I May Not Agree With What You Say but I Will Defend to the Death
High-profile discrimination cases in the courts are regularly said to demonstrate the degree of intolerance and bigotry that however infest Uk today, and the need to accept steps to do something about it. An employment tribunal case last week is a case in point, but maybe not in the manner you might wait.
In Jan 2019 Seyi Omooba, a hitherto modestly successful simply still struggling Nigerian extra, was signed upwardly past Leicester'due south Curve Theatre. The production was an adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, taking place at the Curve and so later at the Birmingham Hippodrome. She was to play Celie, a character with notoriously lesbian overtones.
The day after the casting was announced, an thespian with no connectedness with the production sprang a revelation on Twitter. Well-nigh five years earlier Miss Omooba had made information technology articulate in a Facebook post that she regarded homosexuality every bit beingness forbidden by Biblical teaching and morally unacceptable. "Practise you notwithstanding stand by this post?" he thundered: "Or are you happy to remain a hypocrite? Seeing as y'all've now been announced to be playing an LGBTQ character, I call back y'all owe your LGBTQ peers an explanation. Firsthand."
All hell bankrupt loose. The Bend asked Miss Omooba whether this five-year-old pronouncement still represented her belief. She replied, honestly and in conscience, that it did. A week after the theatre sacked her (though it did offer to pay her wages), on the ground that any performance with her in it would face boos and protests from the audition and LGBT protesters and be "untenable".
Ii days after that happened, her agency also dropped her similar a hot murphy. Its managing director took the view that she was bad for its image and that its employees would not want to work with someone with views "offensive to the LGBTQ+ community and beyond".
The result was that, having previously had a promising acting career, Miss Omooba's prospects of hereafter work were now at all-time highly stunted. She sued both the theatre and the agency for breach of contract and religious discrimination. Her claim failed. At that place is no need to bore readers with the legal technicalities. Suffice it to say, nonetheless, that in that location were some interesting features.
Not-lawyers might notice a whiff of casuistry at the finding that she had been sacked not because of her religious views simply considering of others' dislike of, and refusal to work with her because of, those aforementioned views. Furthermore, it might have been tactful had the members of the tribunal not really said that they personally found her opinions offensive and distasteful, on the tendentious basis that they denied "the foundation of some other person's integrity and identity."
It is also noteworthy that they also added that anything going beyond expressing views every bit to the sinfulness of aforementioned-sex relations, such as approving of conversion therapy, was so outrageous as to be across the law's protection – a view that, however legally sound, some might observe highly disconcerting.
But enough of the constabulary. The social impact of this episode is more than important. Put bluntly, information technology is difficult to encounter anyone, apart perchance from Miss Omooba herself, who comes well out of it. In particular, almost no-1 said what might exist regarded equally obvious to any liberal observer: namely, that whatever her views might exist, in that location was room in the theatrical world for amicable coexistence between her and those who disagreed with her. (The closest anyone came seems to have been the chairman of the theatre's Board of Trustees, who at to the lowest degree had the decency to say she should not exist penalised for her views).
Take commencement the thespian who started the debacle past spilling the beans almost the Facebook post. By and so a successful and adequately well-known performer in his own right, he used his status to prejudice the position of a younger actress with whom he disagreed, who was nonetheless attempting to observe her feet in a very difficult profession.
It was unattractive, many might say, gratuitously to publicise a long-dead Facebook post by her in the knowledge that it would probably turn an employer against her and crusade her to be sacked and maybe lose her career. To anyone who believes in liberty of stance and live and let live, it was even less attractive then to go further, as he did, and tweet his congratulations to the theatre after it won its instance against her.
Nor did the problem lie just with the actor who started the ball rolling. Anyone who thinks the progressive and theatrical world is somehow a buoy of open-mindedness needs only to read well-nigh others involved in this affair to see things from a rather different bending.
The news editor of trade newspaper The Phase said he felt "betrayed" past Miss Omooba's presence in the acting profession with the views she had. The artistic and musical directors of the Curve seem to take fabricated information technology pretty clear from the outset that however good an actress she might be, they were unhappy continuing to work, or having the Bend go on to work, with someone sharing her beliefs. Furthermore, if we are to believe the judgment of the Employment Tribunal, so did at least 1 performer in the production.
The same view was every bit expressed, it seems, by a number of clients and employees of the bureau. Their willingness to have a professional relationship with it patently did not extend to tolerating its representation of someone on its books who had opinions they did not similar.
Furthermore, at to the lowest degree if the belief of the director of the Curve was correct in his belief, Midlands theatre-goers themselves would adjust their views of Miss Omooba not simply on how good or convincing she was on phase, only what her individual opinions on sexual matters were off it, and handclapping or boo her accordingly.
None of this, to say the least, makes for attractive reading. Nor does it bode well for the idea of a properly diverse arts scene, in the sense of an surface area where a variety of views can exist expressed without fear of exclusion or worse. If we regard a bigot every bit someone who is not only firmly and undetachably wedded to a belief or opinion, but too shows antagonistism towards those who who disagree with him and a willingness to disadvantage them, there can be simply one conclusion.
In contrast to the attitude of Miss Omooba, who by all accounts was perfectly willing to piece of work aslope those who disagreed with her, bigotry and intolerance remain alive, well and flourishing in and beyond the Leicester theatrical community. And more depressingly still, it seems most at least of those involved in that community are quite happy, from what they run across as the best of motives, to go along things that way.
Unlike some, I'll go along an open heed. Just at nowadays I recall I'll probably exist giving Leicester a wide berth one time theatres are open over again.
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Source: https://salisburyreview.com/i-may-not-agree-with-what-you-say-but-i-will-defend-to-the-death-my-right-to-silence-you/
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