Abstract
Why is the Polish Catholic church worried about Winnie the Pooh’s gender?
Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek takes off his robes after he conducted the ritual of Confirmation at a church in Poronin near Nowy Targ, southern Poland, March 3, 2013
Credit: Kacper Pempel/Reuters
A religious war is raging in Poland, and Winnie the Pooh is its latest casualty. In November, the city council in the town of Turczyn denied a motion to name a municipal playground after the AA Milne character, beloved by generations of Polish children. Pooh’s gender was unclear, councilpersons argued, and Pooh does not even wear pants; a local ursine cartoon character, who at least covers his or her underbelly, was chosen instead. In more clement times Pooh’s gender would not have mattered – there is even a street in downtown Warsaw named after him – but Poland’s Catholic episcopate has declared “gender ideology” a fundamental threat to the nation. “Gender,” Archbishop Tadeusz Pieronek, otherwise considered a liberal, burst out in a public debate in June 2013, “is a worse threat than Nazism and communism combined”.
Officially, the Polish episcopate does not go that far. In a pastoral letter issued in December 2013, it simply condemned “the gender ideology’s … deeply destructive nature both in respect to the person and to interpersonal relations, and therefore to the totality of social life.” What aroused the bishop’s ire was the idea that gender, as opposed to sex, is a socially learned role. This might lead to the pernicious situation in which gender equality would be taught in schools. “Some parents,” warned Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, another liberal, “like teaching boys that they should clean up after themselves, instead of waiting for girls to do it.” Ultimately, as Bishop Marek Mendyk pointed out, “gender ideology might even lead to the denial of God”.
This is why the Polish episcopate is vehemently opposed to the European Convention on Domestic Violence and has so far successfully blocked all attempts at its ratification. Its opposition centres on the convention’s Article 12, which calls on parties to uproot “customs, traditions and all other practices based on the idea of the inferiority of women”, which the church fears would introduce “gender ideology” through the kitchen door, as it were, and give it legal footing. Poland signed the convention in 2012, but successful delaying tactics in parliament, conducted conjointly by conservative MPs, both from the opposition and the ruling coalition, have prevented its passing as law. Finally in spring this year, the ruling centre-right Civic Platform had the convention passed in parliament. Then President Bronislaw Komorowski signed it into law, attacting criticism from the church and Andrzej Duda, now the new president. Duda has previously backed a proposal to ban IVF, which would mean doctors and women being sent to jail for using it.
This is a serious problem in a country in which, according to the police, there were 135,000 victims of domestic violence in 2010. (Since then the methodology used has changed and the number of victims fell by half accordingly, but there is a steady annual increase.) It is fair to say that victims of domestic violence are also – indirectly – victims of the policies of the Catholic church. This is especially significant as the church obviously condemns domestic violence. It simply disagreed that traditional gender roles have anything to do with it.
“Gender”, an archbishop burst out, “is a worse threat than Nazism and communism combined”
To the contrary – some clergymen argue that the undermining of such roles is a source of pathological behaviour. Condemning “gender” as a “departure not only from divine law, but from the law of nature”, Archbishop Józef Michalik, former chair of the episcopate, argued that paedophilia, which plagues the Catholic church, is a consequence of “unhealthy relations between parents”, which make their child “cling” to others. Therefore, “it loses itself and drags that other person behind” – the “other person” being a paedophile.
The Polish case is but one example among many. The point is not whether one agrees with a given ecclesiastic interpretation of divine revelation. It is whether it is legitimate for that – or any other – religious interpretation to influence legislation. From a fundamentalist perspective, of course, only this is legitimate. Conservative Polish MP Halina Nowina-Konopka, of the Christian National Union, once famously said: “An accidental civil society has no right to decide on the unpunishability of abortion.” Since God, according to Catholic church teachings, has decided that human life begins at conception, abortion is murder and should be treated as such; citizens in a referendum, or parliament in a vote, have no right to pronounce themselves. The Polish law on abortion, though ultimately passed in parliament and not by referendum, is in consequence one of Europe’s most restrictive.
It should of course be noted that most democracies have sets of basic laws that are considered so fundamental that changing them is extremely difficult. Enshrined in constitutions or bills of rights, they represent a broad consensus on equality under the law, universal suffrage and basic rights and freedoms. But Nowina-Konopka calls the source of this consensus in Poland an “accidental civil society”, which has no voice once God has spoken.
Yet the church has not shown itself averse to using this “accidental civil society” and its representatives to enforce its views, as seen in the delaying of the passing of the European Convention. In another example, in 2013 in Croatia the church led a successful campaign for a referendum to enshrine in the constitution of marriage as a prerogative of heterosexual couples only. The government responded by courageously passing in parliament a Life Partnership Act, making homosexual couples equal to heterosexual ones in all but the right to adopt children. Yet liberal-minded Croatians now fear that the church might use its influence to introduce a constitutional ban on abortion.
While the use of the spiritual power of the church for passing legislation might – and should – be a matter of concern, firstly for the members of that church, it nonetheless is not a breach of democratic principles. Like any other association, group or lobby, it has the right to promote its goals, using legitimate and democratic means. If liberals disagree with these goals, as in the cases described above, they should do a better job of convincing “accidental civil society” that they are right – and attempting to reverse gains made by the church.
One has to recognise, however, that once such gains are enshrined in the constitution, reversing them might be very difficult, and potentially damaging to the integrity of the constitution itself, by showing, if successful, the transient and temporary character of its regulations. Herein resides the fundamental menace faith-based limitations of freedom can pose in a democracy. This is particularly visible in constitutions passed before a new democratic system has had the time to emerge and solidify. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, contains all the conventional guarantees of democracy and rule of law, in sharp contradistinction to its monarchist antecedent. Yet it also vests sovereignty in God, not in the people, and the overriding powers it gave to the supreme leader and the Guardian Council, representing the sovereign, has made the guarantees fiction.
Israel has no constitution, but its Declaration of Independence contains relevant democratic and rule of law commitments, which had since been largely borne out. Yet the new state also elected to continue, for reasons of political expedience, the British mandate practice of relegating issues of personal status to recognised religious communities, with the stipulation that each citizen must belong to one. This not only resulted in the severe and well-known curtailment of personal freedoms of non-religious citizens, but also in drastic limitations of the religious freedoms of non-recognised communities. Israel is the only country outside of the Islamic world to severely limit Jewish religious practice, refusing – in deference to the rulings of the chief rabbinate – to recognise non-Orthodox Jewish denominations. It is worth noting that the rabbinate itself is elected by a largely unelected assembly. Non-Orthodox rabbis cannot be appointed rabbis of Israeli localities, their services cannot be held at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and so forth. But also, in deference to rabbinate rulings, the government enforces a ban on Jewish prayer of any denomination on Temple Mount, the ancient site of the Jewish temples where now the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand. While the ban might be politically expedient, or even commendable, it is a major civil rights violation.
Still, Israel is a democracy, if a somewhat hobbled one, and even Iran allows for limited expression of the popular will. The Arab Spring, however, brought forward – somewhat to the surprise of Western liberals – Islamic fundamentalist parties that seemed to adhere to the principle of one man, one vote, one time. In Egypt, a popular military coup toppled the authoritarian, though democratically elected, Islamist government; elsewhere, attempts to overthrow authoritarian regimes have degenerated into violent anarchy. Tunisia is the only example of Islamists accepting the sovereignty of the “accidental civil society” which had emancipated itself from secular dictatorship and does not want to trade in that freedom for a new, religious authoritarianism. Even Turkey, long lauded as an example of successful marriage between Islamism and democracy, seems to be in the process of divorcing the latter.
Religions, like any other organised social force, can be a threat to freedom by those who do not share their goals. As long, however, as they recognise the sovereignty of the people, this threat is conditional and reversible, or at least containable – if uncomfortably real.
© Konstanty Gebert