Unclean!

When you read about that poor woman who had been bleeding for 12 years and read about the way she was stigmatised as 'unclean' just because she was ill. And when you think about the poor lepers who were stigmatised for the same reason, and the way they were sent away to live in 'unclean places'. And when you read about this obsessive need to classify people and their need to use language such as 'dirt' and pollution in order to exclude. And when you realise that this ordering involves rejecting human beings. When you realise all this, you've got to be grateful that we live in a much more enlightened age, when we don't stigmatise people or places as 'unclean'... except, of course, for filthy prostitutes... and those dirty Greenham Common Protesters and those disgusting guys who climb up trees to stop motorway construction...oh and our squalid inner cities, with their graffiti that is like "one of those scribbled signatures teenagers spray around their beat like a urinating dog." Apart from this self-evidently filthy stuff, I'd say we've got it sussed.