Tag Archives for secularism

The Church of England joins the fight.

From The Guardian:

The church’s submission warns that despite ministerial assurances that churches would not have to conduct gay marriages, it would be “very doubtful” whether limiting same-sex couples to non-religious ceremonies would withstand a challenge at the European court of human rights. This could make it impossible for the CofE to continue its role conducting marriages on behalf of the state, it warned.

Many people on Twitter are noting the belief-defying irony here: a Church which was created for the purpose of redefining marriage now claims such an act would destroy it.

Matthew Parris, in the comments section on The Times‘ website, develops (£) upon that theme:

It’s true that for hundreds of years the Church (and the rest of us) have defined marriage as being between a man and a woman; but equally true that for hundreds of years the Church has defined marriage as being largely indissoluble, except by death or by God. The divorce reform laws of the last century smashed straight through that definition, but churches were allowed to keep to it if they wished, and marry or refuse to marry as they chose. I’d argue that it was divorce reform that really broke the mould. What is the Anglican position on the State’s right to make an indissoluble union a dissoluble one?

Another commenter on The Times‘ website wonders what the Church’s attitude to the following are:

Allowing Quakers and Jews to get married (Marriage Act 1753)?

Allowing Catholics and other non-Anglicans to get married (Marriage Act 1836)?

Allowing married women to own their own property (Married Women’s Property Acts 1870, 1882, 1893)?

Banning marital rape (R v R [1992] 1 A.C. 599)?

Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association asks some even tougher questions. Read his whole post. A snippet:

If the Church thinks introduction of same-sex civil marriage means their disestablishment … how long after the introduction of equal civil marriage does the Church intend to remove its state-funded chaplains from prisons, hospitals and the armed forces?

There’s little for me to add to all of this. The absurdity is clear for anyone to see. But I would bring attention to one telling passage from the Church’s submission:

Marriage benefits society in many ways, not only by promoting mutuality and fidelity, but also by acknowledging an underlying biological complementarity which, for many, includes the possibility of procreation.

Emphasis mine. So even in their official document explaining to the government why this is such a destructive, undesirable reform, they take the time to acknowledge that marriage is about cementing and strengthening and recognising a bond between two persons for the sake of their reciprocal love and intense, unparalleled friendship. But they add on what marriages also often have, which gays could never have, and which nowadays seems a mere coincidental, wholly unnecessary characteristic of the union: procreation. That’s their get-out card through which their prejudices can be rationalised. They know the grounds upon which marriage reform should be embraced. They even mention them! But even when penning those arguments themselves, they’re incapable of drawing the proper conclusions.

Ultimately, I’m with George Eaton in welcoming the potentially gorgeous side-effect of marriage reform that would be the Church’s disestablishment. But for the reasons Copson outlines, we should remain skeptical that this is anything but a bluff. They have little interest in losing the prestige and power that the state’s platform gives them at a time when their influence would otherwise be on the decline. Conservatives have often argued that a reason to support the Church’s preservation is because its being tied to the state ensures it remains quiet and apolitical, leaving the bigotry to the Catholics. So much for that theory, which the front pages of the papers dismantle today.

Eaton quotes Rowan Williams from a 2008 interview:

I can see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh synod, it didn’t have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that.

And comments:

In an increasingly atheistic and multi-faith society, a secular state, which protects all religions and privileges none, is a model to embrace. If David Cameron wants a real legacy, he could do no better than to bring home Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation“.

The virtues of secularism.

Photo: Politicsreligion.eu

One may wonder what the relation is between secularism and liberalism, and why each of them is valuable. As I see it, the former can be derived from the latter, stemming from the same concerns. Liberals believe that when deciding what it is that we want the state to do, first and foremost we should prioritise the preservation of equal treatment. We do not want to create a state in which some citizens are shown greater respect than others. And the liberal argues that this has substantive implications for the state’s actions. It may not, for instance, promote a certain way of life as inherently more valuable than another. The disagreements about the good life run too deep. For the state to do this, it would have to endorse one group’s contentious claims about the best way to live over another, and there is simply no reason why citizens would want their government to do this. Why would anyone wish to set up an institution to rule over them and threaten to prosecute, for instance, those that decide they want to smoke pot? And, quite similarly, why would we agree to a state that endorses and boosts the claims of one particular religion?

According to liberals, the state should instead strive to be neutral, and merely provide a framework of security within which these decisions about how to live and what to believe are made freely by individuals. Anything less would be paternalistic, which is, by its very nature, disrespectful. It tells people what is good for them instead of leaving them to choose for themselves. And there is nothing the liberal values more than the individual’s right to exercise their own capacity for choice.

From this, various things seem to follow: not only must Church and state be formally separated so that Christianity is not embraced at the top of government as official doctrine; state tax revenue should most certainly not be used to fund schools that promote certain religions, as is the case in the UK. Even more than this, however, it seems that if the liberal is to stay loyal to his principle that choice is the goal of government, he must not only refuse to fund religious schools, but he must also ban them. This may seem the exact opposite of liberalism: a refusal to allow people to organise education freely. But the point is that if that if ‘freedom’ is being employed to diminish freedom, by presenting a certain idea of what goodness is to children as fact, the idea that education should push no agenda and serve only to develop certain faculties which allows kids to decide for themselves is inevitably attacked, and the liberal thus has a very good reason to prevent any measures that are likely to undermine a child’s future choices.

So the answer is that secularism and liberalism are intrinsically connected, but secularism is narrower, perhaps best seen as a subset of liberalism. It addresses questions about the role of religion and what the state should do about it. Liberalism deals with these questions more broadly, and says, for instance, not only should the state not promote Christianity, but it should avoid criminalising any activity which is not directly harmful to other people. So not only is the Church ousted and drug laws repealed, but public masturbation gets the green light, and so does incest. If people decide this is the way they wish to live, what right do we have to intervene and tell them that we know better?

It’s official: Britain is pro-gay marriage.

Thanks to The Sunday Telegraph for conducting an up-to-date poll, and publishing it in spite of the result. Note the lame attempt at spin, though:

A poll commissioned by The Sunday Telegraph shows that the country is split on the issue.

Overall, 45 per cent of voters support moves to allow gay marriage, with 36 per cent against, while 19 per cent say they do not know.

However, the Prime Minister is out of step with his own party.

Exactly half of Conservative voters oppose same-sex marriage in principle and only 35 per cent back it.

There is no public appetite to change the law urgently, with more than three quarters of people polled saying it was wrong to fast-track the plan before 2015 and only 14 per cent saying it was right.

I’m not ignoring the main headline of that story that this poll is smuggled into, incidentally. I’m just trying to get my ahead around what possible arguments there could be against wearing such a simple, harmless religious symbol expressing one’s identity. My intuitions are with the anti-secularists on this one. It seems truly absurd, and only required by some kind of French form of queer secularism.

Secular Santorum.

This might sound mental, but hear me out. Watch this interview clip courtesy of Mediaite.

So here we have him defending the role of faith in public life and professing anti-secularism. That fits the tone of his campaign, and coheres with statements like this where he defends the right of states to ban contraception on the grounds that birth control is a licence to do things ‘contrary to how they are supposed to be’.

That sounds like both the real Santorum and his liberal media caricature: using Christian natural law theory as a litmus test for legislation. The epitome of illiberalism that he seemingly espouses.

And yet then in this clip he comes out in overt support for what he seems to shun: the idea that he can oppose such things on a personal level without wanting to impose such contentious views through law on others!

What’s going on here? Which one is a lie? Is he deceiving the general public in mainstream media interviews for fear of alienating independents, and thus with an eye to any future general election campaign in which he’ll have to look more moderate? Or, is he deceiving his party base, conjuring up support by making such mental claims about banning birth control merely to distinguish himself as the Christian candidate?

I really can’t tell.

Liberalism and religious tolerance.

This week began with a court decision removing the right of councils to hold Christian prayers as part of their formal agenda, and ended with the Communities Secretary using a legal loophole to reinstate that right in the name of religious freedom. In between, we had The Telegraph lending support in a Leader to the Christian cause and giving front page space to Baroness Warsi’s hysterical warnings about the rise of ‘militant secularism’, just as Reverends popped up on every broadsheet letter page backing her case. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was widely showered with ad hominems (culminating today in a laughable smear noting his ancestors were involved with slavery), and Nadine Dorries MP mocked the Equalities Minister for having the nerve to publicly back the government’s refusal to give legal exemption to Catholic adoption agencies given their practising of homophobia.

I don’t want to dwell on the absurdity of this, because I’ve been covering it closely all week and this morning we now have bigger fish. But one final comment. This is from a brief piece I’ve put together that will be in a student e-magazine soon:

The irony of [Warsi’s] outcry arriving in the week she leads a state visit to the Vatican is seemingly lost on her. What’s more, she seems to be oblivious to how awkwardly her article sits alongside the Queen breaking her norm of silence to insist that the role of Christianity in Britain is ‘under-appreciated’. Further, this comes as Speaker Bercow reassures MPs that formal prayers won’t be disappearing from Parliament on his watch, whilst Bishops by virtue of their religious status remain in the House of Lords. This all being just as recent polling suggests barely half of Britain identifies as Christian, and most of them are not even that serious about it.

And here’s Nick Cohen yesterday, also sharing my inability to lack disbelief that we’re even having this argument, but feeling obliged to keep making it nonetheless:

I won’t labour the obvious point that an established church that uses the force of law to insist on a privileged position, seems slightly more authoritarian, and indeed presumptuous, than those of us who want a level playing field, but look instead at the corruption of language. Militant secularism or atheism certainly existed in the 20th century… British atheists are not killing believers, however, nor are we closing churches or preventing the faithful from practising their faith. We are merely arguing, as full citizens of a democratic society are entitled to do, about the laws that should govern our country. For bishops, chairwomen of the Tory Party, Eric Pickles and Methodist Lib Dems to describe this as ‘militancy,’ reveals nothing except their paranoia, self-pity, ignorance of history and insecurity.

I in fact wish to dispute Cohen here. He is too kind in framing the liberal secular cause as being an argument as part of the democratic process about what the law should be. That concedes too much ground in making it appear like we’re accepting a battle of will in which the majority opinion will rightly succeed. But that’s not how I see beliefs in secularism. This isn’t just one of many beliefs about the way the country should be ran. It’s a meta issue. It’s about the framework within which democratic politics should be done, not part of that process. And the claim is, one final time, this: laws should not be justified with reference to the religious beliefs of a subsection of the population, ever. The demands of the Gospel of John are not to be the organising principle around which we conduct democratic discourse. We must speak in a language that appeals to the reason of all, and I object for eternity to the characterisation of this position, which insists on public neutrality between all faiths by refusing to privilege any of them, as in any way oppressive. If there are any enemies of freedom within this broadly sane country, Baroness Warsi and her anti-secular friends can stand up and collect the badge.

And so, relatedly, on to the bigger fish:

The TUC has accused Gove of failing in his legal duties by insisting that equality laws, which prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, do not extend to the school curriculum.
Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, wrote to Gove in December expressing alarm that a booklet containing “homophobic material” had been distributed by a US preacher after talks to pupils at Roman Catholic schools across the Lancashire region in 2010.

The booklet, which claims that “scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke”, explains that “the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God’s natural purpose for sex – babies and bonding.”

Gove insists: “The education provisions of the Equality Act 2010 which prohibit discrimination against individuals based on their protected characteristics (including their sexual orientation) do not extend to the content of the curriculum. Any materials used in sex and relationship education lessons, therefore, will not be subject to the discrimination provisions of the act.”

Council prayers were one thing. Utterly wrong, but barely sufficient to bring the house down. But now we are talking about what we teach children. And here we have the Education Secretary, in the name of religious freedom, defending the right of faith schools to do more than discriminate on the grounds of sexuality. He’s defending their right to tell evolving minds that their identity may be fundamentally corrupt, just because on their interpretation of their Holy Book, a practise otherwise unacceptable is legitimate.

This should repulse anyone living in Britain who now knows what our representatives are willing to tolerate, even when it’s perfectly clear what the consequences could be. Religious freedom is still, apparently, after centuries of liberal progress, the ace in blackjack; the trump card that silences all argument and concludes the valid case for any action.

I do not apologise for refusing to accept that religious tolerance extends to the practising of activities that we otherwise judge to be wrong, sometimes even disgusting. Here’s Brian Barry, responding to what was then new legislation exempting Jews and Muslims from the Slaughter of Poultry Act (that is, allowing them to bleed animals to death whilst still conscious, despite new prohibitions for everyone else):

we have cases in which laws and rules that are not discriminatory on their face nevertheless have differential impact on people as a result of their distinctive religious beliefs, culturally rooted practices and norms, and so on. This is the kind of case in which exponents of multiculturalism argue for special exemptions. I have suggested that the examples normally cited in this context are not good ones. If there is a sufficiently compelling reason for having the law in the first place, its inconveniencing some people (for whatever reason) is not a basis on which exemptions should be granted. The fact is that almost all laws are more burdensome to some people than to others. The paradigmatic liberal achievement of freedom of worship manifestly suits those whose religious beliefs are compatible with it better than those whose beliefs commit them to the imposition of a religious orthodoxy. A law prohibiting drink-driving does not bother non-drinkers, a law against paedophilia restrains only those inclined to it, and so on. So long as there are sufficiently good reasons for having uniform laws, their having a differential impact is no reason for making exceptions to them.

He then quotes Henry Louis Gates:

Deference to the autonomy of other beliefs, other values, other cultures has become an all-too-easy alibi for moral isolation. When we need action, we get hand-wringing. When we need forthrightness, we get equivocation. We need a liberalism that has confidence in its own insights, a liberalism possessed of clarity as well as compassion.

Case closed, but a word on the politics of this. David Cameron has worked hard over the past decade to repaint the Tory party. Its gay-bashing days were supposed to be behind it. Not only has he come out in favour of teaching gay equality in schools; he has also backed gay marriage proposals to be heard this year, despite vehement backbench opposition from his party’s religious faction.

I don’t know if this is cheap opportunism, capturing the modern mood. The fact he backed Section 28 as recently as merely ten years ago is worrying, but I’m willing to take his apparent change of heart at face value. When his Education Secretary so repulsively steps out in opposition to the party’s new ethos, however, and for now at least Cameron remains silent (just as he has all week on the secular issue, allowing us only to assume he worryingly backs Warsi and co.), one can see why people doubt his sincerity. Gove must apologise and reverse his position, or resign. Anything less than this ultimatum is sheer cowardice now.

Not that the PM is alone here. I have seen no backbone from Labour over this entire affair, and the Liberal Democrats from what I can tell have been similarly silent. There simply seems to be an absence of due outrage on all sides; a passive acceptance of an illiberal consensus.

Belligerent liberalism.

What a glorious front page story The Telegraph leads with today, half-making up for its disaster piece with Baroness Warsi in midweek:

“To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

 The director of the NSS backs Mr. Philips up:

“If society has decided that it wants to ensure by law that every citizen of this country has equal rights, then there cannot be endless exemptions for religious bodies or anyone else,” he said.

Andrea Williams dishes out another dose of her dirt:

“These comments are deeply illiberal. They are intolerant,” she said. “Trevor Phillips fails to understand the nature of faith and what inspires faith and what makes agencies like Catholic adoption agencies so selfless.”

The Bishop of Rochester backs her up:

“Trevor Phillips in the past has argued for respect for Christian conscience,” he said. “I am very surprised that here he seems to be saying that there should be a totalitarian kind of view in which a believer’s conscience should not be respected.”

And Nadine Dorries MP practically calls for Philips’ head:

Because refusing to give an organisation an exemption from laws promoting equality for hetero and homosexuals with regards to adoption is illiberal, intolerant and totalitarian. The right to religious liberty includes the right to be homophobic and discriminate against people on the basis of sexuality. Just as, no doubt, if Christians believed their Bible warranted racism, it would be intolerant to block them from running adoption agencies refusing services to black people on the basis of their skin colour. Promoting racial equality would be the epitome of suppressing freedom. If one’s faith is said to call for a certain action, it must be allowed. And one can definitely argue for this position without committing to the prospect of Britain, in theory, being governed by pockets of Sharia Law in the name of religious freedom. And this anti-secularism is definitely consistent with condemning theocracies a la Iran that also allow legislation with their Holy Book’s alleged demands in mind.

This is what you call a reductio ad absurdum that Dorries and her friends will never understand. They want the government to allow Catholics to practise homophobia as a matter of conscience.

These people are obscene. Long live bold, belligerent liberalism.

Quote for the day.

When you thought things couldn’t get much crazier after Warsi, The Independent (of all papers!) goes and publishes this:

What is staggering about the secularists is their arrogance and the shortness of their memories. The materialist utopianism of the Communists and Nazis is to blame for all the worst atrocities of the past century. Dawkins may appear to make sense, but it is incredible that we should be ready to pay serious attention to a prophet whose message is the same as those whose schemes led straight to the hells of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge.

I’m so dumbfounded that I’ve lost the will now to even bother replying to such rhetoric. Where did these nutjobs emerge from? They seem to have exploded into existence ex nihilo over night. This is not the Britain I knew or perceived a week ago. As I wrote previously, ride out the storm, keep calm, and hope sanity reemerges once they’ve vented their nonsense anger. I think that’s it on this issue for me. A friend at Durham has asked me to write a piece on secularism for the student magazine there, so I’ll link to that once it’s up. But I’m growing tired now of even acknowledging professional journalists absurdly equating secularism with illiberal nihilism.

Warsi reactions.

The Twittersphere’s coming out in force. Warsi is trending, and if you check the content out none of it is nice.

Andrew Copson writes for the British Humanists:

With government proposing to hand ever more schools and other public services to religious groups with only limited protections for the rights of staff and service users of the “wrong” or no religion, the need for an inclusive and secular approach to our public institutions has never been greater. At such a time it is surreal to hear secularism being condemned as intolerant – it is not secular schools that select pupils according to their parents’ beliefs, it is not secular agencies that reserve employment opportunities for staff according to their beliefs, and it is not secular organisations which lobby to maintain privilege and have exemption from laws – like equality laws – that should affect everyone equally.

And adds on his blog:

Are there any actual specific policies that she is recommending to support ‘faith’? She has basically made this same speech five or six times now, and written on the same theme in The Telegraph repeatedly, but I still don’t quite know what she actually wants.

Jones explains at the New Statesman:

In complaining about “militant secularisation” Warsi is, of course, talking the Pope’s language. Objection to the supposed marginalisation of Christianity in the West has been one of the idées fixes of Benedict XVI’s papacy, along with liturgical neoconservatism. Last month he fortified American bishops ahead of their forthcoming battle with the Obama administration’s health reforms, denouncing “powerful new cultural currents” that were “increasingly hostile to Christianity as such”. And if that’s how he views the United States, comfortably the most religious developed nation in the Western world, it’s not surprising that he has an even more jaundiced view of Europe.

Meanwhile, Dawkins has commissioned Ipsos/Mori to poll people who call themselves Christians on the census (just over half the population, down from three quarters in 2001) to see what we can actually learn from that. The delightful results are, perfectly, out today:

Almost three quarters (74 per cent) agreed that religion should not influence public policy, while only about one in eight (12 per cent) thought it should, the survey found.

Six in 10 respondents (61 per cent) agreed that homosexuals should have the same legal rights in all aspects of their lives as heterosexuals, and those who disapproved of sexual relations between two adults of the same sex (29 per cent) were greatly outnumbered by those who did not (46 per cent).

 The current law in England and Wales requiring state schools to hold a daily act of broadly Christian worship was not strongly supported either, with almost as many Christians opposing it (36 per cent) as in favour (39 per cent).

And then the killer:

Just over a quarter (26 per cent) said they completely believed in the power of prayer, with more than one in five (21 per cent) saying they either did not really believe in it or did not believe in it at all.

Almost half (49 per cent) had not attended a church service in the previous 12 months, apart from on occasions such as weddings, funerals and baptisms.

Some 16 per cent had not attended for more than 10 years, and a further 12 per cent had never attended at all.

So of the fifty percent of Brits who identify as Christian, the overwhelming majority are secular and pro-gay rights. And less than half attend Church.

This is not a vote winner, Baroness. Give up now.

Council prayers, continued.

The Times‘ Oliver Kamm continues (£) the defence of the NSS:

No one is objecting to Christianity’s status as a public faith: the issue is whether it should be a civic faith. In a free society, it can’t be. What binds us is common citizenship under the rule of law, not what any of us happen to believe about a Jewish apocalyptic preacher in first-century Palestine.

Mr Pickles’s assertions about the historical role of Christianity are a monumental non sequitur: there is no secularist campaign to bar Christians from participating in the nation’s affairs. Those who wear a clerical collar do not have to remove it to share the liberties of fellow citizens; but they have no right to a special say. If Mr Pickles wishes to see how other societies do things differently, Iran might profitably be his first port of call.

A non sequitur indeed. But it won’t stop Reverends writing (£) into newspapers and continuing to justify formal prayer with reference to the Church’s charity work:

In the middle of the last century, government — in one form or another — took over from the churches and Christian-based charities all kinds of care: of the sick, of deaf or blind people, of children’s homes and much more. Now that the State can no longer maintain all this, the process is in reverse and the churches and charities, very often Christian in inspiration, are being asked to meet the immense needs of society.

In Birmingham, at least, I have not noticed atheist or humanist societies rushing to fill the void left by reduced council provision.

Yes, the churches are imperfect, but they are at last recovering from a time when Christian faith was privatised. They do not, I think, want power, but they are increasingly serving in places of need, and their voice is needed.

I am not a great fan of statutory prayers, or of the paraphernalia of religion. Some in our society would like to keep the fruit without the root, but it would be unwise if this country further diminished the proper public role of the faith which undergirds the best in our history.

This is embarrassingly bad, but as so often in the UK, the mere fact the writer’s name begins with the title ‘Reverend’ ensures it gets published regardless. Schoolchildren could construct arguments better than this.

But nor does the poorness of the argument stop  a ‘quality’ newspaper penning an Editorial playing the victim card and endorsing anti-secularist sentiment:

Our history and culture are formed by the Christian faith. The way we are governed is linked directly to the schism in the Church almost half a millennium ago: in England, we have an Established Church of which the head of state is the Supreme Governor.

It is all too easy to forget this – largely because politically correct fawning by public bodies over the sensitivities of other faiths has left many Christians feeling inhibited about asserting and celebrating their own beliefs…

Last week, we had the perfect illustration of this baleful process, when the National Secular Society succeeded in a High Court attempt to prevent Bideford Town Council doing something it had done for centuries – holding a short prayer service at the start of its meetings. The atheist former councillor who pressed the case argued that the council had no right to “impose” its religious views on him, conveniently ignoring the fact that no one had forced him to attend the prayers, and failing totally to see that it was he who was seeking to impose his views on others, not the other way round.

Note the convenient inclusion of the fact that the objecting councillor was an atheist, deliberately intending to conceal the fact that secularism is perfectly consistent with faith and even endorsed by the more reasonable members of religions. But indeed, the one wishing to make council meetings formally faith-neutral is the ‘imposer’ of values. The value of impartiality, perhaps. But no doubt The Telegraph also objects to that.

Such nutty secularists are not merely oppressive, though; they’re reminiscent of totalitarians:

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities.

That’s why in the 20th century, one of the first acts of totalitarian regimes was the targeting of organised religion.

That was cabinet minister Baroness Warsi. Wake me up. I’m apparently in a nightmare where lovely liberal Britain transforms into bonkers America. This is rhetoric reminiscent of Rick Santorum. If this quote were given to me blind, I’d attribute it to him immediately. This week he felt the need to talk of the guillotine when contrasting the American revolution with its secular French counterpart, and here Warsi has the nerve to say it ‘seems astonishing to me that those who wrote the European Constitution made no mention of God or Christianity’.

I’m only fairly calm here because I believe Cameron has demonstrated secular commitments sufficiently to keep this movement small. His speech over Christmas was pounced upon by Guardianistas, but when you read past the headlines and appreciate the context, the content of what he said was perfectly consistent with not privileging Christianity, and rightly so. The small religious right will have their week to hiss and moan and we’ll have to see it through, but so long as the courts continue to see sense and Downing Street shows no intentions of making this an agenda, we can do our bit to counter the outcry whilst retaining sanity in the knowledge that the voices will never dominate. When judges feel bold enough to even stop Christian B&Bs from banning homosexual couples, you know we have a social ethos and Equalities legislation that should be envied the world over.

But there’s one thing we should refuse to ever stop being angry about, and that’s the ease with which politicians in this country can have relations with the Vatican and talk of them in terms as casual and positive as this:

Seven ministers including Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland Secretary and Michael Moore, the Scottish Secretary, travel to the Vatican on Tuesday. They will be joined by the Archbishop of Westminster. They will meet Holy See officials on Wednesday to discuss issues including human rights and international development… David Cameron welcomed the visit. He said: “Our relationship with the Holy See is an important one and it speaks powerfully of the positive contribution faith can make to all societies.”

Maybe his Cabinet buddies aren’t, but Cameron is intelligent enough to know the Pope stinks of sin. So let’s see some balls, please, and renounce relations with this sick sham of a state led by a coward hiding under faux sovereign immunity. This isn’t a Conservative problem. Labour instigated the Papal visit before the 2010 election, and was far from quick to cancel it as the scandal came to light in their final months. But the thought of the British executive spending the week with this so called fountain of moral value, in a public capacity, is repulsive on too many levels.

(Thanks to this blog for the photo, which also reminds of Evan Harris’ worthwhile explanation of secularism here.)

Council prayers

have now been banned. Cue shitstorm:

And naturally Andrea Williams has a word or two to say:

This ruling is appalling and a direct assault against the Christian principles which this country is built upon. It is a myth that secularism is somehow neutral. The secularism promoted by many today is deeply totalitarian in nature and cuts against the historic freedoms and tolerance which have made this nation admired around the world. Intolerance towards freedom of belief is now reaching endemic proportions. Christianity is being systematically driven out of the public square and we are seeing some very odd judgments from the Courts.

An NSS exec explains:

Our interest in this issue was prompted by a complaint from a Bideford Town Councillor, Clive Bone, who felt uncomfortable at having to sit through prayers, homilies and requests for divine guidance while carrying out his formal duties as an elected councillor. The only alternative to this discomfort was to walk out, unbidden by the mayor, which would look discourteous to those in the public gallery.

And the Secular Society’s report clarifies:

The judgement follows a Judicial Review initiated by the National Secular Society to challenge the practice of prayers as part of the formal business of council meetings in Bideford Town Council (Devon).

Italics mine. Jones confirms:

The point being contested was, arguably, a fairly trivial one: whether prayers could be an item on the formal council agenda.

And he quotes the judge:

I do not think the 1972 Act […] should be interpreted as permitting the religious views of one group of councillors, however sincere or large in number, to exclude, or even to a modest extent, to impose burdens on or even to mark out those who do not share their views and do not wish to participate in their expression of them. They are all equally elected councillors.

Andrea Williams is, of course, wrong. Secularism does protect religious liberty. But admittedly it does not protect the sort that she seeks; viz, its infiltration of government. Secularism is more than happy to let people of all faiths pray. What it merely objects to is that freedom being hijacked and jeopardised by the type of council activity seen here in which one faith is privileged, and it becomes part of the nature of political meetings to begin them with an act of worship. And the point is that this would be the secularist’s stance were this Christianity, Islam or Hinduism dominating the agenda. If this is indeed ‘totalitarian’, ‘intolerant’ and not ‘neutral’, then so much for Williams’ interpretation of those terms and the negative value she attaches to them.

I’m in awe of Giles Fraser’s ability to transcend his faith and side with the NSS on this:

I don’t see how it is right for a chaplain to invite a group of people to say “Amen” (this is true) to a diverse group, many from other faiths and none, when the prayer would usually end “… through Jesus Christ our Lord”. Yes, you can try and take all the faith specifics out of prayer. But I don’t think that ever really works. Faith does not sound right or convincing in theological Esperanto.

The key test here is what The Mail, Christian Concern et al. would say were they to be a minority religion in this country. Would they stand by their backing of the majority’s power to dominate the agenda and impose their contentious faith on a public forum? Would they happily sit through an Imam’s speech merely because the Council is largely Islamic, or would they desperately plead minority rights and, indeed, an infringement of their religious liberty? I wonder.

University, atheism and nihilism.

There’s definitely a link. Just ask Rick.

I love how he’s still pressing that old fallacy-fucked ‘secularists are happy to enforce their values on us, but us Christians are demonised when we force our values on them’ line. Sometimes I hope America one day becomes a Muslim-majority country, just so I can see this man suddenly plead minority rights. Or imagine if over fifty percent of America became heterophobic and wanted a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as being between a man and a man or a woman and a woman! Heh. I will have sweet dreams tonight.