Pussy Riot Should Be Punished!

Pussy Riot on Red Square

The punk conceptual artist band Pussy Riot should be punished for breaking into Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and staging a disruptive "punk service" on February 21.

They should get 15 days of administrative arrest for "disturbing the peace".

But a thoughtful judge should commute the sentence to performance of 15 days of community service out of the Russian Orthodox Church's basement, possibly working with the homeless or women who have suffered domestic violence and are in need of shelter.

Oops, the ROC doesn't have a church basement and doesn't do an awful lot of social work! It's a church said by critics to sell vodka and tobacco and property and deal in high politics to keep the regime and itself in power.

That is, they probably do some social work (there are monasteries that run cold-turkey hard labour programs for alcoholics), but whenever I see the clergy on Russian TV, they are doing things like cutting the ribbon at a new train station or facetiously offering themselves as "mediators" between Putin and the demonstrators on Bolotnaya.

So I guess my plan is out, because the ROC is a "church without a basement" -- i.e. it is not so much involved in social work and outreach to parishioners as it is busy maintaining the facade of the church itself in collusion with the state.

I once wrote about the ROC being "a church without a basement" on the old publication (now gone) "(Un)Civil Societies" and got angry letters from some Orthodox readers in emigration and a vygovor from my boss. Oh, well, I think I have a point.

Now, why do I think these goofy gals should at least get the classic pyatnadtsat' sutok that every dissident worth his salt has served for "hooliganism" since time immemorial?

Well, because I don't think you get to disrupt other people's prayer services. Even if that church collaborates with the state in unseemly ways or represents a political power that is odious to your point of view, there are ordinary people who come to the church to pray who should have that right and that sacred space. The ROC has many offensive types who are busy harassing non-believers, but it also is a place of good works and solace for many. Abroad, priests like Fr. Viktor Sokolov were widely admired and I recall the great respect we had in my Catholic university for the writings of Alexander Schmemann on Orthodoxy.

I'm a big believer in not having extremism in rights that trump other rights, and so is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says, in Art. 30:

• Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

That's a hugely important concept that really serves you well in looking at the clashes between secular activists and religious fundamentalists. It means you can't use religious belief to trump women's rights, for example, or freedom of expression, but you can't use freedom of expression to trump somebody else's freedom of expression or their religious liberty. You can't use one right to discriminate against someone else.

I know there is a big debate in Russia about the role of the Church; what constitutes blasphemy; whether the court system should deal with blasphemy (it shouldn't);whether times are just so perilous that you get to do exceptional things like this.

But you just don't get to impinge on somebody else's space like that to interfere with the expression of their beliefs. Sure, we get it that you believe your cause is so overwhelmingly important that "business as usual" should be suspended and you must "occupy".

Even so, I'm not buying it. The kind of society you build with that kind of rambuctious and extreme protest to get your way isn't one that I -- or I imagine most people -- would want to live in. You can make your point with a picket across the street. You can make your point with a happening somewhere else or an art show. God knows, that will get you into enough trouble in Russia (as Yuri Samodurov found out). But then you are easier to defend on the grounds of self-expression.

Some 20 years ago, In December 1989, a radical activist group called ACT-UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, whose name obviously contains a pun) made up of victims of HIV/AIDS, many of them gay men, staged a protest by breaking into St. Patrick's Cathedral during Mass and disrupting the service. They organized a protest and put on this invasion to bring greater attention to their cause and to get state coverage of HIV/AIDS treatment. They condemned the Catholic Church's teachings against gays and blamed the Church for the epidemic.

Back in those days, I would occasionally meet those ACT-UP activists because they were interested in supporting gay rights in Eastern Europe and the USSR and in principle I supported their cause of getting more attention to HIV and coverage of treatment, although I didn't share their beliefs in the claims about the Catholic Church -- I am a Catholic myself.

But after that invasion of my church -- I ceased to cooperate with them. I just couldn't support that extremism. It was unnecessary. They should take accountability for their own behaviour and not invade others' sacred spaces to "make a point". They had a lot of attention with their "die-ins" that sometimes disrupted traffic and accepted the arrests for civil disobedience that came with them. The invasion of the church seemed to be a nastiness of a different order that was not warranted. Years later, the leader of ACT-UP, Larry Kramer, expressed some regrets about the movement's culture, but he stood by the decision to invade St. Patrick's; and other members of the groups had no regrets.

Interestingly, the 43 people detained inside the church (there were 111 in total, as some were outside with about 5,000 demonstrators) didn't face any seven years in jail, or even 15 days. They were simply detained by police on the church premises when they refused to leave and removed and got desk appearance tickets, i.e. they had to appear in court, and if they appeared, chances are they'd either get no sentence, or community service, or at worst a few days in jail.

As the liberal New York Times -- which often takes a lenient or even celebratory approach to such protesters as they do now about Occupy Wall Street -- wrote back then in 1990,  the protest, whatever parishioners said about "desecration" was "effective." Said the Times:

To many parishioners, the recent invasion of St. Patrick's Cathedral by dozens of angry AIDS protesters was an act of desecration. But to Christopher Hennelly … it was a prayer for self-preservation. ‘The strongest prayer I've ever made in my life was on the floor of St. Patrick's,'" he said.

As the more conservative Sun wrote later, the Times chose its words carefully, and even highlighted the fact that the activists invading the church believed it was a "form of prayer".

As in Russia, views differed. Here's a religious writer who found the protest "a tantrum" rather than serious activism -- there was a contrived notion from ACT-UP that the Catholic Church was "to blame" for the spread of HIV because it refused to "teach safe sex" or promote the use of condoms -- something I've always found ridiculous on the face of it because it's not the job of the Church to do this, but individuals should be accountable themselves for their own behaviour. The effect of the protest was more about raucously protesting moral censure from the bishops, rather than drawing support for more AIDS research.

To get back to Pussy Riot -- these unfortunate women are facing as much as 7 years in prison for "hate crimes" and "violation of public order," the Guardian and other news media have reported. (Even the Kremlin's agitprop machine RT has had to struggle to cover this case as it has become very popular among protesters and even the Church has said it doesn't want to see such a harsh punishment.) Such a lengthy prison sentence is an outrage, of course, it was a political protest and no one destroyed property or harmed people -- as I suggested, administrative arrest commuted to community service seems about the size of it.

The Pussies defense? They say that in fact their "pussy prayer," as they called it, was a plea to the Blessed Virgin Mary to help rid the country of Putin. Could we be against that?! The women have young children, and have gone on a hunger strike to protest their injust punishment.

I realize the international justice jet-set will find me politically incorrect with this view. I don't care. One right cannot trump another. This is our key to fight against both the intrusiveness of secularism and the oppressiveness of religious fundamentalism.