Impolite

Nearly all of the past week has been devoted to the topics of politics and religion. WiB launched its new series of workshops: ‘Warning Signs of Fundamentalism and Feminist Responses’ with a ‘training of trainers’ conference last weekend. We sat in a conference room and listened to academics and other experts talk about strategies of Muslim fundamentalist in Western Europe, New Age spirituality and Fundamentalism, Feminist tactics for confronting fundamentalism, etc. etc. etc.

And, by some grand coincidence, a bill on churches and religious communities was recently introduced to the Serbian parliament. It is intentionally worded very vaguely (which is super frustrating for one helping to translate it), but looks like it will have the effect of permitting state funding for religious institutions, removing all state oversight from religious schools, and dividing religious communities into ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional,’ which could lay the groundwork for future discrimination. Additionally, the designation of ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ appears to be arbitrary. Some churches, such as the Pentecostals are labeled traditional even though their presence here is quite recent.

So WiB and other NGOs held a protest of this law on Friday. On Wednesday, I was told to make a banner. I spent Wednesday night, much of Thursday, and Friday morning sewing ‘zene protiv fundamentalizama women against fundamentalism’ onto a white sheet. That’s a lot of letters. It took quite a while.

And all this religion and politics shows no signs of letting up. I am even scheduled to speak at the next ‘training of trainers’ in a few weeks.