Lebanon is ruled by a religious Mafia that either is itself involved directly in politics or operates like a pupeteer handling subservient puppet politicians. If you watch the political process in the media, you will see more men in robes, beards and strange headgear than men or women in normal professional attire. The Shiite sect is run directly by mullahs, imams or other clergymen, with a handful of civilian hacks posturing as politicians (MPs, ministers, etc.). Other sects like the Sunni or the Maronite sect present themselves publicly with civilian ministers, party leaders or MPs, but when the system breaks down, as it is right now, patriarchs, muftis, bishops and other clergy take over and speak on behalf of their respective sects about political issues, essentially becoming themselves the political leaders.
This is the Mafia that divides the country into religious concentration camps in which the individual is trapped within his/her community and has no value or rights except to serve as a faceless member of a herd. While sects claim the freedom to worship without restrictions imposed by the other sects, individuals within each sect have no freedom. A Lebanese Christian who claims to be free means he is free to ring his church bell on sundays without the Muslims prohibiting him from doing so. I call this "communitarian freedom". But within the Christian community, there are no individual freedoms: A Maronite individual cannot openly challenge or criticize the Maronite Church.
The Lebanese confessional or sectarian system of government, disguised under the fabricated filth of "consensual democracy", grants rights to religious sects, but not to individuals within those sects. All of Lebanon's current problems are due to disagreements between the sects, not between individual members of those sects. The fallacy of "consensual democracy" is exactly the problem facing the country today in the inability of Parliament to elect a president. In a serious democracy, all differences are solved by voting, either in a popular vote or a vote inside the assembly, and the winner moves forward to form a government or pass a law while the loser becomes the opposition that tries to improve its standing with a view at winning at the next vote or elections. In Lebanon, however, differences always end up in a stalemate. When faced with a vote or an election, the party that suspects it might lose does everything it can to block or obstruct the vote or the constitutional process under the pretense that it wants dialogue and consensus.
By dialogue and consensus, the parties, regardless of the wishes of their constitutents, meet in backrooms away from public scrutiny, make deals that often involve payments and bribes and other concessions, and reach an agreement over, for instance, appointing a president, thus bypassing the constitutional process. Since the last exercises of real democracy some time around the early 1970s (1970 for presidential elections and 1972 for legislative elections), all elections and votes have in fact been fake and for show, since they were always overridden by consensus, deals, impositions by occupying countries like Syria and Israel, and appointments to public office. In other words, "consensual democracy" has replaced the genuine democracy that Lebanon had practiced in the early decades of its existence. For the most part, genuine democracy was practiced when the Christians had a bigger say in government (1943-1976), while bullshit consensual democracy took hold when Muslims grabbed power thanks to Palestinian terrorism, the Syrian invasion-occupation, and the Taef Agreement - sponsored I should say by the self-declared beacon of democracy, the United States - that shifted power from the Christians to the Muslims. The US republican administrations (Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.) have not ceased since the early 1970s kissing the oily asses of the Arab dictatorships, sacrificing and backstabbing every other minority in the region (Kurds, Maronites, Copts, Yazidis, Armenians, etc.) in exchange for cheap Arab oil, while those same Arab dictatorships were dispatching terror groups to attack the West in the heart of its cities and capitals.
Why pretend to have a democracy? Why have elections and votes? Why even have a constitution and laws? Why not go back to a primitive form of government in which the religious bosses of the sects regularly meet and enact laws that suit their objectives without taking into account the people's wishes? This is how the Taliban mullahs rule in Afghanistan. This is how the ayatollahs rule in Iran. These are the forms of government in which the people are infantilized as ignorant of their interests, and only the religious dinosaur in power knows what is best because he, and only he the dinosaur, understands the will of God as stated in dubious parchemins and scrolls written some thousands of years ago during the Bronze-Iron Age by even older stinking dinosaurs.
In a country with a diverse population and a myriad of sects, the problem is compounded by the co-existence of multiple Mafia bosses. In Iran, there is one dinosaur boss, the ayatollah. In Afghanistan, the chief Mullah runs the show. In Lebanon, with its 18 religious denominations recognized by the constitution, the authoritative power of the religious boss is diluted and distributed across several bosses, which makes reaching a consensus even more difficult. It is easier when you have one dictator, but imagine if you have several competing dictators. That is why reform is impossible in Lebanon as it exists today.
When the bosses of the religious Mafia disagree amongst each other, they wage wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die. And they convince their people that their death (sacrifice, martyrdom, etc.) is part of asserting God's will. The status of victim is idealized to that of a martyr for the cause. The Christian Church created the myth of the "martyr" in its early days, making saints out of suicidal rebels. The Muslim world today does the same: every jackass who gets killed in a car accident or who blows himself to kill other people is a "martyr" on a express lane to heaven.
When the bosses agree, they act jointly to keep their respective herds in tow and the existing system in place. On questions of the civil status, religious laws and courts override civilian laws and courts. Inheritance, marriage, divorce, births and deaths... are all the purview of the religious authorities who engage in all manner of discrimination, abuse and corruption, especially against women. Lebanese women who marry foreign men cannot grant their children the Lebanese nationality. If a Lebanese woman dies without a direct male relative (brother, son, husband), it is virtually impossible to declare and register her death. I personally was unable to register my maternal aunt's death because she had no brothers, wasn't married (no husband) and had no children, let alone male ones. I, as her male next-of-kin could not officially declare her death, and we had to resort to "wasta" (personal connections and a courageous selectman willing to bend the law) to to obtain a death certificate.
Over the past few decades, people - overwhelmingly young people - have been demanding civilian laws for the personal status, as for example civilian marriage. Right now, Lebanese couples cannot marry before a judge; they have to be married by a priest, an imam, a sheikh, etc. The irony is that if a couple travels abroad and gets married in a civilian court, their marriage is accepted in Lebanon. Similarly for divorce: Some sects make it very difficult to obtain a divorce for the purpose of extorting money from the couple, but if the divorce is processed overseas it is accepted in Lebanon. Every time calls are made to adopt civilian laws for the personal status, the clergy of ALL the sects, Christians and Muslims alike, band together, and since they control the politicians, it is virtually impossible to change the law. The point is that the religious Mafia is alive and well: it controls people's lives and makes money out of marriage, divorce, birth, death and inheritance proceedings. Christian and Muslim authorities always come together to defend their money-making power-holding turf, always declaring that people's lives outside the religious lines are sinful to God. But when they disagree and fight, they push people to take up arms and commit massacres in the name of God. Everyone is convinced that God is on their side and they brandish Him like a scarecrow to order the herd back in line. Imagine what centuries of this abuse and brainwashing can do to people: They become like sheepish obedient slaves during the light of good days but can be turned into werewolves in the darkness of the bad nights. Christopher Hitchens once said, "Religion makes otherwise normal people do wicked and disgusting things".
When it comes to LGBT rights, the religious authorities have in recent months rallied together to stand up against an increasingly vocal LBGT community. Lebanon has always had a gay community that was generally accepted in public, but now the religious dinosaurs are competing with one another as to who can harass the gay community more. The mere display of a rainbow invites chastisement and harassment. Christian thugs, declaring themselves "Soldiers of God", and probably dispatched by the Maronite Church, recently descended on a street in the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh and harassed and beat up bar patrons because of suspicions that they were gay. The Shiite Muslim Hezbollah minister of culture - how can any sane person hand the culture ministry to a radical Muslim fundamentalist militia? - decided to ban the movie Barbie on the ground that it promotes gayness. He hasn't yet succeeded, but there is a threat against those theaters who show the movie and against people who go see it.
The bigotry of the religious establishments is so blatant. On top of the Bkerke hill (some 10 miles north of Beirut) sits the Maronite Patriarch whose humble title is, "Patriarch of Antioch and the Entire East", even though his flock is about 1 million in Lebanon and a couple of millions overseas. Despite all the frowny disguisements of piety and deep faith, right under the windows of Bkerke and under the nose of a giant statue of Mary, is the Maameltayn red light district where prostitutes from around the world plough their trade near the city of Jounieh. Just google "Jounieh prostitutes" and read about how travel websites describe the area. Over the past several decades, child sex abuse by Catholic priests has been exposed all over the western world. It is no longer a secret that many homosexuals and pedophiles chose the religious "vocation" as a way to hide themselves and lead secret sex lives, including molesting and raping children. Not one country has been spared, except those opaque dictatorial backward countries that deny the existence of what they call the disease of homosexuality. Which means that child sex abuse by clergymen is a world-wide pandemic, and by applying simple statistics one can extrapolate the phenomenon, with a very high likelihood, to Maronite Catholic priests in Lebanon. Yet, only one case (Mansour Labaki) has ever been denounced for a long series of abuses between 1967 and 1997, and while the Maronite Church tried to sweep it under the rug, it was only in 2013 that the Vatican declared him guilty, but the Lebanese authorities refused to extradite him in 2017. He was tried and convicted in France in 2021, but never in Lebanon which refuses to extradite him.
[https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1280979/mansour-labaky-a-priest-faces-the-demons-of-the-past.html ]
https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/lebanon/2022/09/27/vatican-defrocks-lebanese-priest-convicted-in-france-of-sexually-assaulting-girls/].
Only God knows what else is beneath the tip of the iceberg. More than in any Mafia, the omerta is very powerful here in the Lebanese religious Mafias.
Finally, one question that has always haunted me: Why are there so many sects within one religious denomination? For example, within the Christian community in Lebanon, the Catholic faith is represented by the following different sects, each with its church, patriarch, institutions, courts, schools, etc.: Maronite Catholic, Latin/Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian Catholic, and Syriac Catholic. I am fine with diversity, but when diversity signifies division,
suspicions, lack of solidarity, and allegiance to outside powers, it becomes a handicap. Why so many catholic sects? If the Catholics can't agree on belonging to one church, why is there a Catholic church to begin with? Why doesn't the Pope order them to coalesce into one Catholic sect that is specific to Lebanon, let's name it "Lebanese Catholic". Once you are in Lebanon, you should no longer be Latin, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Armenian, etc., dragging your ancient and primitive history into our time.
Same thing with the Orthodox Christians: Greek Orthodox, Assyrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox... How about merging them all into a unified "Lebanese Orthodox" church?
Same thing on the Muslim side: Sunnis, Shiites, Ismailis, Alawites, Druze... Plus the Protestant and the Jewish sects which are recognized by the constitution, though their numbers are very small.
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