Anglican Mainstream

By Damian Thompson, Telegraph

British schools are helping to boost Islamism with politically correct lessons that tell black pupils that slavery was entirely the fault of English and Americans, and omit the long and vicious history of Arab slave trading, according to an influential Church of England bishop.

In an exclusive interview for our Telegram podcast, which goes live later today, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali – a Pakistani-born scholar who resigned as Bishop of Rochester in 2009 in order to train Christians facing persecution – says "the Churches have generally capitulated to secular culture and therefore cannot bring a distinctive voice to public debate".

They have neglected human relations, especially the family, in favour of "welfarism" that teaches that the state should provide all the goods that citizens need. All this adds up to the slow death of people's sense of themselves as spiritual beings – and this affects "even people who go to church".

Bishop Nazir-Ali, a theological conservative who opposes the ordination of actively gay clergy, is now president of Oxtrad, which "prepares Christians for ministry in situations where the Church is under pressure and in danger of persecution". He claims that, in addition to ignoring the current persecution of Christians in the Islamic world, secular Britain brushes aside historical evidence of Muslim aggression.

"If you ignore what really happened to give a lopsided view of history in the interests of political correctness, you can't blame [young] people if they move to something else that has a less critical view of itself," he says. Christianity appears so apologetic that students naturally gravitate towards self-confident Islam. Meanwhile, "the Churches' engagement with the secular world becomes capitulation to it".

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By Claire Carter, Telegraph

Religious leaders and campaigners said the rejection of religious discrimination claims by three Christians will have a ‘chilling effect’ on people’s right to their beliefs and raised concerns about the future persecution of Christians.

Campaigners warned the decision by the European Court of Human Rights could see more cases where Christians lose their jobs because of their religion, following David Cameron’s gay marriage bill.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali said he thought the decision by the court not to take the cases of Lillian Ladele, Shirley Chaplin and Gary McFarlane further, raised fears of a “systemic exclusion of people” from public roles because of their beliefs.

Marriage registrar Miss Ladele was disciplined by Islington council for refusing to conduct civil partnership ceremonies when they were legalised in 2004, and Mrs Chaplin, a former nurse, was transferred to desk duties after she refused to take off a crucifix. Mr McFarlane was dismissed as a relationship counsellor at charity Relate after he said he was prepared to counsel same sex couples but not to discuss sexual issues.

All had their claims of religious discrimination rejected by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg earlier this year and judges have now rejected their request to take their appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Court.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, said: “I think the real worry is that this could mean the systemic exclusion of people from certain roles in public life, simply because they hold their beliefs.”

He said he felt an “opportunity has been missed” in the case to recognise people who did not want to carry out certain tasks because of their conscience, or beliefs, and added: “My experience in other countries is that exclusion and discrimination leads to persecution.”

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From Cranmer

The beheading of a British soldier in his own country has long been threatened by some of our home-grown Islamists, but such a barbaric act occurring on the streets of London has been quite literally incredible, unimaginable, inconceivable. Yes, there are gruesome 'religious' decapitations all over YouTube, but that sort of bloody horror is peculiar to the shady fiefdoms of Mogadishu, Chechnya or the Sudan. It just doesn't happen in England. Not to a 20-year-old young man wearing a 'Help for Heroes' charity T-shirt, walking peacefully in the warm London sunlight of the merry month of May.

There appears to be some unfortunate attempt at media censorship going on, and this will help no-one: indeed, it is more likely to increase suspicion over motives and inflame anger. One of the killers, speaking in a recognisable saarf-Laandan accent, was recorded on video. He said:

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don't care about you."

The Muslim Council of Britain rushed out a swift statement, washing its hands of the murder, repudiating utterly any link with Islam: "A barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly," they said.

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Read also:  Denial is still a river in Londonistan and Stiff competition for Most Fatuous Reaction award by Melanie Phillips

by Joseph Backholm, Family Policy Institute of Washington

by Sheila Liaugminas, MercatorNet

There is bi-partisan outrage over the widening scope of the revelation that the powerful Internal Revenue Service has been targeting groups said to be conservative for the past couple of years. But the IRS target list was much wider than that, and the agency’s treatment of these groups and citizens is both shocking and disturbing.

AM Comment:  For us we would add a third great lie: that people are born gay which means that those who are 'anti-gay' are racists.  Gay is now seen as the new black. This however is a lie, launched in the late 80s by  PR gurus Kirk and Madsen in their seminal 'After the Ball' (1989).  Hitler's apt quote comes to mind: "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.'

By Roger Scruton, Conservative Home

From The Deep End, Conservative Home

In 1961 a young psychiatrist by the name of Thomas Szasz published a book called The Myth of Mental Illness in which he argued that “psychiatry, unlike medicine, could demonstrate no physical basis for the ‘diseases’ it identified and ‘treated’”.

In a fascinating profile for Aeon, Holly Case writes that Szasz’s book was a big hit with the counter-culture of 1960s America, whose anti-establishment rebels delighted in what they saw as a repudiation of society’s suffocating norms.

And yet, Szasz was no leftwinger. In fact, he was a staunch Republican, who feared that, in the hands of the left, psychiatry would become a tool of political oppression:

[...]  In other words, we should oppose such points of view on the grounds that they are factually and/or ethically wrong, not as the symptoms of a supposed medical condition.

Even at its worst, political correctness (whether practised on the left or the right) has not ‘gone mad’, rather it uses concepts of madness to define opposing viewpoints. This, potentially, is what makes it so dangerous. Instead of debating the rights and wrongs of an issue, one can simply pathologise a minority opinion by noting its deviation from the norm – and thus defined, its repression can be re-defined as ‘treatment’.

As Thomas Szasz once said, “it can be dangerous to be wrong, but, to be right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.”

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From AFA

Within hours of an AFA Action Alert, the Pentagon said it had resolved the reasons it blocked the Southern Baptist Convention website, www.sbc.net, from military computers.

The block came just a few weeks after an Army briefing labeled Evangelical Christians and Catholics as examples of religious extremist groups, and a separate email identified two prominent Christian ministries as "domestic hate groups."

In this case, the Pentagon said the block was a matter of website security and not an infringement on religious liberty. "In this case, security systems performed as expected in detecting a threat to DoD (Department of Defense) networks," Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said in a prepared statement.

"We determined that our web filters recently detected malware at the SBC website, which resulted in the block for some service members," Pickart said. "The department has verified that the Southern Baptist Convention website no longer contains malware that may pose a threat to our networks and will be unblocked today."

Pickart added the block did not have anything to do with the "hostile" or religious content. "The Department of Defense strongly supports the religious rights of service members, to include their ability to access religious websites like that of the SBC," he said.

Immediately after releasing the AFA Action Alert, dozens of military personnel and chaplains told AFA they could not access the Baptist website on base computers, while a few said their military computer allowed the site.

WHY THIS WAS IMPORTANT

Had this issue not gained national attention, the sbc.net website would still be blocked today. Because hundreds of Baptist military personnel and chaplains depend on their denomination's website, it was critical that the site be unblocked quickly.

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By Conal Urquhart, Guardian

By Julian Mann, Christian Today

By Andrew Pierce, Mailonline

David Cameron’s so-called ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ has been rocked by the defection to Ukip of one of its once-stalwart supporters.

In a clear sign of the Tory leadership’s continuing alienation of the party’s grassroots, one of Cabinet minister Francis Maude’s closest aides has joined Nigel Farage’s party.

Councillor Roger Arthur, deputy leader of Tory-controlled Horsham District Council where Maude is the MP, explained his defection by citing the Tories’ obsession with gay marriage and massive spending on international aid.

He said: ‘The Conservative Party has altered out of recognition and no longer represents my views.

‘A lot of traditional supporters have been disappointed at the continuing lack of strong direction.

Many were foot-soldiers, who have been departing in their droves so that some local associations are no longer viable fighting machines.’

And in a killer blow, he added: ‘Ukip is the real Conservative Party.’

Mr Arthur’s defection came only two weeks after Philip Circus, the vice-chairman of Horsham Council and a former parliamentary candidate, accused Mr Cameron of losing touch with the party’s grassroots.

No wonder David Cameron felt it necessary last week to try to placate Tories with traditional views by appointing to the Cabinet Office no-nonsense minister John Hayes (a key member of the Cornerstone Group of Tories which implacably opposes gay marriage, green taxes and the Human Rights legislation). Many fear, though, that the move is far too late.

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Read also:  Christian Conservatives can be proud of this Coalition's record but a lot more still needs to be done by Colin Bloom, Conservative Home.  It is evident from many of the readers' comments that any attempts by David Cameron at appeasing Christians are worthless so long as he continues to ram through gay marriage.

By Tim Loughton, Conservative Home

By Ross Clark, Mailonline

No doubt the bigwigs at Birmingham City Council thought they should be seen to be doing something about its shambolic waste-collection service, which last December saw the streets disappear beneath 10ft-high piles of rubbish.

But quite how the ‘Attitudes To Recycling And Rewards’ survey it has just sent out to residents is supposed to help it empty the bins is anyone’s guess.

After a few mundane questions on wheelie bins, it suddenly demands to know: ‘Which of the following most accurately describes your sexual orientation? Bisexual? Gay man? Gay woman/lesbian? Heterosexual/straight? Other?’

[...]  Actor Sir Ian McKellen, who isn’t slow to complain about homophobia wherever he senses it, roundly condemned the Arts Council for including a question about sexual orientation on a funding application form.

Nosy questions about ethnicity, sexuality and gender are part of a bureaucracy that is spinning out of control.

And the irony is that it doesn’t come from any genuine concern to stamp out inequality, but from pen-pushers building empires and creating jobs for each other.

What we, the public, see is nothing compared with the nonsense that public-sector bodies inflict upon their own staff.

Two years ago, Buckinghamshire County Council staff issued its staff with a questionnaire entitled ‘Respecting Sexuality’. Among the questions they were expected to answer were ‘What do you think caused your heterosexuality?’, and ‘Is it possible your sexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?’

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By Kerry McDermott, Mailonline

• Birmingham City Council e-mailed questionnaire to thousands of residents
• Question appeared in 'about you' section of rubbish disposal survey
• Council said it wanted to ensure feedback was 'as informed as possible'

Town hall officials have quizzed residents about their sexuality – in a survey on wheelie bins.

The questionnaire, sent by Birmingham council to thousands of homes, posed a number of mundane questions relating to recycling reward schemes, the sizes of bins and whether respective properties had adequate space to store them.

But it had a bizarre sting in the tail. One of the questions in the ‘about you’ section asked: ‘Which of the following most accurately describes your sexual orientation?’

The options available were ‘bisexual, gay man, gay woman/lesbian, heterosexual/straight, other, or prefer not to say’.

The question has not gone down well with the citizens of Birmingham. One of them, Dave Dixon, 34, who was emailed the questionnaire, said: ‘It does not ask if residents want such bins but is very interested in their sexual orientation. Are we going to have different coloured bins dependent on one’s orientation?'

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By Paul Burgess

This week’s debate in the Commons on the Government’s gay marriage bill was notable for a lack of engagement with the real issues at stake and thus missed the point of the argument for marriage. For there are many levels of engagement in this whole matter of whether marriage can be extended to include same sex couples.

On the surface is a debate about social justice: the issue of whether denying gay couples the benefits of an official marital status is essentially discriminatory. These days Western society is increasingly governed by a politically correct human rights notion of equality. It is at this level that the proponents of gay marriage argue.

On another level there is the question of theology, whether about the conclusions of a dogmatic theology based on the interpretation of the revelations of a Faith’s sacred scriptures (tradition), or about the findings of a natural theology based on the studies of nature itself (human experience and scientific discovery). It is at this theological level that the proponents of a traditional concept of marriage argue.

Attached to this theological level are two further areas of debate:

1. The philosophical discussion of the ontological (i.e. essential) nature of marriage. It concerns the issue of its category identification: is the essence of marriage about a heterosexual relationship or merely a sexual relationship?

2. The application of moral theology to the mores (relating to the moral attitudes and customs involved) of marriage. This concerns the morality of homosexual behaviour – to be sharply distinguished from orientation (same-sex attraction).

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By Alexander Boot

Having admitted at his trial to the rape of a 13-year-old girl, Adil Rashid, 18, was facing four to seven years in prison.

Yet Judge Michael Stokes suspended the sentence, for reasons that make one doubt not just his sanity but also that of our whole society. In fact, this case could provide a valuable diagnostic tool in any psychiatric examination. However, lacking medical qualifications, I’ll have to approach the stated reasons behind such lenience from other angles.

Reason One: Since Rashid had gone to an Islamic faith school, he didn’t know that having sex with female children was wrong.

Now, Rashid was born, bred and educated in Birmingham, not in Dar-es-Salaam. Even if his environment could indeed ‘be described as a closed community’, as his defence attorney claimed, surely he must have ventured outside his school enough times to make such ignorance unlikely?

But even assuming for the sake of argument that he was indeed unaware of the difference between a child and a woman, or between a woman and a lollipop, as his lawyer also suggested, since when is that an extenuating circumstance? Certainly not since the Roman jurists first enunciated in no uncertain terms that ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of the law is no excuse).

Had Judge Stokes sent Rashid down for the full seven years, he would have therefore asserted a legal principle that operates in the law of every civilised country. More important, he would have sent an important message ‘to encourage the others’, in Voltaire’s phrase.

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From Cranmer

Yesterday in Parliament an obscure little statutory committee – all undemocratically appointed by the Lord Speaker – examined and approved draft Measures presented to it by the Legislative Committee of the General Synod of the Church of England on how to deal with the BNP. Ben Bradshaw was quick to extrapolate this to 'far right or racist parties' in general, suggesting future scope for the extension of these disciplinary measures. His Grace has purposely included the first two responses to Mr Bradshaw's tweet, since, if a council can discriminate against adoptive parents for their 'right-wing' UKIP-leaning views, it is inevitable (with a very high degree of certainty) that 'far right' will come to embrace those who oppose gay marriage or women bishops. For if racism be an abhorrent manifestation in the Church of Christ, how much more should homophobia, misogyny or europhobia be subject to ecclesiastical opprobrium?

His Grace has said this before, but he'll say it again. All reasonable Christian people will have immense sympathy with an expression of Christian witness which seeks to denounce racism in all its forms, including in the temporal political realm. The Church should be completely intolerant of all those who would foment discord on the basis of ethnicity or skin colour. The Early Church abolished the Jew-Greek division and declared all to be one in Christ Jesus, so there can be no theological rationale 2000 years later for black-brown-white segregation. To be Christian is to be blind to race: all of humanity is equal in the great plan of salvation. We are all children of God, and all equal in our sin.

But here we now have the Established Church of England empowered by Parliament to prohibit those in Holy Orders from joining a political party which is not only legally constituted in the United Kingdom, but has won elections to the European Parliament and is deemed to conform to both UK and EU law.

Oh, of course, the party has not been named: the General Synod simply decreed that allegiance to a party whose policies are ‘incompatible with the teaching of the Church of England in relation to the equality of persons or groups of different races’ would be ‘unbecoming and inappropriate’. So, in theory, Ben Bradshaw is right that all racist or discriminatory political parties are to be proscribed.

But he only mentions the 'far right'. Are there no 'far left' parties with racist or otherwise discriminatory ideologies?

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From Conservative Home

By Tim Stanley, Telegraph

by Gerri Peev, Mailonline

Children as young as six have been asked about their sexuality and whether they have had a sex change in a survey about their local library.

Youngsters in Portsmouth were among those canvassed on the future of Cosham Library.

But as part of the survey, the children were asked to identify their sexuality and say whether they were still the same gender they had been ‘assigned’ at birth.
 
Questions about where residents would prefer the library to be located took up just half a page of the two-page survey. Three-quarters of the questions were about whether library users had a disability, their religion and what ethnic group they belonged to.

 The poll, carried out by Portsmouth City Council, also quizzed library users on their sexuality and asked respondents: ‘Is your gender the same as the gender you were assigned at birth?’

The library survey was put through residents’ doors, posted on the council’s website and circulated to officials.

Tory councillor Alistair Thompson said: ‘This is political correctness gone mad. It’s completely bonkers and a waste of taxpayers’ money.’

Council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson, a Lib Dem, insisted the survey was a legal requirement.

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