The British state now refuses to tolerate any opinion contrary to the official dogma that homosexuality is morally equal to heterosexuality. In the service of this dictat, the state would deny needy children good homes that may, if queried, denounce the homosexual lifestyle.
By Stephen Bates in The Guardian on 28th February, 2011:
Anti-gay Christian couple lose foster care case
Court rules against Christian couple who claimed their beliefs on homosexuality should not prevent them becoming foster carers
A Pentecostal Christian couple have lost their high court claim that they were discriminated against by a local authority because they insisted on their right to tell young foster children that homosexuality is morally wrong.
Eunice and Owen Johns, who are in their sixties and have fostered children in the past, claimed they were being discriminated against by Derby city council because of their Christian beliefs, after they told a social worker they could not tell a child a “homosexual lifestyle” was acceptable. The couple had hoped to foster five- to 10-year-olds.
The case was the latest to be brought by conservative evangelicals, led by the Christian Legal Centre, over their supporters’ right to discriminate specifically against gay people and not be bound by equality regulations. All the cases have so far been lost.
In a sharply worded judgment, Lord Justice Munby and Justice Beatson dismissed the couple’s lawyer’s claims as “a travesty of reality”.
“No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not ‘fit and proper’ persons to foster or adopt. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law and our way of life that everyone is equal before the law and equal as a human being … entitled to dignity and respect. We are, however, entitled to take judicial notice of the fact that, whereas the sharia is still understood in many places as making homosexuality a capital offence, … the Church of England permits its clergy, so long as they remain celibate, to enter into civil partnerships. We live in this country in a democratic and pluralistic society, in a secular state not a theocracy.”
Outside the court, Eunice Johns said: “We are extremely distressed at what the judges have ruled. All we wanted was to offer a loving home to a child in need, but because we are Christians with mainstream Christian views on sexual ethics, we are apparently unsuitable.
“We are prepared to love and accept any child. All we were not willing to do was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing. We feel excluded and that there is no place for us in society.”
The CLC’s lawyer, Andrea Minichiello Williams, said: “How can judges get away with this? The law has been increasingly interpreted by judges in a way which favours homosexual rights over freedom of conscience. Britain is now leading Europe in intolerance to religious belief.”
The judges in their ruling said they were not ruling against beliefs but against the discriminatory effects of those beliefs and that one set of beliefs could not take precedence in a pluralist society.
Derby city council said it had never taken a view on the Johns’ application, adding: “It would be inappropriate for the council to approve foster carers who cannot meet minimum standards. It would be difficult and impractical to match children with Mr and Mrs Johns if they feel that strongly.”
Lord Justice Munby and Justice Beatson refused to tolerate thoughts differing from those of the pro-homosexual (celibacy is in fact not so much as requested of Anglican priests in their “civil partnerships”), pro-jihadist Church of England. Clearly, the Soviet Union was anti-homosexual; nevertheless, the parallel with the soft totalitarian inclinations of our government is unmistakable.
By Hal G. P. Colebatch in The Australian on 21st April, 2009:
Thought police muscle up in Britain
Britain appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.
There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution’s principal tasks was “to alter people’s actual psychology”. Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people’s psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years’ prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the “global baggage of empire” was linked to soccer violence by “racist and xenophobic white males”. He claimed the English “propensity for violence” was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were “potentially very aggressive”.
Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government’s anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: “If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you.” Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: “If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings.” It took him five years to clear his name.
Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police!” Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.”
A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya ”Paki” and “bin Laden” during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan Finestein, said: “Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There are major crimes out there and the police don’t bother to prosecute. This is nonsense.”
Finestein was fiercely attacked by teaching union leaders, as in those witch-hunt trials where any who spoke in defence of an accused or pointed to defects in the prosecution were immediately targeted as witches and candidates for burning.
Hate-crime police investigated Basil Brush, a puppet fox on children’s television, who had made a joke about Gypsies. The BBC confessed that Brush had behaved inappropriately and assured police that the episode would be banned.
A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to “celebrate diversity”, the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.
Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children.
There have been innumerable cases in recent months of people in schools, hospitals and other institutions losing their jobs because of various religious scruples, often, as in the East Germany of yore, not shouted fanatically from the rooftops but betrayed in private conversations and reported to authorities. The crime of one nurse was to offer to pray for a patient, who did not complain but merely mentioned the matter to another nurse. A primary school receptionist, Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking about Jesus in class, faces the sack for seeking support from her church. A private email from her to other members of the church asking for prayers fell into the hands of school authorities.
Permissiveness as well as draconianism can be deployed to destroy socially accepted norms and values. The Royal Navy, for instance, has installed a satanist chapel in a warship to accommodate the proclivities of a satanist crew member. “What would Nelson have said?” is a British newspaper cliche about navy scandals, but in this case seems a legitimate question. Satanist paraphernalia is also supplied to prison inmates who need it.
This campaign seems to come from unelected or quasi-governmental bodies controlling various institutions, which are more or less unanswerable to electors, more than it does directly from the Government, although the Government helps drive it and condones it in a fudged and deniable manner.
Any one of these incidents might be dismissed as an aberration, but taken together – and I have only mentioned a tiny sample; more are reported almost every day – they add up to a pretty clear picture.
Tags: anti-gay christian couple lose foster care case, Britain, eunice johns, Hal G. P. Colebatch, owen johns, Stephen Bates, the australian, the guardian, thought police muscle up in britain
March 7, 2011 at 12:54 pm |
I have long said that political correctness (and, at this point apparently, totalitarian repression) is out of control in Great Britain and Europe. You, as a white Christian Englishman, have no real freedom of any sort–at least not when it might happen to inconvenience or annoy the leftish scum who dominate the sociopolitical life of your nation. A similar situation obtains in Canada.
A lot of this repression comes from silly bureaucratic types and stupid minor officials, as usually occurs in all societies. But what is unforgivable (to my American mind, at least) is that no one in the upper levels of British society is raising a stink about this horrific repression. No one! Not your academics or your lawyers or your legislators or your journalists or your writers. They are all as silent as sheep.
At least here in the States we can still scream bloody murder if we want, and embarrass the idiots. It would seem that doing so in Britain now will land you in prison.
You can’t say it but I will: Jack Straw is a piece of garbage.
March 7, 2011 at 4:33 pm |
After the British aristocracy were largely wiped out after fighting in two World Wars and the Empire then went into decline due to a mixture of American pressure and domestic loss of will, a new socialist leadership rose from the ashes.
On the one hand, there were the administrative socialists concerned primarily with expanding their petty fiefdoms, and on the other hand the ideological Marxians — especially the Gramscians.
Together, by 1970 or so, they had effected a revolution without changing the outward appearance of the state. Today, these two groups are virtually indistinguishable, although of course some people (e.g., Jack Straw, Rowan Williams) are more offencive than others.
I suggest you look at the writings of the libertarian monarchist Sean Gabb. I cannot be certain, but I suspect you would find his work to be most edifying.
March 7, 2011 at 11:28 pm |
I agree about the Gramscians: they are the real termites undermining the Western world. At least many of the old Communists and Socialists had the courage of their convictions, and one could fight them in the open. The Gramscians are mostly under cover, working with the silent intensity of Carthusian monks.
Yes, your natural aristocracy is mostly gone, mowed down at the Somme, or blown away at the Dardanelles or Tobruk. And this aristicide (overtly practiced by leftists wherever they gain power) is deeply regretted by millions of non-English persons like myself.
I will check out Sean Gabb.
March 8, 2011 at 9:17 pm |
Here is Sean Gabb’s website:
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/