The year is ending, and the media makes the balance of the most significant events. In such analyzes, of course, there is usually no room for picturesque: Mentions are reserved for important cases. For my part, however, I am going to allow myself to get out of that pattern. I want to deal with a curious judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), of last 9 November, which has gone almost unnoticed.
The case (‘De Wilde v. The Netherlands’) has its crumb. Ms De Wilde applied to the Nijmegen city hall to renew her identity card and her driving license. The regulation establishes that, in the photographs, the applicants must appear with their heads uncovered, except for exceptions based on your religious confession. Usually, it is the women with Islamic headscarves and the men of the Sikh confession, with their turbans, who can appear in the photos wearing the corresponding headdresses. Mrs. De Wilde presented some photos in which her head was covered with a wringer, like a helmet. Claimed it was pastafari, and that their religion forces them to carry a kitchen pot of this type on their head, the kind that are used to release the cooking water for vegetables and pasta. The authorities did not admit these photos, and denied the applicant the exception she requested. They did not recognize Pastafarianism as a religion, and, having exhausted domestic remedies, Ms De Wilde went to the ECHR.
The sentence does not give him the reason, because it denies that the applicant’s convictions constitute a religion and, consequently, no violation of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which proclaims religious freedom, can be recognized. And he justifies it by starting first with a synthesis of the beliefs of the Pastafarians, who form the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The origin of this group is located in 2005, in the United States. In Kansas, Christian fundamentalists tried to combat the explanation of the theory of evolution in schools. To do this, they asked to explain a version of creationism: the so-called “intelligent design”. As a reaction, Bobby Henderson, a 24-year-old physicist, wrote an open letter to the Kansas Department of Education. The obviously satirical text maintained that the creator of the Universe was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and demanded that this doctrine be taught alongside that of ‘intelligent design’.
Henderson was joined by others, who decided to found a church that had the aforementioned Monster as a deity, represented as a giant meatball from which spaghetti sprouted. That church generated its own sacred texts, whose names are reminiscent of those of the Judeo-Christian tradition: ‘Old Pastamento’ and ‘New Pastamento’, in which one of its subdivisions is called ‘Torahtellini, part two’. Regarding clothing, an official note from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, dated October 5, 2021, considered that the use of a wringer as a headwear is “a tradition of the Pastafarian faith.”
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I believe that the authorities of the Pastafarian faith are people with a great sense of humor, but the ECHR did not go along with them. Citing the judgment ‘Eweida and Others v. the United Kingdom ‘of 1982, indicates (paragraph 51) that what protects religious freedom They are points of view that reach “a certain level of obligation (“ cogency & rdquor;), seriousness, cohesion and importance & rdquor ;. Which is not the case, for the ECHR, of the Pastafarians. He even quotes a Pastafarian canon text (‘The Loose Canon’) in which it is clearly stated that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a satire of the ‘intelligent design’ movement (paragraphs 30 and 53).
Satire is part of the freedom of expression, and it seems advisable to me as a method of fighting against superstition and religious fanaticism. And I understand that she aspires to be recognized as equivalent to the object of her parody: it is the greatest blow of effect. But that is asking too much of a court, which cannot confuse a religion with its caricature.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com