News from the New Party

Naming teddy-bears

The absurdity of the jailing of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons for the "crime" of allowing her primary school children to name a teddy-bear Muhammad, has drawn an outraged yet confused response from across the political and cultural spectrum in this country.

On the one hand, there is near universal agreement that Gillian Gibbons should not be in jail.  On the other hand there is confusion about whether the Sudanese courts had any justification for locking her up.  This confusion has manifested itself principally in the flurry of commentators who have rushed to condemn the fifteen day prison sentence as "disproportionate".  In other words, the complaint is not that Gillian Gibbons is guilty as charged, but that in view of mitigating circumstances the imprisonment was excessive.  Our own Archbishop of Canterbury has weighed into the dispute in these terms, describing the judgement as "an absurdly disproportionate response to what is, at best, a minor cultural faux pas."  One wonders what it might be at worst.

In the circumstances it is unsurprising that the job of extricating Gillian Gibbons from this mess has fallen to two Muslim peers, Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi, who are attempting to persuade the Sudanese president to grant a pardon, and of course we wish them well in their mission.  However, while it is reasonable for Muslims to describe the sentence against Gillian Gibbons as "disproportionate", there is no reason for the rest of us to regard it as such. 

Free societies should be able to face up to such dangerous topics as the naming of teddy-bears with reasonable equanimity.  The habit of descending into spasms of outrage, threats of corporal and even capital punishment, whenever one encounters a reason to be offended is not one which we should readily indulge, for religious or any other reasons.  The sentence against Gillian Gibbons was unjustified and wrong - and we should not be afraid to say so.