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A few weeks ago I ran into a relatively normal middle aged woman who, eight or nine months ago, was very exercised about the cause of Enoch Burke. When I had last seen her, she was about as partisan a Burke supporter as you might hope to find – she viewed his persistent refusal to back down in the face of state and school pressure as immensely admirable, and worthy of praise. Eight or nine months later, her tune had changed.
“I supported him in the beginning”, she said, “but he’s just making an eejit of himself at this stage”.
I have no idea how widespread that woman’s sentiments are: But I do know, as do most people, that if shouting and roaring at Judges of the High Court was an effective way to make your case in a court of law, then every barrister in the country would have started doing it years ago. They have not.
On a human level, it is possible to retain sympathy for Mr. Burke: He languishes in prison for a cause he no doubt believes to be entirely vital and worth more than his personal freedoms. Whether one agrees with him or not, we should all recognise that it takes considerable personal courage and conviction to – in essence – volunteer oneself for an indefinite, and possibly permanent, life behind bars.
But courage and wisdom are different things.
For one thing, Enoch Burke is not in prison, no matter how much he might assert it to be true, for the reason that he “would not call a boy a girl”. In point of fact, no court has ever made a ruling on the question of whether he could, or should, be permitted to refuse to “call a boy a girl”. He has never really given the courts any opportunity to rule on that question.
Indeed, in the matter of his own dismissal from his teaching position, that question was not at issue either. Instead, the school alleged, it was his persistent refusal to engage in reasonable argument over the question that was at the root of the conflict that emerged: Accusations that he had “harangued” the then principle in public, for example, which were given some credence by the scene of his family attending a school disciplinary meeting and being ejected from it for disruptive behaviour.
Mr. Burke is presently in prison because he keeps trespassing at a school where he is – definitively and absolutely – no longer an employee. The school, to its credit, showed admirable restraint in allowing him to continue to trespass, in defiance of a court order, for months before seeking his committal to prison.
In all of this, Mr. Burke’s conduct could be described as courageous. But none of it could be described as wise.
As will surprise very few people, on the original question of whether Mr. Burke should be compelled to “call a boy a girl”, both this writer and this publication are squarely in his corner. Almost the entirety of the present controversy in the western world about transgender issues rests on this question: Whether the right to live as the opposite sex comes with a right to force others to treat you as a member of the opposite sex. It absolutely does, and must, not. A law that forces people to profess in public something they believe to be a lie is entirely tyrannical: Up there with the Test Acts that compelled all public servants to profess themselves faithful protestants, whether they believed it or not.
Mr. Burke was not only right, but well within his rights, to say no to that and to object to it publicly. The school, in my view, was entirely in the wrong.
And yet: We live in a country of laws and a country with a legal system that exists for the resolution of such disputes. Mr. Burke did not engage his own lawyers. On several occasions, he represented himself in court, which is a fool’s errand. On multiple occasions, he was rude and overtly disruptive in court, making accusations about the motives of Judges which have no basis in the publicly available evidence, let alone in fact.
He has also persistently refused to abide by the legal process, even as he seeks its aid: If Mr. Burke will not obey the orders of the court to stay away from the school, then why should the school ever have been expected to abide by any order to re-instate him? This is the question which, notably, he cannot answer, and has never answered.
Yesterday, Mr. Burke and his family were back in court, and once again, several members of his family had to be ejected from the courtroom for shouting and roaring at the Judge. In the evening, Mr. Burke returned to prison.
There is a difference between courage, and wisdom. Mr. Burke is undoubtedly brave, and his remaining admirers are right to say so.
But he is not, I fear, wise. And if he does not recognise the difference, then I think the public, like the lady I met who has changed her mind, very much does.
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