Hydesland wrote:Calladan wrote:Even with the broad sweeping statement of "lets forget everything that happened in the troubles", the DUP are a bunch of religious fanatics who would set women's rights back to the stone ages, gay rights back to before the flood and would make Donald Trump look like Al Gore on the subject of climate change.
You say they're fanatics, but in the context of Northern Irish protestantism isn't this just mainstream conservatism? How different are they for instance from the UK conservatives of the 1970s, would they also be described as fanatics? I'm not going all culturally relativist - but I feel the word fanatic has implications of being vastly outside the mainstream of the parent culture, and I'm unsure that's the case for NI.
I fail to see how that isn't being relativist.
Wouldn't it be the same as saying that the Taliban aren't "vastly outside the mainstream" of their area of the middle east, rife with far-conservative Islamist governance.
The Taliban, Pakistan, Iranian conservatives etc are all broadly under the umbrella of "fanatics", to obviously differing degrees.
In any case, as I understand it, the DUP's social position is "vastly outside" what could be considered the societal norm in Northern Ireland - they're the only party keeping same-sex marriage illegal, the only party preventing abortion access, and do not line up with the views of the population at large, and seem to be kept in power by a mix of tactically voting against the nationalists and a minority of far-conservatives in Ireland able to wield far more political power than they ought really have due to the nature of our political system.
