put modern Western science and medical models onto the Biblical text. We’re quick to find new explanations for frothing and writhing which perhaps sound more comfortable and palatable, and which do not involve any supernatural elements. I note that whereas the terrifying thought of demon possession may be something we’d like to explain away, that this attitude is also taken to miracles.

I also point out that even by transmuting devils to chemical imbalance, that Mary is therefore potentially mad. Demon possessed people and those with afflictions that we demonise are also outcasts, confined away from decent society and sometimes literally fettered in some form. I noted the uselessness of the Jewish priests’ response in Margaret George’s book, as inept and ignorant as mental health services can be.

Madness of course is a great way to discard and discredit people who might not fit in and whose truth might actually seem unsettling.

Mary Magdalene is such a person.

I want to state very clearly that our God has power over all, including any spirits; and that mental illness – which I am not linking with possession, if that state really exists – or sexuality is not about uncleanness, peril or unreliability. This is simply spin.

Mary pulls the veil off all that. A good metaphor, considering new rules over here…

I am among those who believe that Mary’s prostitute backstory was a deliberate invention to vilify her by the church, and which allows Peter, another disciple, on whom the established churches are founded, to take centre stage. His being so is necessary for the keys being passed between generations of bishops and priests, who are most commonly ordained at Petertide – a late June feast in honour of the fisherman bishop to whom Jesus allegedly gave all earthly authority.

Lauri Ann Lumby portrays Peter so differently in her novel that I didn’t recognise him. She always calls him Simon, and the new name that Jesus gives him isn’t an honour, it’s a sad nickname. The Rock (which translates as Peter) is a hard, impenetrable heart who is always the fiery critic and downer, who just doesn’t seem to get Jesus’ message. For Lauri, Simon/Peter and James, Jesus’ brother, distort the message of Jesus and misrepresent it. They focus on laws and communion and building a church chain – but that wasn’t what Jesus taught at all. Yet it’s them who have held sway – til now.

I asked Lauri where she gained her inspiration. There is a non canonical Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and other contemporary Gnostic texts suggest that Mary’s role was somewhat different to the small part she’s allowed to play in the four Biblical gospels. Even then, she has managed to come out of the thick mesh laid on her and fascinate people, even when her followers were driven underground.

The rediscovered Magdalene brings a different message, and Lauri conveys this as well as any. It’s suggested that Mary’s surname is a title – like Mahatma Gandhi (I think) – and it may refer to her enlightenment, not her geography. I wonder if this name, meaning ‘tower’, is like the perspective you get when you climb one: it’s over a wide area, seeing people from above. It’s what I call the authorial eye view, or the Higher Self.

Mary’s not the Woman At Well, With the Jar, Sister of Lazarus and Martha, I don’t think, but I can see how these Gospel characters embody the facets that we like to attribute to this Mary: she’s unconventional, an outcast who’s given a ringside seat by the master; she loves Jesus and she shows it; she’s not interested in rules, but she does have novel theological understanding. She’s more interested in discussion than dishes (amen, sister!). I think that if Magdalene were all these women, it would mean that Jesus touched the lives of far fewer people and that insight and incident came to just one, rather than to three.

In both Magdalene novels, I noted the critique of the Law. I also read God by Deepak Chopra, and his first chapter is a take on the book of Job which exemplified the same idea. For a Jew – in the ancient time of Job, as in Jesus’ day – to please God was to keep these 613 laws. And for this, you were credited with righteousness – interesting that phrase comes from the epistle of law-loving James (2:23). Note the ‘credit’ – a banking transaction. And so the world could see, like wealthy Job, that God had blessed you in return for what you had obeyed. You kept your boon whilst God was pleased with you. If you stopped obeying, then disasters struck. Job starts to turn this argument, as I’ll take up another time. But Deepak’s understanding facilitated mine: this was what the Jewish world believed, for centuries. And this is the world that Jesus entered and began turning.

In Margaret George, young Mary sees Jesus’ dad break the Sabbath by unscrewing a medicine bottle for his daughter in pain. Her own father put law and tradition before his own daughter’s wellbeing. In chapter 35, p415 of the paperback, Jesus answers the ‘shall we pay taxes to our oppressor’ trick question with an answer that goes farther than the Bible: “All these laws are passing away. The coming Kingdom will render them all meaningless. To make more of them than they deserve is a mistake.”

I bookmarked that and re-read it several times. Alas, Jesus charges into his next encounter before that point could be elucidated, but it made me wonder. How could Jesus state that not a jot or tittle of the Law would pass away, but yet he would fulfil it, and imply that its observance was both necessary and obsolete? (Matthew 5:15-20; Luke 16:16-17). In what way was he fulfilling it?

Does he mean that this new teaching would crunch the law into a dense space, where all of it was there, but now existed as something else, and the individual laws no longer mattered? Principles rather than particulars? Distilling to just a double decree?

It isn’t just the Torah that needs fulfilling in that way, but our own statutes. It wasn’t just the time of Magdalene or – my other woman, Anne Boleyn – the bringer of the English Reformation out from the distortion of the Catholic church. We have again slipped, as much as their times. Our own world, secular or religious, is filled with laws, some of them arbitrary. I note the repeat of that word in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: no-one shall arbitrarily be [deprived of a right]. I’ve noted how law based the church of England is – which has a set of laws all of its own. I’ve seen churches elsewhere – such as the LGBT focussed Metropolitan Community Church – create hefty legal and policy documents. And yet their byline is ‘Love Liberates’.

As I said in February, I believe it’s time for another reformation, for church, and society: new wine into new wine skins.

My priestess sisters speak of the divine feminine which Mary embodies and brings to us which we and our world so need – this year more than ever. For centuries, we’ve lived away from or matriarchal roots in the distorted masculine, for men and women. It’s created inequality, injustice, division, exploitation.

It values money and power and productivity over being and making for its own sake.

It values what we can get over what we respect.

It values what we can count over what we feel.

It values obedience over co-creation and debate.

It rules by coercion over respectful free will.

It is governed by what can be monetised, owned and contracted.

It’s rule-based rather than principle based; thinking comes before intuition.

Love and spirituality come an embarrassed second to empirically evidenced ‘facts’ – even though we know that facts are malleable and fakeable.

And it’s that which allows me to link this Biblical Goddess to a very different myth…

WONDER WOMAN

Yes, I know. If Magdalene to Boleyn was a jump for you (it was to my PhD supervisors) then to a 20^th C American comic superhero is a leap that even Princess Diana – of that unspellable Greek island [Themyscira] – couldn’t make. Well, have more faith in Wonder Woman and your own imagination, because the link to me is clear.

Wonder Woman has also become significant to me: she was one of the first entries on this blog, 9 years ago. In a way, she too has been downplayed behind her male counterparts, and early Wonder Woman and her polyamorous controversial creator were dragged across decency boards, pushed out of jobs and neighbourhoods. Yes, Wonder Woman was involved in sex scandals, and if you follow the early cartoons, and even the 1970s TV show (happy 69^th for Friday, Lynda Carter), she’s often as bound as those first century demoniacs. She also binds with a lasso, and there are even spanking scenes in the 40s comics. The link to kink is not an accident or an oversight.

The week before, I finally felt constrained to watch the DVD I’d had sitting about from the library all lockdown – Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. I saw it at the cinema in 2018 – the story of Wonder Woman’s professorial creator, who saw his wench in a bathing suit as a psychological tool to influence his young readers. Writing in the Second World War, William Marston (pen name Charles Moulton) believed that women were the future and that it is their leadership which the world needs.

He saw women as men’s equal, and when not held back by them, that women could be even as physically strong, as we see in Princes Diana of the legendary Amazons, whose raising in an extended all girl school island makes her more powerful than the male citizens of even mighty America. The key to women’s great leadership was their tenderness. Her real, essential weapon is love. For the first time… not even just truth and justice, like her older ‘cousin’… but love.

It’s how Wonder Woman stops wars – Make A Hawk A Dove…

Marston also proposed a psychological theory called DISC:

Dominance

Inducement

Submission

Compliance

(Note that I, S and C can stand for other things: I’m going by what was in Angela Robinson’s film)

I’d look at that and assume that the top was the worst and that it improved – not very greatly – as the list descended. But Marston saw it as the other way around. The worst for him was compliance – the begrudging going along with orders. Inducement is about persuasion, but it’s still another finding a way to put their will over yours. But, said Marston, dominance is about the voluntary submission to a loving authority. (Hence the spank parties and lasso in his comics).

But why impose your will on others at all?

Isn’t that broken patriarchy still?

Sounds more like a sexual preference than a way to run a country… although perhaps these subjects are not so far apart. I’m often hearing about the essential need to reclaim sacred sexuality via my priestess sisters, and how this benefits the collective.

DISC feels relevant as much of the world have ceded their authority to WHO and we, as individual citizens, runners of businesses, communities, are asked to cede ours to our country or state. We are told to put others first – but the double commandment says ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ Note the AS. We have mostly kept to lockdown, but there are differing views as to whether this and other measures are necessary or helpful. In England, we’ve a new face covering law (see last and forthcoming post), and I’m wondering: how many are doing this because we think it’s right, and how many are doing it because noncompliance involves punishment? We also have rules imposed on businesses and – worse – places of worship. You are invited to attend a socially distant masked ball mass, no singing, try not to use the toilet. Prebook or come early to avoid disappointment. I wonder how many are in C of DISC because they need to reopen, not because they agree. And so we’re in a state of resentment and vigilance because we’re doing unfair things and perhaps having to pass our pressure onto others because if we don’t make them do what we’re told to, we’re in trouble. Or do some really believe the ‘necessary for your safety’ rhetoric?

The Nanny State, or as Indian investigative journalist Ramola D said last week, Nanny World, is not a D kind of nanny. It may hope for it, but mostly it’s getting a C from us.

I’ve said our world leadership is becoming a Duckula sized nanny – that’s another British kid’s TV reference. The vegetarian vampire is towered over by a large chicken parental figure. But the young Count’s carer is ditzy but endearing. She means well, and her affection is genuine. She calls her charge ‘the master’, for she sees that it’s her job to serve him – not the other way round. She is not tracking him and taking his temperature and swabs from his orifices. She is not asking him to open his bags and his electronic mail. Nanny has no sinister design on the Transylvanian teal teenager. (Can this be said of Igor?) They guide, advise – but he chooses and learns for himself.

In short, Duckula has freewill, as God gives us. So why not our government?

We’re getting a Nurse Ratched kind of nanny (ie that awful psychiatric matron from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). And we know that mental health is not always about our own health and best interests, as that novel and film attests. We are seeing that now physical health is a reason to incarcerate. We need to be vigilant against this, for this is becoming the worst kind of C… and Marston didn’t put down downright tyranny on his model. This is dominance in the way that most of us would view it.

However, I don’t think that D is what Magdalene brings forth. D of Marston’s DISC theory does not stand for ‘divine’ or ‘desirable’. This is not the Goddess energy that Magdalene brings forth.

The Christian God is often asking us to trust, but it’s different to human authority; and I query that kind of God too.

Submission and voluntary surrender to someone that you’ve learned to trust is quite different. Such surrender can only be divine, and interpersonal. Freewill remains.

I will cede that the Magdalene I’ve heard proclaimed many times via my priestess sisters (and brothers – she’s for men too) is hard to see in Gospels, just as the Wonder Woman of early comics is not a heroine I’m always impressed by… but something transcends their male scribed stories. I know that their essence stands for a larger truth. It’s time to unveil that truth.

Lauri Ann Lumby sees the seven demons of Mary as a full initiation into Christ consciousness. This made me think of the dance of the seven veils, stripping away the layers and coverings of untruth that mask the true nature of God, Mary, and us.

It’s time to take off the veils that separate us, the veils based in hierarchy and law, not in love and mutuality; to rebuild using new values, not resurrect the old paradigm; to love ourselves as much as those around us; and to not need a commandment to love our divine maker, but to enter into that relationship freely and joyfully, knowing that Spirit is love beyond measure, wisdom unsearchable; who has beaten all invisible enemies and is our invisible, but palpable, Friend.

The next planned sermon is for 13^th September: truth telling day

LISTEN AT  https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/wonder-women-a-sermon-for-magdalene-day

AN OPEN LETTER ABOUT MASKS AND OTHER COVID-RELATED RULES

I wish to challenge the upcoming rules about masks, and also taking our contact details in pubs.

One – I think this shows how arbitrary law creation can be, and that it can contravene what we know to be right and fair; but even within law:

No statutes can contravene Common Law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a global, inalienable set of articles.

Lockdown has broken almost every one, and letting us out legislation has the potential for more.

But even so called emergencies can’t override these rights.

There is also the query that coronavirus a) was and b) still is an emergency, because figures have been greatly exaggerated and other narratives pushed aside. Many whistleblowers in medicine and science have queried the true infection rates, the death rates, the very nature of germ theory vs terrain – and thus how data has been used to justify government actions.

The act being used in Britain, The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 (note the year), states that emergency contingency must be proportional. If the disease isn’t as deadly or widespread in a dangerous way, then the laws are disproportional and thus not valid. They also are valid for only a short period – we have overreached ours.

Many doctors also state that masks don’t help protect. Studies are vague (one being cited in April was retracted, but it relied on only 5 people). I have read many times the common sense approach that masks hold in our old breath, making any germs go round and round our respiratory system, thus making us ill. But masks aren’t designed or effective for stopping what we breathe out seeping beyond the mask.

Masks make hearing aids out fall out; glasses steam up; they exacerbate breathing issues (this is allowed for in legislation, thus they know that masks aren’t good for us); they promote fear, obfuscate conversation and emotional connection; they can look sinister.

There is a strange shift from WHO and other medical officials from saying: masks are not necessary for the healthy general public, especially in outdoor or brief indoor encounters; to sudden regulations requiring them – as lockdowns eased.

This seems a highly political move, to keep fear and the economy moving side by side.

Is this law or guidance? The latter can’t be enforced, the former only by police.

Hence chairman of the Federation of Police of England and Wales, John Apter, who quickly made a statement to newspapers at the news, is wrong to say that mask wearing should be a condition of entry to shops. He’s really saying: the police don’t want the job, so we’ll push it onto front of house staff – who are privately contracted employees, some of whom aren’t even employed to do security.

He also made a statement that masks are necessary – but he’s not a medical specialist, and neither is that his role to make or stipulate policy.

I had hoped that the first bit of his statement meant he and the police were an ally, and I’d love for them to refuse to enforce such an arbitrary, difficult rule.

Recently reopened cafes in England are being asked to take customers’ contact details at the door. Mostly, you’re not warned of this and there’s not a notice to tell you the conditions, (eg how long are they held, by whom, and exactly what for.)

This is contact tracing through the back door: who deems that there has been an outbreak of COVID among customers and requires them to be told to self isolate? Is this going to be checked or enforced? I can see that this is also a compliance test as well as a possible excuse for house arrest and collection of genetic material and treatment – not in the patient’s interest.

I pointed out that this is a data protection breach, the terms of which are unclear. We don’t usually have to do this to enter a library, so why now? Why are security staff – not library employees – allowed to take this information?

I can see how this is a compliance exercise and several are worried about further stages.

This may not seem too unreasonable – but what follows?

We shouldn’t need a doctor’s note – they’re hard to get to, and it assumes a condition that the mainstream health system understands whilst ensuring you’re in their system.

For a security guard or police officer to ask for our medical history is an intrusion.

I note the inconsistency: passengers must wear a mask on the socially distanced bus – but the driver doesn’t. You can sit round a pub table with your friends for an evening, maskless, but not swiftly move through the supermarket where you’re meant to be 2m apart… or was that 1 now, Boris… we’re really not sure. We’ve shopped all along – why the sudden panic?

Masks make us ill. If you think different, by all means…. if you think it reassures your customers…

but don’t require it, or make it a division and something for strangers to argue over, or employers to threaten staff with.

John Miltimore, editor of the Foundation for Economic Education, said

“Good ideas don’t need force.”

And bad ones… perhaps that is why force is being used. For nothing about this – spending money we may not have, thanks to lockdown, on masks that I frequency see discarded, that make us ill…

Have you noted how much coronavirus rhetoric is about others before you?

Wearing something, washing something, giving something should not be a government condition of opening or entering.

I reiterate that right to work (23), to associate (20), freedom of movement (13), to participate in cultural life (27), to a good standard of living – food, clothes, supplies (25), leisure (24) access to services (21) – are all enshrined the UDHR and thus denying these is not legal, especially as this is effectively penalising for one’s opinion – also forbidden under UDHR (18/19).

And there’s no exceptions (30), no discrimination (2).

‘The Will of the People is the basis for authority in government’ – UDHR 21.3

These laws are not and therefore, being deleterious to the same, are not lawful, nor moral.

Hence these regulations need to be dropped as recommendations only and give the people the choice of whether to go elsewhere, and never have their livelihood dependent on it.

And to the papers who say that mask-refusers are less intelligent:

I think the tenure and vocabulary of this article (somewhat abridged) proves this invalid.

On Sovereignty

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/on-sovereignty-a-sermon-for-independence-day

Priestess Elayne Kalila Doughty has proclaimed yesterday – America’s Independence Day – an International Day of Sovereignty. And in Sisterhood, I am doing likewise.

I think that when priestesses talk about ‘stepping into your sovereignty’, they mean, owning all parts of yourself and being responsible for them; of making your own choices; of becoming all that you are; of awakening and using all of your spiritual gifts.

I say ‘amen’ to all that, but that’s not really the sort of sovereignty I want to discuss.

I also think that priestesses mean that stepping into our sovereignty is stepping out of oppressive structures, and awakening to the ways in which we are oppressed or allow oppression to happen; we may even be oppressors. That’s closer to what I want to say.

I’ve mentioned sovereignty several times in recent posts, as the virus – aren’t you bored of  that as a character in your world? – has put an ultimate question into sharp relief.

I’m not talking old British coins, or our Queen, or a one time chicken factory group.

I’m not even talking about God, although I will.

I’m taking about us vs the state.

Doing a little research, I was intrigued by the phrase Sovereign Citizen, but I could find no website of such proponents, or even a neutral discussion. Each search result was about the fear felt by the ‘enforcement community’ – conglomerate, more like – of such people. America’s Southern Poverty Law Center is actually about hoiking out extremism – but just how exactly is questioning the state’s role attached to poverty?

What search results really show is what the mainstream wants us to think. Sovereign Citizens – I keep thinking of those chickens – are a threat, we’re told. They’re silly. There’s even a false website with a crude message to would-be sovereigns. They’re dangerous. They do harm. They think they’re above the law. (I’ll analyse that statement in another post). The FBI are after them. They have no legal basis – duh! If they don’t believe in the power of law, why would they even seek a legal basis? However, I have read claims to have found it. I’ve always been against anti-extremist laws, for I can see that this term is a wide net to silence dissent, and that it’s been cast and tightened for some time. As long as there are enough incidents, especially of terrorism, we can allow the law to get stricter. In Britain, we have a regime called Prevent where professionals such as teachers are meant to report, on pain of losing their own jobs, anyone coming into contact with them who sound like they might be extremist. Yes, even toddlers have been reported.

Extremism is clearly meant to be tethered with terrorism in our minds. Terrorism is a broad term and it’s used really about enemies of the state. When heinous acts are committed, we are meant to link these bombings with alternative mindsets; so that for example, the work of the Irish Republican Army and Irish Catholic independence went together. Of course they did not, and there were lesser known Protestant pro British equivalents to the IRA; and still less known were that Irish police and British troops – who the news showed us as necessary peacekeepers, if not heroes – were bullying the people. I only learned that two decades after the peacefire in a museum in Free Derry.

We are being encouraged to see those who declare themselves as Free, ie Sovereign, as a form of terrorism, although I’m not aware that Sovereign Citizens have bombed anyone or taken up weapons of any kind, or are even an organised group.

I hate that Wikipedia comes up top of search results – I try to switch it off, for it is part of the Bubble we’re meant to live in, the bubble controlled by algorithms and powerful large corporations as well as our governments and those who work for them, who censor non approved narratives. They seem to have an opinion on sovereignty too.

The first result in a box is that sovereignty is a ‘legal doctrine’. I thought that only religions had those. Oh, I forgot that the Rule of Law is one, which thinks it can override our own principles and faith. I suspect that all faiths have had to miss an important holy day due to lockdown, and that deeply upset me that my government thought that it could tell Christians that we had to miss Easter – our central festival, the fulcrum of our faith. I’ve said that I believe that church and state should be separate, and this statement is usually that established religion should not steer the state; but I mean most of all that the state has no power over faith.

One of my issues with the rule of law is that it makes law – an undemocratic, nebulous, arcane and elitist construct – bigger than our God, and our own conscience.

Law is often not about what’s right, but about control. It often suits a few rather than all and it means that our enforcement officers – I’ll be back with more posts on them – spend their days mostly pulling up on petty actions deemed to be ‘offenses’ which often shift. There are people and groups they are encouraged to worry about, but that is about conditioning. When your secret ‘services’ feel that an appropriate response to green activists is to blow them up (the Rainbow Warrior), when you infiltrate these groups long term and have kids with them to learn of their plans, when M15 know Greenpeace’s membership, it says alot [sic] – and not good things – about the values behind who’s running our society.

One of the questions I want to ask us together is what sort of society we have, and even if we have one. We’re meant to assume that we have a state, can’t escape it – I’m struggling to think of a place on Earth that doesn’t, especially who might be able to read this and introduce themselves.

But even saying this might be considered extremism. And that’s wrong. Look how anarchy – a possible cousin of Sovereign Citizens – is seen as ‘lawlessness’ – a state to fear.

But what of fearing the state?

When you read that the opposite of anarchy – which is merely no organised hierarchical rule – is statism, you realise that having a state is a thing. And therefore, you have an option not to have it. It’s especially questionable when again, the easy answers I despise on the net tell me that my country’s state is the sovereign force in it. Parliament is supposed to hold government to account (do note the word for our leadership), but it’s also the sovereign law making body, and of course, we’re meant to live under the law.

——————–

I’ve been looking at law in the Bible recently. What kind of God made all the laws – 600 odd – that the Jewish people had to live with, controlling every aspect of their lives? I’ll say more for Magdalene day, the 22^nd July (or the Sunday following); but I want to note how living under the law is about ceding your sovereignty in many aspects of what you do. Who is sovereign and who is accountable go together. Those who are supposed to be civil servants – that’s serving us, not the High Heid’yins – are accountable to the people, not the other way around. I note that the services which our government, at any level, provides, almost covers everything we do. Thus by providing it, they also own it and have sway over it. Publicly owned means publicly paid for… for do we really have meaningful say or clout regarding most matters? Think: our streets, our education, our car parks, our pay, who lives with us… all connected to the government: they either provide it, want to know about it, or to give permission for it. They can expect us to ask permission to have chairs outside our cafe and signage outside our church – yet did they ask our permission for new CCTV and other dodgy watching devices? Or even distruptive road works and events?

During the lockdown, most of us round the world have felt that our leadership have tested how far that they can take their sovereignty, in relation to our own. We’ve had our bodies and homes even intruded into; our association and work and places of worship, our special treats and rights of passage – even saying goodbye to people who leave the earth – curtailed or banned. The more we’ve done electronically, the more our transactions have been trackable. Many of us have if not assented, acquiesced by default. We’ve stayed in and 6ft/2m apart and asked our customers to; we’ve queued; we’ve not gone into work or round our neighbours. We’ve followed the arrows (now on pavements!) and stood on the markers, like some game. Indeed, some wonder if this isn’t some prescripted charade we’re participating in…

Recently, some maintenance men wanted to do an annual check. The government expects it, they said. I am sick of the government telling me who I can and cannot have in my home; and why does this stranger, which is quite a nuisance, think that they can come in when my loved ones – save my ‘Bubble Buddy’!! – cannot?

Surely the only person who can really say who comes into my home is…me!

————–

Free Cannabis – yes that’s his name – of Glastonbury, where else? – writes a poem on his website about being given over to the crown at birth via his birth certificate. He couldn’t opt out, not as a bairn nor man. It’s a lifelong non-negotiable contract. Is that legally true? It’s a legitimate way of seeing it – see how law creeps in everywhere? We are kind of slaves to the state, paying into it without choice in return for provision and protection… which sounds very ominous. And we can’t really leave, for the next country, who may not have us, will have its own set of rules and expect sovereignty over us too. Is there anywhere on Earth that we can live in our own sovereignty?

————————-

I want to discuss God and sovereignty. Those with faith have sometimes been seen as suspicious to a different faith or no faith government. It’s because believers believe that their ultimate authority is God and not any human leader. It’s why communist governments fear religion, and why the Anglican church feared Catholics – whose head was a powerful man of another empire – and all the nonconformists who just went straight to the Top – ie God. A pamphlet written in this very city four hundred years and thirty ago was burned, and its readers executed, because Robert Browne stated that a judge didn’t have authority in matters of faith. He asked that believers did not wait for the state to allow them to build new Christian communities, and said that giving civil authorities such power to violently punish made magistrates into gods and ‘worse than beasts’. This incensed our church/state hybrid, whose central pillar was the elevated power of the judiciary. A Treatise of Reformation Without Tarrying For Anie is still a hard book to get hold of.

In a public extremism consultation in Britain, there were suggestions of who might be extremists, and all the faiths we have here were given as options to tick.

I’m not going to reveal where, lest this site is attacked, but I stumbled upon an American Christian website who argues from law and scripture that we are free – that is, sovereign – citizens. They say that as Christians, God alone is sovereign of our lives.

They say that in their country, sovereignty, whilst delegated to the government, remains with the people; that since Jesus, we are no longer under the law; and that we are foreign – in that Christians are pilgrims passing through Earth, whose real home is in Glory – so that a different legal status can be conferred, via the FSI Act, giving them immunity. There’s advice on how to gain that, and what and what not to do.

Living under the law is slavery, they say. Be Not Conformed Of This World!

I have never heard Romans 12:2 used in that way before, but I love it!

An unlikely ally for me, she who is gay and woo woo friendly, but I do like to find fellowship in wide and unexpected places. Perhaps the very traditional Christians (when I don’t look up some of their other views) are kindred in that they are thinking for themselves and using God alone as their guide. Perhaps that’s why fundamentalism in any religion is literally given a bad press.

The other unexpected Christian ally – found via a nonchristian website – was a Catholic Archbishop, Carlo Vigano. He recently wrote an open letter to Trump L’Oeil.

No I do not agree with Carlo’s idea of what a good citizen is. Family excludes those who don’t have families; I fear that he means the permanent pairing of heterosexuals with values that would make me squeal from here to [titular] Ulpiana. I resented his working to make prosperity for the homeland; but then perhaps this is a clever letter, writing exactly what Trump would like to read whilst being credibly true to Catholic values. I didn’t agree with Carlo’s hell statements either. But I did like that he called out the imbalance of wealth; of creating division; that investigations are showing deliberate use of the virus for nefarious political means by the Deep State.

He even spoke of deep church! Dare I call this man a brother?

He’s awake, and he’s speaking out, against the New World Order, the powers of darkness (not giving you capitals – victory is already given to us, the side of Light), and against those in the church (he means his own, presumably, I mean literally catholic – Universal) who are willing servants by their conformity.

Perhaps in his own words:

I dare to believe that both of us are on the same side in this battle, albeit with different weapons.

——————–

This is a time to regain our sovereignty, not to further give it away.

Our governments’ right and method of ruling must be carefully examined. That isn’t extremism – any who call it so are a fearful, controlling bully of a leadership and their lackeys.

I took my faith apart once. I decided, then, that I could rebuild it as it was, but it felt stronger having been prepared to not rebuild, or to rebuild anew.

I am wary of the role of licensing, which gives the government power over what we can do in many aspects of our life, from film viewing to fishing. I am concerned when decriminalisation amounts to regulation, which really means revenue control. We might want to protect our fish and our film industry, but the real protection is proprietory – these are OUR fish; we want money from OUR film. To be explored more another time. It also shows that what’s legal isn’t about what’s good but what the government and the powerful businesses who steer it want in on, or to have the power to stop.

It’s the last of these – about places of worship – that I’ll address before my round up.

In the late 17^th Century in Britain, after over a century of persecution (and after Robert Browne), forbidden new – ie dissenting – churches were at last ‘allowed’ to meet openly. They were, as the law called it, generously tolerated. But they needed a license for their chapels, from the state, which was the Anglican church. (Catholics had to wait until the 19^th century). Thus the Church of England patrolled its rivals, as its men had done, seeking secret services, breaking up, imprisoning, fining, torturing. Thus it was using fear and punishment to gain full sway, expecting tithes and maintenance by force from those who were not worshipping with it. It meant that it showed itself as sovereign, even though some people had opted out.

In Communist regimes, churches which weren’t banned also required a license, such as in China today. It again means that an all-seeing government feels it must give permission for people to express their beliefs and meet together, and if you give, you can take away – as in the book of Job (he’ll be a sermon soon). But it’s the state, not the Lord, who can hoik back, and make conditions, and inspect us to decide if we’re meeting its standards, and shut us down if not, and thus we are not free.

———————

Another thing that those priestess sisters did was to withdraw consent for all injustice. It began with the awful racist police killings in May, but now we’re asking about the very inequality and bias behind such acts that underpin society.

I like the idea of withdrawing consent.

I even better like what She-Ra – there’s a sermon in her – said:

I will not co-operate with evil.

I wonder how we can show that – and that means enforcement officers and judges; people who could report or litigate or punish something that actually is about prejudice and not fairness. So if you’re tempted to report this or other people’s social media remarks or speeches, think: what am I consenting to and encouraging to happen? (Hint: secular heresy).

When I call a sovereign citizen a dangerous freak to be stopped and weeded out, have I stopped to ask what sovereign citizenry might mean? Have I thought that this attitude of labelling nonconformity as ‘extremism’ is the state protecting itself? Am I suspicious that the remit of all English-speaking spy groups is to uphold capitalism? (Check their websites). Have I considered history or philosophy, psychology or spirituality before I made that critical statement, let alone that arrest or sentence?

So…I withdraw my consent from all the things I’ve spoken out against already.

I withdraw it from a fear based, self perpetuating status quo, from being unable to question, from a nebulous law and state pyramid which is afraid that it’s crumbling, or about to be inverted. (Hear the Magnificat). I withdraw my consent from all isms, and yes, assumed statism is one, and demonising those who dare query it is another.

I am sovereign, under God and the Double Commandment, and so are you.

Listen at https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/on-sovereignty-a-sermon-for-independence-day

The next planned sermon will be for Magdalene day