I knew this was going to spawn a rant, and I even guessed which poster. And lo! here he is. On form, as well:
We’d have you inform yourself before assuming, like an absolute idiot, that the Archbishop of motherfucking Canterbury endorses public stonings. Because he plainly doesn’t. I realise this is going to take a lot of the fun out of your rant, but them’s the breaks when you live in the real world.
Moving back from bizarro-land, let’s look at what he actually said, shall we? In fact, let’s just check what he didn’t say first.
Good, I’m glad we’ve got that established; the man has explicitly denied what you insist on assuming. This shows rather neatly that you didn’t read past the headline of the Evening Standard before spaffing off your OP, but we’ll gloss over that, shall we? Aren’t we kind. So what did he say? Well, here’s the full text (warning: PDF). I’m not going to quote at length (not least because it’ll be completely wasted on the OP), but the gist is this:
Dr Williams believes that an optional increased judicial standing for some areas of religious (not just Islamic) law might (might!) be beneficial in terms of societal cohesion; i.e. that rather than treating religious strictures as a complete irrelevance, it might help if the law recognised that some people might choose to adhere to them, and might benefit from their having legal standing. Scholar that he is, he thoughtfully identifies several major problems with this:
[ul][li]Vexatious appeals to scruple - he wants no more than anyone to see trifling and unsubstantiated religious objections bothering the secular (he gives the example of a Muslim woman working at M&S who reportedly refused to handle a book of Bible stories).[/li][li]The reinforcement of repressive traditions - how truly “voluntary” could a Sharia family court be in the face of patriarchal tradition?[/li][li]The implications of compromising the idea of judicial monopoly - given that many of our most important societal norms are based on the idea of equality before the law, what implications do “supplementary jurisdictions” have for our broader society and the assumptions on which it’s based?[/ul][/li]Again, being a thoughtful man he offers no easy answers, nor does he draw any binding conclusions. He makes some very interesting points about our current notion of a “human right”, noting that there seems to be an implicit assumption that having been blessed with these things, it’s our duty to exercise them at all times. He asks whether people might want to subsume certain rights to a religious belief, and whether it’s our responsibility to save themselves from their own choice.
What he pointedly does not say at any point is that there should be stonings and executions for apostasy. Because he’s not an idiot. Anyway. Hopefully this illustrates how a nuanced and thoughtful speech by a clever and well-meaning man has been utterly mangled by a moron.