ONCE UPON A TIME

There was a time, quite recently, when more or less everything was perfectly okay on these islands of ours. Everyone worked hard, everyone played cricket, everyone went to church and everyone listened to the wireless. There was no crime and all the children were well behaved. You could still use the word "gay" in its proper context. There were one of two Bleck Piple and Hoh Moh Sexuals, but they knew their place. There may even have been on or two bad people, but they had their bottoms spanked and their necks broken and lived happily ever after, or not, as the case may be.

Then, quite recently, everything on these islands became awful. Really awful. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, excrementally awful the Daily Mail believes that modern Britain really is. Children cannot read or write; teachers are imprisoned for subtly reprimanding them; middle-class women have no higher aspiration than to become prostitutes; parts of the North of England are under Al Quaeda control. When the Chinese government donated two Pandas to London Zoo, Mac submitted a cartoon in which the animals threatened to commit suicide.

"But Andrew: haven't all people at all times looked back with nostalgia on the olden days? Hasn't everyone over 30 always thought that in their day, the summers were better behaved and the children were hotter and the women were braver and the soldiers were prettier? Don't you yourself think that the children's TV and the comic books were better when you were growing up, even if the pop music was much, much worse?"

Indeed. But the Daily Mail is not just telling the story of how the world used to be wonderful and how it recently became shitty. It tells the story of a world in which Somebody Is Responsible.

We didn't merely go to hell in a handcart. Someone sent us there. Deliberately.

It is the propagation of this story which makes the Daily Mail so pernicious. Daily Mail Woman may be bright enough to realise that there is no such thing as Winterval, that the dark skinned family next door are not actively working towards the establishment of a European caliphate and the two elderly spinsters next door but one are not part of a lobby hellbent on the destruction of civilisation. 

But when the individual lies are forgotten, the meta-narrative remains. Everything was lovely. Everything is shitty. Someone is responsible. Blacks? Gays? The Political Correctness Brigade? The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? But it would be relatively easy to change it back. Bring back hanging. Bring back the cane. Abolish immigration. Ban veils. Then everything in the garden will be lovely.

And this meta-narrative haa poisoned political discourse. Politicians on both sides believe in it, or pretend to believe in it. You can't have a sensible discussion about border controls, or running schools, or how to help people who don't have jobs: because discussion about IMMIGRANTS, DISCIPLINE and WELFARE SCOUNGERS are predicated on the theory that everything used to be fine and everything recently became awful.

During the election, David Cameron made the expression Broken Britain something of a mantra. Disgraced former Prime Minister Tony Blair said, explicitly, that before he came to power society had pretty much ceased to exist and been replaced with a maelstrom in which children murdered children in every shopping mall. It was his moral duty to restore civilisation through ASBOs, identity cards, literacy hours, war with Iraq etc.  

There is nothing wrong with hyperbole. I myself have used hyperbole on millions of occasions. We shouldn't hold a demagogue to account for the literal truth of everything she says during a full blown rant. If I say that in the entire history of the universe, no Scotchsman has ever left a tip in a restaurant, then it is not very helpful to say that in 1968, your friend Tavish McHamish said "Jings! What fine haggis" and left a threepenny bit under his napkin. I probably didn't expect you take me literally. But I probably did expect you to infer that I thought that Scottish people were a bit mean with money.

I don't know to what extent Melanie Phillips literally believes that the singing of hymns in Civil Partnership ceremonies will bring about the end of civilisation as we know it. I don't know the extent to which the Campaign Against Political Correctness and all the other rentaquotes believe that Political Correctness was invented by t he Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxists with the specific objective of bringing down western civilisation.

I don't even know to what extent any anti-semite ever really believed that a committee of evil Rabbis, operating out of a secret bunker under the Mount of Olives, was issuing edicts that, at 9.30PM on Channel 4, during a changing room scene in Footballers Wives, a man's penis should briefly hove into view. ("That will inflame the passions of goy women, cause them to leave their husband, bring down their society and hastern the coming of the Messiah. Oy! This roast baby is awfully good, isn't it?") Many of them really did, and really do, believe that the Media and especially Hollywood, is controlled by "Jews" and that this explains why the telly and the pictures are so rude and violent nowadays. 

Have you noticed, by the way, that no-one ever complains about shadowy Fenian puppet masters manipulating history from behind the scenes, or implies that the government of the State of Israel is like a thick, drunken navvy?

When Mel says that The Gay are plotting to bring about the end of civilisation as we know it, we may suspect her of going over the top for effect. But unless her typing is simply to be regarded as the newspaper equivalent of an idiot-boy going "burr-burr-burr", we have to assume that it is an exaggeration of something. Unless she believes that The Gay are, at some level, deliberately and intentionally doing harm, for politically motivated reasons, nothing she says makes the slightest sense. 

Mr Karl Marx believed that society had been dreadful and oppressive for most of human history, but that, real soon now, a fundamental change would occur and everything would be perfect and utopian for ever and ever, amen (although he didn't  believe in God). Mr Marx also believed that society was defined by its economic base -- one half of society controls the means of production, and the other half doesn't -- and that everything else grew out of that fundamental inequality. You can't fix the church or the schools or the family until you fix the economic basis: once the proletariat control the means of production, everything else will come right as surely as night follows day.

The Daily Mel, as we have seen, believe that society is defined  -- built on -- the privileged status afforded to heterosexuals and the inferior or subordinate status afforded to homosexuals. This is the core, the foundation, the bedrock the thing everything else was built on. As long as that bedrock of sexual inequality remained in place, society was good and perfect and idyllic. But someone has, or is just about to, overturn that fundamental base. We started regarding homosexuals as normal; now, we regard them as superior; pretty soon, heterosexuality will be forbidden. As a result, things have fallen apart and the centre is unable to hold  If mere anarchy were shortly to be loosed upon the world, I shouldn't be in the least bit surprised.

Everyone creates an enemy in their own image. The Daily Mel's fictional universe is a mirror image of the Marxism which she abominates As mythologies goes, it's neat, it's compelling, it could almost be true and it's completely barking mad.

PREACHER

So: why does singing hymns in registry offices, particularly, represent an attack on Christian civilisation? We need to wind back ten months, to May 2010 when an amateur Christian evangelist named Dale McAlipine was arrested and charged (but not prosecuted) "simply" for preaching Christian principles in public. 

Naturally Melanie Phillips leapt to his defence :

"Terrifying as this may seem, the attempt to stamp out Christianity in Britain appears to be gathering pace....a gentle, unaggressive Christian is arrested and charged simply for preaching Christian principles....It would appear that Christianity, the normative faith of this country on which its morality, values and civilisation are based, is effectively being turned into a crime. "

Well, yes.

Or rather "no". The preacher was not arrested for  simply preaching Christian principles. He was not arrested for simply saying that Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures, or for simply saying that He rose again on the Third Day. He was not arrested for simply saying that the First and Second persons of the Holy Trinity shared a single essence. (He'd probably, to be fair, have had to have said that in a fairly complicated way.) He was arrested for saying, in what the police judged to be incendiary language, that homosexuality was a sin.

You could only say that he was "simply" arrested for preaching Christian principals if you already believed that "Christianity" and "the sinfulness of homosexuality" were synonymous or interchangable terms. Which would, obviously, be completely mad. Some Christians think being gay is a sin. Some don't. Rowan Williams' whole problem is that his church is split on the issue. Even the more traditional Christians, who think that gay sex (and playing with your thing, and having sex of any kind before you are married) is Very Naughty don't generally think that it is the most important part of the Christian faith. Mr C.S Lewis was quite careful to preface his (extremely conservative) chapter on Christian Marriage by saying that some muddle-headed Christians talked as if this was the heart of Christian morality, but that it wasn't. (Pride, since you asked.) 

There seems to be a general agreement that the police action  in arresting the soap-box preacher was over-the-top. Peter Tatchell himself thought that it went well beyond what the incitement to hatred laws ought to cover. (He thought there should be a certain quid pro quo: if he had the right to stand up in public and say that the Pope was a child abuser and a bigot then other people should have the right to stand up in public and say that Peter Tatchell was a hell-bound sodomite. This is what used to be called "secular liberalism", I believe.)

In any case, the soap-box man was never prosecuted. The Gay Lobby aren't trying nearly as hard to stamp out Christianity as the State Lobby is to stamp out Student Protests.

I did a bit of street preaching myself in my reckless youth. If the police think you are obstructing the highway or making a nuisance of yourself, they "move you on". Only if you positively refuse to move do they arrest you. Some of the keener brothers rather wanted this to happen since it would give them the opportunity to tell the local beak that unless he repented, he too would perish, in the manner of Saint Paul on Mars Hill. The bobbies never, in my experience, obliged.

 

One police officer arrested one street preacher on one occasion. That doesn't amount to a blanket ban on street preaching. One police officer moved on one group of children on one occasion: that does not mean that sinister forces in the government are pursuing an ideologically driven anti-hopscotch agenda. 

Only a complete lunatic would think that it did.

Mel takes two rather incompatible lines over this kind of thing. The first is a simple free speech position: if we are truly a tolerant society then intolerance is one of the things we should tolerate.

"Surreally, this intolerant denial of freedom is being perpetrated under the rubric of promoting tolerance and equality - but only towards approved groups. Never has George Orwell's famous satirical observation, that some people are more equal than others, appeared more true."

It doesn't matter what we think about Sodomy: what matters is that the Hotel Martyrs sincerely believed it to be a sin, and sincerely didn't want any sin going on in their double beds. A tolerant society must allow then to act on these sincere beliefs. 

 

This doesn't hold water for five minutes. I may very well have a sincere belief that God has instructed me to go around shouting "fire!" in crowded theatres, but that doesn't mean that my right to do so is protected under "freedom of worship" laws. I can believe that God disproves of miscegenation as strongly as want: I just can't turn mixed race couples away from my hotel. The "NO DOGS OR JEWS" sign hanging outside my shop may be a perfectly honest and sincere reflection of my belief that the Jews killed Jesus, drink the blood of infants, and, moreover, smell of wee. It's still against the law. 

Everyone has the right to practice, or not practice whichever religion they like and society must, indeed, be very careful indeed of making laws which impact disproportionately on particular communities. I have no particular human right to stick vegetables in my clothes, but a law prohibiting anyone from putting leaks in their headwear during March would be judged to be a bad law, because it would have fairly obviously been invented with the specific aim of annoying Welsh people. It seems unfair that there is a special law against hunting foxes, with dogs, on horses, while wearing natty red jackets, because that law seems to single out a particular social class (rich country people) while leaving the fascist R.S.P.B quite free to gas hedgehogs if that's what they get off on. Laws preventing people from covering their faces in public, or changing the regulations about the humane slaughter of animals are open to the accusation of unfairly singling out particular minority religions. 

But that doesn't mean that all laws become optional if you can plausibly claim that breaking them is part of your religious identity. Every military officer and every schoolteacher knows this: it's one thing to say "Can I be excused chapel because I'm a Muslim" or "Can I take my day off on Saturday, rather than Sunday, because I'm Jewish" but quite another to say "I have just invented, off the top of my head, a religion called Jedi, and, as you know, it is against the Jedist faith to peel potatoes or go on cross-country runs." Satanists are perfectly free to be Satanists, Rastafarians are perfectly free to be Rastafarians and creepy evangelicals are perfectly free to be creepy evangelicals but the laws against performing human sacrifice, smoking weed and spanking schoolboys apply to them just the same as they apply to everybody else, however sincerely they believe that Satan / Jah / Dr Dobson told them otherwise.

So: since the argument that street preachers should be allowed to preach homophobia simply because that is what they sincerely believe is unsustainable, Mel has to resort to a deeper, more sophisticated, stupider argument. Preachers and hoteliers have a special right to discriminate against homosexuals because homosexuality is a special case.

 *

Most Christians are Christians because they believe that Christianity is true or at any rate, wish that it were. They believe in God and think that Jesus, or the Church of England, or Cliff Richard provided a good path, or the best path, or the only path for getting in touch with Her. Some of them -- some Quakers, maybe, Catholic Modernists, Sea of Faith Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury -- may not even go this far. "I don't know if there's a God" they say "But I do know that everyone would be much nicer and much happier if they just pretended." Nearly all of them have some feeling that Jesus is, or was, or would have been, or am, a really cool dude. They think that God and Jesus and Christianity are good things in themselves. 

Melanie Philips never mentions Jesus. (She's Jewish.) She doesn't regard Christianity as a good thing in itself. She takes a purely instrumental view of religion. It is a means to an end. The end is a mysterious entity variously described as "this country" or "society" or "civilisation". Christianity is "the normative faith of this country on which its morality, values and civilisation are based". Christian opinions represent "the bedrock values of this society". Biblical morals are "the bedrock values of Western civilisation" and "society's core values." If a preacher is arrested (but not prosecuted) for using incendiary homophobic language in public, it follows that "the faith Britain was built on" is becoming a crime. We need to be Christian, or to pretend to be Christian, or to have Christian morals, because that's the only thing which will keep "this country" or "society" or "western civilisation" ticking over.

Well, now. 

If by "culture" you mean "the stuff we've all got in common" then anyone might say that Christianity is a big part of British culture. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Henry VIII, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Cliff Richard were, or claimed to be, Christians. Parliament, the Church of England, Oxford and Cambridge University, Eton College, the BBC and the Beano were all founded by people who thought of themselves as Christians  (John Stewart Mill, Charles Darwin, Aleister Crowley, David Attenborough, John Lennon and Ricky Gervais were of course, atheists, but they were Church of England atheists. It was an Anglican God they didn't believe in.) And we could probably all agree that it would be a Bad Thing if Christianity, in this sense, were to be "stamped out" by an Orwellian boot. It would involve falsifying our history and our "culture". It would be quite odd if Kenyan children grew up knowing all about the Eskimos and the Highland Clearances, but little about the history of their corner of Africa. It would be equally odd if we decided to raise a generation who did not know who Friar Tuck, Solomon, Falstaff, Doubting Thomas, Sir Francis Drake, Daniel, Mr Micawber and Polycarp of Smyrna were. 

If that is really happening, which it isn't, then the stamping is being done, not by the Political Correctness Brigade but by gradgrindian Tories -- Daily Mail readers to a man -- who don't see how Shakespeare and Dickens and the Bible are going to help kids get out and compete in the global marketplace, or at any rate work in McDonalds. (Education for its own sake is a bit of a dodgy idea, as one of Blair's simians once remarked.) Even Richard Dawkins and Phillip Pullman agree about this: you may not believe in the Bible but you ought to know what it says. It's only the halfwits who contribute to the Guardian's religion blog who can't hear the word "Bible" or "Church" without blubbering "why even mention ancient savage bronze age stupid fairy tale primitive grapefruit segments har har Christians are silly".

But. 

Even if it is true that some or all British institutions were originally Christian, or Christian in inspiration, it could not possibly follow that the "stamping out" of Christianity would cause those institutions, and therefore the nation as a whole, to collapse.  I suspect that this part of Mel's argument is based on a rather silly piece of metaphor abuse. If my school was founded by a Christian teacher, using money donated by Christians, and if for 600 years a prayer has been said in the chapel each morning, then I might very well say "this school is built upon Christian foundations". It doesn't follow that if you stop singing hymns or appoint a Muslim headmaster, the building will fall down. It might be quite silly and quite petty to decide that prayers would no longer be said in the House of Commons, but the business of law-making could carry on quite happily without them. 

But there is not the remotest suggestion that this is going to happen. Mel's case for Christianity being turned into a crime depends on four examples. 

1: The aforementioned preacher, who was arrested, but not prosecuted, for what an individual police officer judged, wrongly, to be hate speech.

2: The aforementioned hotel owners, who were successfully prosecuted for refusing to allow gay couples to share a bed under their roof.

3: A local government official who was fired for refusing to perform civil partnership ceremonies. (She was offered a transfer to a different department, but refused to accept the offer.)[*]

4: Nothing else. 

That is: when Mel says that "Christianity" is being criminalized, what is being criminalized is prejudice against homosexuals. But that's okay, because prejudice against homosexuals is at the heart of the Christian message. It practically is the Christian message.  

What follows is a direct quote from her column: it is not a piece of satirical exaggeration on my part:

"Many of these cases involve the issue of homosexuality since this is the principal area where orthodox [**] Christian beliefs cannot co-exist with the law. This is in contrast to other contentious issues such as abortion, where the law specifically provides exemptions for conscience. This is because unlike the specific and limited issue of abortion, the militant gay rights agenda represents an attack on the entire value system of our society by destroying the very idea that any sexual behaviour is normal. "

Now abortion is the kind of issue which makes liberal believers -- liberals in general, I think -- uncomfortable. How can a horse, a dog, a rat have rights, and an unborn human no rights at all? Why are so many of us so absolutely certain that killing Nazi soldiers is wrong, killing murderers and paedophiles is wrong but killing unborn people is sometimes perfectly OK? Even if its a matter of life and death, why do we choose to kill the innocent who had no choice with the less innocent who, might have done? 

Don't bother to write in and tell me the the answer to these questions. I've already placed my bet firmly on the "pro-choice" side of the coin. I'm only saying that it's a difficult question. A question about morals. And that if you think -- as Mel I believe Mel does, and as I imagine the soap-box preacher does -- that abortion is wrong, you believe that it is wrong on simple, straightforward grounds that anyone, of any religious or philosophical persuasion, could easily understand. Killing babies is wrong. 

In the Melverse, it passes in a second. It is unimportant. "Saying that you can't preach inflammatory anti-gay sermons in public places" and "Saying that if you want to work in a Registry Office you have to perform civil partnership ceremonies" represents and attack on the entire -- the ENTIRE -- value system of our society whereas killing babies does not.

I am going to say that again.

Saying that two men or two women can form a legally binding civil partnership is an attack on the entire value system of our society.

Saying that it's sometimes okay to kill babies is NOT an attack on the entire value system of our society.

Why is the right of someone to preach homophobic sermons, or the right of someone else to turn gay men away from their hotel such an inalienable right? 

Because the idea of gay equality represents an attack on society because it would "destroy the very idea that any sexual behaviour is normal". It is "the very idea that any sexual behaviour is normal" which is the " core" or "bedrock" which she has been talking about. The distinction between normal and abnormal sexual behaviour is the thing which our society is based on.

To summarize:

The Entire Value System of Our Society (V) is based on the idea that heterosexuality is normal and homosexuality is not normal (H)

The Entire Value System of Our Society (V) is based on Christianity (X).

If V = H and V = X than H = X

Christianity can therefore be defined as "the belief that heterosexuality is normal and homosexuality is not normal." 

In the Mel lexicon, Christianity means homophobia.

Having dealt with the more sensible part of her argument, I now wish to turn to the part where she goes a little bit crazy:

[*] That really is a bit like a Muslim working in a hotel, who refuses a offer to be transferred to the kitchen, the waiting staff, or the coffee bar. "No" he says "I demand to be allowed to serve in the bar, but to have my conscientious objection to serving beer respected." He would not have been fired for "refusing to serve alcohol" so much as for "being a dick."

[**] She talked about Christianity as a "normative" faith; she's now talking about "orthodox" Christian belief. I am not sure what either of these two qualifying words mean. I know what an Orthodox Christian is; I think I know what an Orthodox Jews is: they aren't "orthodox" in the same sense. I think I know what a Normative Jew is. I have no idea what a Normative Christian is. (Does it mean "one who follows Christian norms, whether or not he believes in Christian theology". Or does it mean "The consensus among ordinary people as to what Christianity means, regardless of the what the clergy teaches.) I hope she is not using these big words just to throw sand in our eyes.

Begorrah!

not sulking

just busy writing stuff I'm actually being paid for

final sections follow next week, probably thursday

if you haven't heard it yet, listen to this: Best Fairy Tale Ever?

yeah, yeah, yeah lost manuscript of the aneied retrieved from a bonfire where i hve heard THAT one before?