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Identity politics serves to corrupt the notions of morality, common sense, and what it means to live in a society under the rule of law.  This is a brief examination of a twitter thread I stumbled across about the recent cases of Catholic Churches being burnt down as misguided retaliation for the residential school system that was in place in Canada.

” SASKATOON — A former Polish Roman Catholic church in rural Saskatchewan was destroyed by fire Thursday.

The church was located near Redberry Lake, which is about 80 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon.

Lynn Swystun, who lives about a mile and a half west of the church, says she noticed smoke from her yard around 12:15 p.m. then drove to the area and discovered the church engulfed in flames.”

(read the full story here)

Now here is where it gets interesting, this is a response to the story.

Wait, what?  Where exactly is the conflation happening?  Damage to places of worship, in my books, is damage to places of worship.  But apparently, in Nora’s world, your identity is also somehow a factor that should be used to categorize the level of violence, determining whether the violence is ‘valid’ or not.

If you’ve been with us here DWR you know that I’m not exactly the biggest supporter of organized religion and all the tomfoolery it is responsible for.  But, even being the anti-religious soul that I am, I wouldn’t attempt to order and rank attacks on places of worship into ‘worthy’ and ‘less worthy’ categories.

What kind of internal moral compass is Nora going by here?

The hell?  It isn’t a hate crime to burn down a place of worship because of a political/ideological motivation?  And, yes the actions of the Catholic Church are indeed pretty horrible, but burning down a church is not how we express our displeasure in a nominally civilized society that values the rule of law.

Just in case if you missed it.  This is the moral wasteland that much of identity politics leads to.  The level of oppression Catholics face in our society is irrelevant the crime that has been committed.  Burning down a church is arson.  Arson is against the law, for good reason, in our society.  There is no “good” or “valid” arson permissible if one wants to live in a reasonable law abiding society.

Do you see it there?  The bullshit notion that there are differing levels of ‘arsonability’ based on your identity in society (of course it comes from a pronouns bio *smh*).  Err no.   There is no fucking way this paradigm can work if we want society as we know it to work.  Past oppression does not mean a free pass when you break the law.

Is protest a part of a democratic society, absolutely.  It is our civic duty to keep our political class in check and in tune with needs of the people.  Arson, however, is not one of those methods that should not be considered acceptable in society as a path to change.