XPost: alt.heraldry.sca
I wish more people paid attention to this group.
We have a problem in the CoA: there are right-wing extremists crawling into the College
and using superficially plausible statements aimed to, eventually, impose a white-European
superiority on the registration of names.
Currently, a branch in An Tir is attempting to register the name of an award/order. They
are using the long-established name-structure of "saint's name + object". This structure
for award/order names is historically valid, and has been used in the SCA for nearly ever.
They are also using the "constructed saint name" allowance, which is specifically
mentioned in SENA. The name they're using is a nice, period, English name.
However---there are a few people on OSCAR who are objecting to this name on the basis
(once all their smoke-screen verbiage is removed) that the name the branch want is not the
name of a historical saint. IOW, since the Roman Catholic church, nor the Anglican church,
canonized anyone by that name, at least in period, that the name is not historical, and
should not be registered.
In short, a few right-wingers are trying to make "historicity" more important than freedom
of religion. Believe me, this is the thin edge of the wedge; a wedge to push the CoA away
from treating the people of the SCA decently. It is a start of an attempt to get the SCA
to be a comfortable place for the "alt-right", to get the SCA to be a breeding ground for
fascists.
If the declarations recently made by the BoD promoting diversity and inclusion are to be
more than empty words, it is time to put out the fire NOW, before it grows.
The following is my response to the "history before decency" posts in OSCAR.
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I am disgusted. The question is simple: is the CoA going to support freedom of religion,
or give a religion/set of related religions a superior position with the feeble excuse "it
was like that in history".
I am proud of the peerage of my home kingdom of An Tir for stepping up to the problem of
the bigotry that is starting to infest the SCA, with the declaration shown in:
https://www.facebook.com/AnTirEventsVirtualFeed/videos/a-statement-on-diversity-and-inclusion-from-the-peerages-in-an-tir/449418072215554/
I am particularly inspired by the line, "We declare, when encountering words and
situations contrary to the support of equity, diversity and inclusion we will confront
these circumstances as best we can" That is what I am doing; I am confronting religious
intolerance, and an attempt to put one small set of religions above all others.
After knocking down your straw men, it is clear you think some religion(s) have more
rights than others, and you are using a white-European view of history to cloak your
religious intolerance with a microscopically thin veneer of plausibility. I hope the CoA
will throw your specious arguments aside.
And I deeply hope the CoA will take this opportunity to remember that we should be serving
the people of the SCA, both as individuals and as a group. I hope we will take into
consideration the effect of our actions on the SCA as a whole, and stop putting "historicality" above people.
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~~Basil Dragonstrike
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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