How long until Christians are blackmailed for daring to
speak?
By Peter
Hitchens
Revolutions do not
always involve guillotines or mobs storming palaces. Sometimes they are made by
middle-aged gentlemen in wigs, sitting in somnolent chambers of the High Court.
Sometimes they are
made by police officers and bureaucrats deciding they have powers nobody knew
they had, or meant them to have.
And
The Public Order Act
of 1986 was not meant to permit the arrest of Christian preachers in English
towns for quoting from the Bible. But it has. The Civil Partnerships Act 2004
was not meant to force public servants to approve of homosexuality. But it has.
The Sexual Offences
Act of 1967 was not meant to lead to a state of affairs where it is
increasingly dangerous to say anything critical about homosexuality. But it
did.
And the laws of
But it has come to
that this week.
How did it happen
that in the course of less than 50 years we moved so rapidly from one wrong to
another?
Until 1967,
homosexuals could be – and were – arrested and prosecuted for their private,
consenting, adult acts.
This was a cruel, bad
law that should never have been made. It led to blackmail and misery of all
kinds.
Those who repealed it
did so out of humanity and an acceptance that we need to live in peace
alongside others whose views and habits we do not share. No such generous
tolerance is available from the sexual revolutionaries.
Now, as the case of
Dale McAlpine shows, we are close to the point where a person can be prosecuted
for saying in public that homosexual acts are wrong.
And officers of the
law, once required to stay out of all controversy, get keen official
endorsement when they take part in open political demonstrations in favour of
homosexual equality.
We have travelled in
almost no time from repression, through a brief moment of mutual tolerance, to
a new repression. And at the same time, the freedom of Christians to follow
their beliefs in workplaces is under aggressive attack.
Small and harmless
actions, offers of prayer, the wearing of crucifixes, requests to withdraw from
duties, are met with official rage and threats of dismissal, out of all
proportion.
How long before
Christians are being blackmailed by work colleagues, for daring to speak their
illegal views openly?
Daily the confidence
of the new regime grows. The astonishing judgment of Lord Justice Laws last
week, in which he pointedly snubbed Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of
Canterbury, and mocked the idea that Christianity had any special place in our
society, is a warning that this process has gone very deep and very far.
The frightening thing
is that it has not stopped, nor is it slowing down. What cannot be said in a
Workington street will soon be unsayable anywhere.
And if Christianity
has officially ceased to be the basis of our law and the source of our state’s
authority (a view which makes nonsense of the Coronation Service) who, and what
– apart from the brute power of the manipulated mob – is to decide in future
what is right, and what is not, and what can be said, and what cannot?
This process, if not
halted, will lead in the end to the Thought Police and the naked rule of power.
(Click to enlarge)
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