No Christianity, please, we're British...
"This election is about independence, who is best equipped, and who has the best plan to achieve it. It is also about the society we want Scotland to be – where tolerance is the ruling ethic, poverty becomes history, equality of opportunity is the birth right of every child.
Over the last few days, questions have focused on my faith. I feel greatly burdened and heartsore that some of my responses to direct questions in the media have caused hurt to friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. That was never my intention, but I've listened carefully.
I will protect the rights of everybody in Scotland, particularly minorities, to live and to love without fear or harassment in a pluralistic and tolerant society. I will uphold the laws that have been hard won, as a servant of democracy."
Isn't it ironic that there is intolerance of certain types of difference. Human rights law describes certain ‘protected characteristics'. Race, gender and sexual orientation cannot be used as a basis for discrimination. Religion is also a protected characteristic, deserving of respect. If someone was deemed unsuited to office on the basis of any other protected characteristic there would be outrage. Yet, we don’t defend everyone’s right to freely hold, manifest and express their religious beliefs.
From an article by Rod Dreher:
Kate Forbes, 32, is a Presbyterian -- and a real one, not one of the woke ones. Her views on trans matters -- she opposes the idea that men can be women simply because they claim to be -- were well known. She was asked her feelings about same-sex marriage, which is legal in Scotland. She said she opposed it for faith reasons, but said that as far as she's concerned, it's a settled issue, and if she became SNP leader, she would not seek to reverse it. She also said that thinks having children out of wedlock is a bad idea. Watch the whole video interview here.
That did it. She's now History's Greatest Monster. Surprisingly and wonderfully, Kathleen Stock, the distinguished academic and lesbian who was driven out of her college for being gender-critical, rises to Forbes's defense in UnHerd.
Excerpts:
"Rather,
Forbes’s words have been seized upon because they help prop up adherence to a
different sort of modern dogma: the rainbow religion promulgated in the name of
the amorphous “LGBTQI+” people. Like Christianity, this centres on the figure
of a sacred, innocent outsider, beset on all sides by hatred but turning the
other cheek, and freeing people from their traditional ways of life by lived
example.
Alongside the idea that you can reinvent yourself
at any time, it’s one of the fundamental tenets of this value system that
LGBTQI+ people are still actively persecuted across the board in modern
Britain, with no room for further nuance about who exactly, or under what
circumstances, or what the hell some of those letters even stand for anyway.
Hundreds of public and third-sector organisations and enterprises are invested
in this exceptionally simple story. Indeed, some of them make a lot of money
from it. Thousands of employee hours have been spent in HR training sessions,
listening to ropey statistics that represent perceptions of persecution among
gay and trans people as fact. At this stage, there is such collective national
investment in thinking of LGBTQI+ people as severely oppressed that one
obscurely fears a lightning strike even to raise a question about it."
More:
"Of
course, in practice, no-one criticising her has any idea whether Forbes is a
genuine homophobe or not. Another facile equation made by those religiously
invested in victimhood for LGBTQI+ people is that any objection to
liberalisation must be rooted in some kind of “phobia”. In practice, like
everyone else, Christians range from kind, tolerant, and generous people to
bigoted nutcases, with many shades of grey in between.
But
Forbes is unlikely to be given the benefit of the doubt. To do so would be to
squander a rare chance to perpetuate the hysterical fantasy that LGBTQI+ people
in Britain, generally, are permanently a hair’s breadth away from malicious
destruction — even as the Equality Act explicitly protects both gay and trans
people, the BBC hosts dozens of positive stories about trans youth, millions of
pounds roll into charity coffers, gay men rule entertainment telly, lesbians
rule women’s sport, and entire classrooms change their pronouns to the delight
of their teachers.
As I say, what we have here is a clash of two
religions. One of them is full of sanctimonious, swivel-eyed moral scolds,
rooting out heresy and trying to indoctrinate everybody into their fantastic
way of thinking. The other is a branch of Calvinism. One of them asks “what
would Jesus do?” and the other “what would Owen Jones think?”. Faced with a
choice between their representatives on earth, I know which kind I would prefer
to see in high office."
Killer closing! I'm grateful to Prof. Stock for her strong words in defense of a Christian politician ...
This is a religious war. The other side does not want tolerance. They never did. Even those among them who advocate sincerely for tolerance are on the margins of the movement. It's a movement that takes scalps ....
Kate Forbes refused to live by lies, and it might well cost her her political career. That's what life is like in post-Christian Britain. In 2017, Evangelical Christian Tim Farron was forced out as leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, because he hesitated to say what his views on homosexuality were. He later said he didn't think gay sex was sinful, but that wasn't enough. The fact that he was silent when first asked was damning. No Christianity, please, we're British...
The actual nationalists in the Scottish National Party -- most of those in control of it today are actually identity politics activists who are in the party because it's now the Establishment in Scotland; they have no interest in Scottish independence -- are concerned that there's going to be a stitch-up for Hamza Yousef. The fear among this group is that Yousef couldn't organize a two-car parade, but will be shooed in anyway though the electronic voting process. That fear has been voiced today by Craig Murray, whom I consider to be somewhat erratic, but still one of the few true journalists working in the UK today.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/02/history-turns/#tc-comment-title
Yousef is sometimes referred to as "Continuity Sturgeon". From what I can gather, either of the two female candidates would be acceptable to most of the party membership, and Forbes's Calvinism is really not an issue for them. It's only the media who are bigging it up.
An electronic voting process, eh? Good luck with that, Scotland. Errrrrr, 'Freedom', as somebody once said.
Delete@Bell, if Yousef wins, what will the outlook then be for indyrefs and all that?
ReplyDeleteThere won't be any referendum if he wins. As I say, his faction have no interest in independence. They're devolutionists with no particular attachment to Scottish sovereignty and who have things nice and cozy for themselves in Scotland. They're essentially in the place that the Labour Party envisaged for themselves when Blair created the parliament and they're not interested in rocking the boat by confronting London.
DeleteThank you, @Bell. In the meantime, I have noticed some mumblings online about Salmond being poised for a comeback. Is that even a possibility?
DeleteI'd be surprised. Salmond's history is colourful to say the least. He's twice been expelled from/encouraged to leave the SNP and I seriously doubt he'd be willing to give them a third chance, especially after the stitch-up they tried to lay on him with those legal charges. His legacy is that he made Scottish independence a viable concept in the minds of most Scots, even if only to dismiss it. He made it serious. What you have to understand is that Salmond did that, NOT the SNP. They've been around for decades, but they were always fringe grouping until he came along and made them a force. Then they peed it all up against the wall. Would YOU go back for more?
DeleteI think this is unsurprising. The state has become a de facto religion for most people, since the government started sticking its oozing tentacles into areas that were traditionally matters of individual conscience. The tenets of the state religion are incompatible with those of most other religions, which is why the state seeks to undermine them and why nobody who takes a faith seriously will make it far in politics.
ReplyDeleteMost people prefer to dwell in darkness and delusion; the myth of the 'Christian country' has lulled us into a false sense of security and believing that followers of a countercultural kingdom deserve a place at the heart of an earthly one.
Except it's not really a "religious war" as the 16th century so-called "Wars of Religion" supposedly were; it's more a war of ideology, with religion (and objective morality etc) on one hand and lack of religion (and moralty being whatever we tell you it is this week) on the other.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that Deyer should point out the Calvinism of Ms Forbes' church here. Not entirely sure how thst helps in this case - would be interesting to find out more.
Dreher is correct that it's a 'clash of religions' insomuch as it's mutually incompatible belief systems bashing heads; but Dreher is guilty here (again) of leveraging Christianity into the 'culture war'. In reality, it's actually simply the truth that St. John the Evangelist expounds in his prologue - 'he came unto his own and his own received him not'.
DeleteNot that I'm saying Forbes is a radiant beacon of Christian truth - I don't know anything about her - but anybody professing any genuine faith in the public sphere will be pilloried: 'if the world hates you know that it hated me first'. I struggled to understand why people continue to be surprised by something that Christ warned us of 2000 years ago.