Do liberals discriminate?
Are liberals willing to practise religious discrimination? In the case of Chris Cranmer, it seems not. Mr Cranmer has won recognition of his satanism on board his Royal Navy ship, meaning that he is free to publicly practise satanic rituals and to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan.
But then we get to the case of Signor Buttiglione who has been deemed unacceptable for a position of responsibility with the EU because of his orthodox Catholicism - this despite a promise that he would keep his Catholic beliefs private.
Matthew Parris, in a column in the Sunday Times, wrote of Mr Buttiglione that,
“Signor Buttiglione claims that he has been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination ... I think Signor Buttiglione has indeed been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination, and that such discrimination is now in order ... Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion are unacceptable and insulting, not only to me but also the majority of Europeans, and the overwhelming majority of educated Europeans. I do not shrink from according special status to the educated, for they lead thought.” (via Conservative Commentary)
So, we’ve arrived at a situation where it’s thought reasonable to allow Satanism to be practised in the Royal Navy, but that Catholicism is too “insulting” to be accepted even as a private belief by a political candidate.
Liberals, in other words, will discriminate on the grounds of religion, but just aren’t concerned to discriminate against satanists. In fact, on one very liberal Australian website, satanism was declared to be admirable for its “frank and rational hedonism”. So I don’t like the chances of a return to a more traditional ordering of things, in which discrimination was practised against satanists rather than Christians, at leat not in modern liberal societies.
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:29 | #
Mr. Matthew Parris’s ugly comments are shocking for a number of reasons, among them that:
1) they veer into leftist thought-control: Mr. Buttiglione declared forthrightly that his personal feelings about homosexuality wouldn’t affect his official acts as long as it wasn’t a crime, so it seems he’s being punished merely for having certain thoughts (as Jim Kalb points out, by the way, he might have done better had he phrased his concerns about homosexuality in terms other than “sin”);
2) his comments are shocking in being such an unhesitating, stark black-and-white statement of liberalism’s intense antipathy toward Christianity in general and Catholic Christianity in particular, something tradcons have long discussed of course but seldom been so openly slapped in the face with (“tradcons” being what until around 1970, give or take a couple of years or so, were just ordinary, normal, average, utterly apolitical folk—it seems such folk have to have a name nowadays). Notice by the way how Mr. Parris insinuates that anti-Christian liberals in Europe are more intelligent, the same way liberals here keep thinking they have higher IQs—see Steve Sailer for more on this liberal myth.)
3) these foolish, ignorant comments of Mr. Parris’s are shocking because they perfectly illustrate the soundness of that Frenchman’s concerns last month who coined the apt metaphor about the dry riverbed of European secularism just waiting to be filled by the mighty river of Islam, a metaphor needing no further explanation or comment for MajorityRights.com regulars, I trust. Mr. Parris: whether you yourself be homosexual, or anti-Catholic Protestant, or just garden-variety liberal, now’s especially not the time for statements like these, if you wish literally to help save your own civilization!