ONE of the reasons that raising questions regarding government and police campaigns about domestic violence is difficult is because we all, or at least everyone I know, myself included, think that beating your wife or partner is a despicable act. Our sympathy for victims should not, however, mean that we shut down our critical faculties or, worse still, try to shut down those who raise questions about it.
Unfortunately, following my article last week, that questioned the Scottish Government’s latest campaign about domestic violence, this is exactly what happened. In the process, it demonstrated one of the points I was trying to make, that some issues are now so moralised and tied up with a sense of virtue that to raise the most basic of questions is to risk an authoritarian and deeply intolerant assault.
As well as calls for me to be sacked and suggestions that I must clearly beat my wife or girlfriend, politicians lined up on Twitter to shame The Herald and to demand the article be taken down.
Green MSP Patrick Harvie described the article as, “positively dangerous”. SNP MP Mhairi Black questioned, “Why would something as dangerous as this ever be published? Cabinet Secretary for Justice Humza Yousaf argued that, “this article should not have been published”, and SNP MP Kirsten Oswald said that, “This is really disgraceful. You should take it down right now”.
There were a few dissenting voices. One from the critical social work consultant Maggie Mellon who explained that she disagreed with me but that, “it is wrong to call for censorship. It’s called a free press”.
Stuart Waiton: Is domestic violence campaign a knee jerk reaction?
We live in strange times, when liberals and radicals not only lack the ability to raise questions about growing police powers around issues that have been politicised and moralised. But worse still, when self-proclaimed “progressives” call for articles, ideas and thoughts to be extinguished.
In George Orwell’s novel 1984 he called this Newspeak, a process of eliminating or altering certain words and ideas, “designed to diminish the range of thought” in society for political purposes. Today we find those in authority use the emotional sentiment of vulnerability and victimhood to condemn certain words and ideas as so "dangerous" that they need to be taken down, eliminated.
History, I suspect, will treat these politicians harshly, as shameful authoritarians who are attempting to undermine the most basic of freedoms.
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