Millionaire Waheed Alli, given a life peerage at the age of 34 in 1998, became the youngest and first openly gay peer in Parliament.
Posted on 03/06/2010 12:28:46 PM PST by NYer
Damian Thompson of The Telegraph reports on an amendment to the so-called "Equity Bill" that threatens to further the seemingly inexorable steamrolling of religious freedom in the UK:
On Tuesday night, the House of Lords passed an amendment to the Equality Bill tabled by the gay Labour peer Lord Alli. As a result, the Bill now removes the ban on civil partnership ceremonies being held in places of worship. If passed in its current form, the doors of churches will be thrown open to what are effectively gay weddings – not as a result of a narrow and bitter vote in a Church Synod, but by political fiat.The piece goes into much more detail; read it in full on The Telegraph site. The remark about the "doctrinaire secularism" of the Brown government is more than a little interesting, of course, because a very similar doctrinaire secularism is apparent in the Obama administration, as highlighted (but hardly limited to) the refusal of PRO (Pelosi-Reid-Obama) to remove abortion funding from the various "health care" bills being floated around (or, better, carted around on trailer trucks). What we are seeing is the logical advancement of illogical beliefs, which flow not from a healthy form of the secular—which traditionally referred to those matters outside of the ecclesiastical realm—but from its brutish, bullying grandchild, Secularism. Benedict XVI, speaking about the difference between the two in December 2006, remarked:
And if they refuse to comply? The front page of Thursday's Daily Telegraph spelled it out: "Vicars to be sued over gay weddings". And not just vicars, but Catholic priests, rabbis, imams, ministers of the (gay-unfriendly) Church of Scientology – to say nothing of soft-voiced ministers of the Kirk.
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The problem for the Government is that this Equality Bill was not supposed to provoke a showdown with the Churches or other religions. The legislation was presented as a "clarification" of the law, consolidating existing anti-discrimination regulations into a single Act. That should have been easy enough to slip past Church leaders, for whom discrimination is a mortal sin.
But not so fast. The Church of England is caught up in a worldwide Anglican civil war over homosexuality. Britain's fastest-growing congregations, both inside and outside the C of E, are evangelical: they regard the whole concept of gay weddings as gravely sinful. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is privately sympathetic to homosexuals who want to get marred, but dare not say so in public. His fellow bishops are all over the place on the subject – but they agree on one thing: they don't want to be pushed by the Government into gay church blessings.
Until last month, they were in a similar stew about an amendment to the Equality Bill which was tabled by Harriet Harman. It reminded Churches that, since 2003, they have no longer had the right to refuse employment to atheists or homosexuals applying for lay positions. Anglican bishops managed to defeat this amendment in the Lords, but there was little doubt that Harman would reintroduce it – that is, until Pope Benedict XVI, no less, intervened. Speaking to English and Welsh bishops in Rome, he described the bits of the Equality Bill as "as assault on natural law", which imposed "unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs."
On February 2, when the Pope's address was made public, Harriet Harman stood her ground. The next day, however, she dropped her plan to reintroduce the amendment forcing Churches to comply with secular employment law. The Government had been ready to ignore the hand-wringing of bishops in the Lords, but had lost its nerve after a savage ticking-off from "a bloke in a dress", as one Labour MP described the Pope.
So now we have two climbdowns in a row: one over employing gays and atheists, and – if Harman's disavowal of Alli's amendment is taken seriously – the other over homosexual "weddings" in churches. On the face of it, then, the Churches and their conservative religious allies, such as Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, are winning their fight with Downing Street.
But the reality is quite different. These small victories obscure the bigger picture. The unique feature of Gordon Brown's government is not its economic incompetence. Rather, it is doctrinaire secularism. For the first time in British history, no one sitting around the Cabinet table holds traditional Christian views that defy the liberal consensus on social issues or sexual morality. In May 2008, the Catholic Cabinet members Ruth Kelly, Des Browne and Paul Murphy voted for a sharp cut in the upper abortion limit to 12 weeks. All three have since left or been pushed out of government.
Moreover, "healthy secularism" implies that the State does not consider religion merely as an individual sentiment that may be confined to the private sphere alone.Read the entire speech, given to Italian Catholic jurists.
On the contrary, since religion is also organized in visible structures, as is the case with the Church, it should be recognized as a form of public community presence. This also implies that every religious denomination (provided it is neither in opposition to the moral order nor a threat to public order) be guaranteed the free exercise of the activities of worship - spiritual, cultural, educational and charitable - of the believing community.
In the light of these considerations, this is certainly not an expression of secularity, but its degeneration into secularism, hostility to every important political and cultural form of religion; and especially to the presence of any religious symbol in public institutions.
Likewise, to refuse the Christian community and its legitimate representatives the right to speak on the moral problems that challenge all human consciences today, and especially those of legislators and jurists, is not a sign of a healthy secularity.
Thus, it is not a question of undue meddling by the Church in legislative activity that is proper and exclusive to the State but, rather, of the affirmation and defence of the important values that give meaning to the person's life and safeguard his or her dignity. These values are human before being Christian, such that they cannot leave the Church silent and indifferent. It is her duty to firmly proclaim the truth about man and his destiny.
Catholic ping!
This pertains to all faiths! Makes me wonder when the Brits will rise up in arms.
The gays, the Church and the government would all do well to remember that pendulum swings are a bitch.
What do you think would happen to the first “gay couple” that wants to be married in a mosque?
Egalite!
It’s not a coincidence that EGALE is the name of the gay lobby organisation here in Canuckistan. Papa Benedict gets it, which is why he tried to nuke the legislation altogether from the faraway Vatican. It’s good to see someone standing up against the homofascists!
The McCains and Cheneys support gay marriage and sodomy.
I am not familiar with the British system of government. How does one qualify for a life peerage?
A drunken sodomite Lord has fallen into the Thames or been pushed by even his most jaded of sycophantic pederast hangers-on. An opening has been created in the House of Lords. The Prime Minister, the Chief Whip and the Cabinet count the donations and the advantage to the party of a short list of individuals. When the party coffers are suitably topped up (or the sufficient level of blackmail has been achieved), the individual's name is submitted to the Monarch for approval. The Monarch generally approves whatever appointment she is asked to, presumably with generous helpings of Tums.
An interesting point is that Church of England bishops are appointed in the same fashion...
So how does one go about having their name placed on this list?
There are a whole bunch of ways that one may acquire brownie points, such as donations to the party coffers, assistance in a national election or byelection, homosexual blackmail of prominent politicians, civil servants who have hit the promotional ceiling and are retiring and need a new source of income and so on and so on.
The ways in British politics are endless to peerages, and even better, to be appointed to quangos. These have even better salaries, less work, less time required, and often result in mundane or inconvenient fact finding trips to the Caribbean in winter and to Scottish or Canadian hunting and fishing lodges in the summer.
Isn't the same true in our country?
Exactly so. There are many people in the US (many of them here on FR) that snoot about with the superiority of the American versus English systems of governance.
When the British PM screws up, he can be tossed immediately and without months of hearings. When the governing party screws up, Parliament is dissolved and new elections are held immediately. Throw the bums out now becomes the mantra. And in Britain, the monarchy is hereditary and essentially decorative. The US has an elected monarch who is essentially untouchable until the next election 4 years away.
The appointment of individuals to high offices that you could not trust with either your daughter or your wallet goes on in either system.
Ever since Labour changed the rules in 1999, people can get “nominated” to the House of Lords. They removed the hereditary peerage and put in place political appointees — ok, these are mostly supposed to be people who done good, but it is really just political haves.
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