Bashing the Bishop Update

First up, cheers to Chicken Yoghurt for linking to my post from last night, it makes this morning's extreme tiredness worthwhile.  Best of luck to Justin and his project for living with just the mainstream media for a day, but I note from his Twitter page that he's already broken that rule by, er, finding a copy of Private Eye.  Tut, tut.

Back to the Bishop - Gracchi at Liberal Conspiracy offers up a reaction:

Partly he has made an idiot of himself through the fact that whatever Rowan Williams does understand, the media isn’t one of the things that he gets. Partly though he has made an idiot of himself because he has advocated a concept of law which I think is dangerous and creates a special privilege for established Churches in this country which they should not have.

Indeed, dealing badly the media is where the problem started here.  The original speech I commented on last night clearly reads that when Williams refers to something that 'seems unavoidable' he means Ayelet Shachar's idea of an open market of competing jurisdictions as an alternative to a single state legal system or multiple ad-hoc communal ones.  The word 'sharia' isn't mentioned near this, and it's pretty obvious that Williams intends one of the competing jurisdictions to be the Anglican church wresting back some of that nasty arid secular state power.

However, when Christopher Landau came to interview the Archbishop yesterday, his very first question invented the link to sharia, completely unsupported by the original text.  This was the right time to say 'no, hang on, that's a misquotation' but what actually happened, according to the transcript on the Archbishop's own website, was this (which is appallingly badly copy-edited, so I've neatened it and emphasised the key parts):

CL To begin with you've given this vision of if as a nation Britain wants to achieve social cohesion, that challenge is how to accommodate those of religious faith in relation to the law; and your words are that the application of Sharia in certain circumstances if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion seems unavoidable?

ABC It seems unavoidable and indeed as a matter of fact certain provisions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law; so it's not as if we're bringing in an alien and rival system; we already have in this country a number of situations in which the law the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justified conscientious objections in certain circumstances in providing certain kinds of social relations, so I think we need to look at this with a clearer eye and not imagine either we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and not just associate it with what we read about Saudi Arabia or wherever.

Thus he missed the opportunity to correct the misquotation and thus gave the impression that he agreed with it, either because he didn't notice it or because he wanted to ramble off onto one of his learned digressions (in the form of a 117 word sentence, no less).  Not a great day at the office, then, but part of the refreshing thing about Rowan Williams is that he's a genuinely intelligent, moderate, thinking man who's trying to work in a world of spin and presentation.  It's not surprising he screws up badly seen through that distorting prism.  Perhaps it's the prism that's the problem here, not the Bishop.

Mind you, he's still wrong in his conclusion, as Gracchi points out - legal systems aren't really his area (despite the speech being at the Temple to an audience of lawyers) and his idea, which he's admittedly lukewarm about, is profoundly unworkable at anything much above the strictly minor scale it's used at present.  A decent legal expert will spot a ton of pitfalls in a few minutes.