just the facts, ma'am

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Nov 04, 2007

Cherie Blair, the dismayingly ditzy wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, gave voice last week to some not-especially-penetrating insights into the ignominy of the full-face veil as worn by Muslim women: "... if you get to the stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because we cannot see her face, then we do have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman's right to be a person."

You get the drift. There's lots more where that comes from -- all predictable, and all dutifully set down by the Times' religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill. What's remarkable, given that Gledhill's writing a news article rather than an op-ed, is the manner in which she digresses from her story to call attention to the institutional sexism of the Catholic Church, of which Blair remains a doctrinally wobbly but still-connected member:

Mrs Blair's own Church forbids the ordination of women, forbids women from using condoms even when their husband has been infected by HIV while working away, and denies the sacrament of communion to women who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, even when a woman's first marriage has broken down because of abandonment for a younger woman by their husband.

And not only that -- the swine still hasn't paid his share of the April rent or bothered to pick up his snow tires from her garage!

Blair spoke on BBC radio.