It was just a little parenthesis but, between the commas, a thread of prejudice was revealed. \u201cMr and Mrs King\u201d began the sentence. And then came the words \u201cwho are Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses\u201d. It did not just appear in one newspaper but in many of the first reports of the story of five-year-old Ashya King, the boy with the brain tumour whose parents had suddenly removed him from Southampton Hospital.<\/p>\n
Others were more explicit, revealing that the thread was part of a backcloth of bias.\u00a0 \u00a0Brett and Naghmeh King had taken the boy from hospital \u201cdespite\u201d suffering from a brain tumour. Jehovah’s Witnesss, they noted, \u201crefuse blood transfusions on religious grounds\u201d. Hampshire Police had issued an arrest warrant for \u201ccruelty to a person under the age of 16 years\u201d. The bad faith of the Kings was taken for granted.<\/p>\n
On Radio 4 the Today programme compounded the smear by using the case as the introduction for an attack by the novelist Ian McEwan on Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, with the interviewer, Mishal Husain, inviting him to extend his assault on religion more generally.<\/p>\n
Mr McEwan\u2019s latest novella, which has been criticised for its \u201cformulaic\u201d plot, centres on a high court judge who must decide whether a teenager who is not yet 18 should be allowed to refuse a live-saving blood transfusion. \u201cSometimes religious views run right against the grain of what seems rationally compassionate,\u201d he told Ms Husain who tried to move the subject on to the Trojan Horse plot and extremism in schools, perhaps hoping that Mr McEwan would repeat his view that in the clash between the religious and secular imaginations \u201cthe secular mind seems far superior\u201d.<\/p>\n
What the novelist, the media and the hospital authorities had in common was a degree of religious illiteracy. Jehovah\u2019s Witness may oppose blood transfusions but they offer no religious opposition to the chemo or radiotherapies the hospital wanted for Ashya. Mr McEwan has elsewhere complained about the \u201cuninterrupted monochrome\u201d of religion. Those who criticise faith have no credibility when they proceed from a basis of such ignorance.<\/p>\n
A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, the doctors in Southampton no doubt thought when Mr King trawled the internet for alternative treatments for his little boy. But the same admonition applies to those who so blithely parade their religious prejudice.<\/p>\n
Misinformation has dogged this case from the outset. The Kings’ objections to blunderbuss radiotherapy were not religious. They were medical. The parents wanted a more focussed Proton beam radiotherapy which is only used to treat eye tumours in the UK but is used on brain tumours in other countries. They did not from remove him from Southampton \u201cdespite\u201d his brain tumour but because of it. However misguided that may have been, it was well-intentioned.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that is true, too, of the authorities who told Mr King if he questioned their judgement they would exclude him with a court order, and then issued a heavy-handed warrant alleging cruelty by the parents. \u00a0\u00a0The irony is that their fear of cruelty ended in the actual cruelty of a small child lying alone in a foreign hospital \u2013 with his Mum and Dad in separate jails 300 miles away \u2013 surrounded by strangers he cannot understand.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
from The Church Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was just a little parenthesis but, between the commas, a thread of prejudice was revealed. \u201cMr and Mrs King\u201d began the sentence. And then came the words \u201cwho are Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses\u201d. It did not just appear in one newspaper but in many of the first reports of the story of five-year-old Ashya King, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,432,33],"tags":[692,693],"class_list":["post-8286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-family","category-science-religion","tag-medical-ethics","tag-religious-prejudice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8287,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8286\/revisions\/8287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}