Blasphemy vote looks a done deal days before we go to the ballot box
IASKED a friend yesterday how he’d vote on removing blasphemy as a crime from the Constitution. “Who f ***** g cares about that c***ology when we’ve got a s***load of bigger things to worry about.” Despite his aptitude for profane poetry, the sentence encapsulated what many of us are privately thinking.
This Friday’s vote seems a done deal even before we tick the ballot paper, given how much most of us swear and curse as it is. I remember working recently in an office where a swear jar of for every obscenity uttered was enforced – it was overflowing by Wednesday mornings.
It does seem strangely appropriate though that Dáil Éireann should occupy itself with this linguistic crusade, given its own history as a hotbed of expletives. Indeed the ‘Salient Rulings of the Chair’, a supporting document to the parliamentary Standing Orders, offers an intriguing picture of forbidden political proclivities.
Deputies mustn’t “reflect on character or personal honour” by stating fellow members are guilty of murder, blackmail, corruption, perjury, seditious libel or deceit.
Members are also banned from alleging that colleagues are smugglers, rogues or scoundrels, and should never be referred to as a brat, buffoon, chancer, corner boy, gurrier, guttersnipe, rat or – my personal favourite – yahoo. While the dictionary defines blasphemy as “speaking of or addressing God or something sacred with impiety”, you wonder what semantic somersaults modern lexicographers would be forced to perform when surveying the 2018 White House?
President Trump made blunt talk a personal trademark long before his entry into national politics. But you wonder what previous White House intellects like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln or John Adams would make of a man who accused women of having “fat, ugly” faces or being “crazed, crying lowlifes”. Maybe there’s something in the air of politics that incites the worst in potty mouths – a notion former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel subscribed to when he defined Washington DC as “f***nutsville”.
Perhaps, like anything forbidden, blasphemy has always been an illicit joy ingrained in our psyche. “It is that very act of suppression of the language that creates those same taboos for the next generation,” says Benjamin K Bergen, a professor of cognitive science and author of ‘What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves’. Labelling it a “profanity paradox”, he reasons that “a child thinks the F-word is a bad word because, growing up, he or she was told that it was a bad word, so profanity is a cultural construct that perpetuates itself through time. It is an affliction of its own creation.” This is clearly an idea with which oath-obsessed chef Gordon Ramsey would concur: “Swearing is industry language – for as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.” Or, to put it in a suitably culinary context – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.