Scorn for One - Quivering Obsequiousness to the other
On Sunday I noted that the heavy-handed enforcement of ‘religious tolerance’ (so-called) in this country by Mrs May’s planned new Strong State would not in fact favour Christianity. I argued that it would instead work on the side of the very Islam whose ‘extremist’ branches we claim to be trying to combat with surveillance and speech restrictions.
I wrote: ’Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice’.
Oh, my prophetic soul. Before the day was out, two stories had erupted into the newspapers. The first, in my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, concerned a Christian magistrate who remarked that he thought a child would be better brought up in a traditional family than by a same-sex couple.
Whatever opinion you hold on this, Richard Page’s opinion is legitimate and based upon Christian teaching, until quite recently the basis of this country’s morality and system of government, and ostensibly its Established Church, to this day.
Mr Page was then reported, suspended, found guilty of ‘serious misconduct’ (by a supposedly Conservative minister) and sent on an ‘equality course’, to get his mind right . He was found to have been ‘influenced by his religious beliefs rather than by the evidence’. This was defined as ‘serious misconduct'.
Is it not possible that those who disagreed with him were influenced by their political and moral beliefs, rather than by the evidence?
It is only necessary to imagine the reaction to this event in the Britain of even 30 years ago, to grasp that this country has in fact undergone a vast moral and cultural revolution in that period, in which Christian beliefs have been entirely dethroned, without the population fully understanding that this was taking place and certainly without any such plan being openly avowed in the manifesto of any major political party.
Is it wild speculation to suggest that the old beliefs have not been replaced by nothing, or by a commitment to view matters entirely on the evidence without any consideration of moral attitudes?
Might it be that magistrates are now expected to be guided by an alternative and radically different set of beliefs, beliefs which 50 years ago were held only by social revolutionaries (and not even by all of them), best summed up in the phrase ‘Equality and Diversity’?
(What, in any case, is the impartial science-based evidence on this matter which might be seen as actual unbiased evidence in this matter? It seems unlikely to me that same-sex parental couples have existed long enough or in sufficient numbers for any serious and balanced research to have been completed into the comparative outcomes, but I’m always ready to listen to evidence.)
What particularly struck me was that Mr Page was accused of breaking his oath, which required him to ‘do right to all manner of people’, ‘without fear or favour, affection or ill will’. For a religious believer, such an accusation is very painful, as oaths are promises made before God. I cannot for the life of me see how his concern breaks that oath, especially since, as he points out, the oath ends with the words ‘So help me God’.
No doubt those words won’t feature much in future, indeed I shouldn’t wonder if we don’t see a proposal to ban them pretty soon (just as those subversive terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ were erased from many official documents recently).
But they were a permissible part of the oath when he swore it, and the God worshipped in this country by its Established Church, whose Supreme Governor is the Monarch, crowned in an explicitly Christian ceremony, is the Christian one. This is also a country whose Parliament opens its sessions with Christian prayers.
That Christian God seems to me to have been fairly clear in thinking that marriage was between a man and a woman. The Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, still legally (by Act of Parliament) the basic standard of the rules and nature of marriage in England, and still a legally recognised form of marriage not requiring any endorsement by any other body, is quite clear on this.
The new idea about marriage comes from a different tradition. If we are, as Mrs May claims, committed to ‘mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths’ Mr Page is surely entitled to the ‘respect and tolerance’ of his fellow magistrates.
According to paragraph 5 of Mrs May’s horrible guidelines (read them here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/388934/45584_Prevent_duty_guidance-a_consultation_Web_Accessible.pdf )
’vocal and active opposition’ to ‘mutual respect and tolerance’ is ‘extremism’. Well, can you get much more ‘vocal and active’ in ‘opposition’ to another faith than by reporting an adherent of a religion you don’t like to the authorities, for expressing his sincere opinion, in such a way that he is suspended from his duties and compelled to be ‘re-educated?
Please grasp that I am not here seeking to enter a debate about whether Mr Page was right or wrong. This discussion has been had to the point of tedium, and will presumably continue for ever. People don’t agree. Generally, this is because they adhere to different moral system. They’re not going to persuade each other.
What interests me is that the non-Christian side no longer *has* to persuade its opponents. It can simply use the state to crush them. The force of law (in my view stretched to the limits of its meaning) is now being used to silence people in the judiciary who hold Mr Page’s view. This has been done by an allegedly ‘Conservative’ minister. How long before the law is used to silence private citizens for doing so?
So that’s the bit that deals with the state’s ‘general scorn for conservative Christianity’, as I mentioned. Now, what about its ‘quivering obsequiousness’ to Islam?
Well, first of all I ask you to wonder if a Muslim magistrate, expressing the same opinion, would be in the same sort of trouble? You only need to ask, to know.
Of course, such a non-event, in which somebody was not reported, not suspended and not sent for re-education would not be recorded and we would not know anything about it (The Mail on Sunday had to fight hard to report the case of Mr Page, in which several recordable events did take place) .
But lo! The sun had hardly begun to climb into the Sunday sky before this story emerged:
A Christian nurse has been disciplined for alleged ‘bullying and harassment’ . Again, can anyone really imagine a case in which a Muslim nurse gets into trouble for praying for a Christian colleague, inviting her to visit events at her mosque and for giving her a book about a Christian who converted to Islam?
Under ‘Equality and Diversity’ all religions are equal. What people don’t seem to grasp is that this is, in effect, the downgrading and disestablishment of Christianity. For if Christianity in Britain is ‘equal’ to Islam, or any other religion (and that has been the explicit law since 2010) , then it is no longer entitled to the standing it once had.
This is a simple matter of fact. And of course, in the early years of the cultural revolution, that will involve repeated slapdowns for Christians, until they stop imagining they have any special claim on government or the courts, and at last learn their new and very humble place in multicultural Britain.
Meanwhile, we all know that Islam won’t put up with being treated like that.
And Mrs May’s daft ‘anti-Islamist’ laws will end up strengthening the power of Islam in our country, laws, society and government. You wait and see.
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