Beware the ghost of Henry VIII

Goodness me! The eighties are back yet again. This time John Selwyn Gummer's on the case:

Catholics should realise that really tough times are ahead. The secularists are on the march and intend to push Christianity to the sidelines. They’ll use all sorts of diversions; playing on people’s concerns about Muslim extremists in order to attack the principle of faith schools; suggesting that it is education that perpetuates the division in the North of Ireland; and using the creationist beliefs of extreme Protestants to ridicule all Christian education. They will use anything to eradicate Christian influence in mainstream society. What they want is a state that treats faith as an eccentric hobby – akin to motor sport or stamp collecting and about as relevant to real life.

Part of that equation is to insist that all religions are on a par. It is seen as unacceptable to distinguish between the manifestly crooked or historically nonsensical and that which has serious academic validation. So the views of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Scientologists are to be treated as if as worthy of serious consideration as the doctrines of the Catholic Church. It is a short step from that to dismissing all religion as equally worthless.

The new secularists use the language of Christian liberalism to promote a hard-line and exclusive view of the world. Their tactics over the Equality Bill are typical. By bandying words like “equality”, “fairness” and “respect” they seek to portray themselves as open-minded and evenhanded. In fact they have an extremist moral agenda and they want to impose their new morality on us all.

According to Selwyn Gummer's article in "The Catholic Herald", the organisation that gave the world the words "Inquisition" and "propaganda" is under "attack" from "hard-line", intolerant militants with "an extremist moral agenda". The word "irony" seems inadequate.

Of course, what's going on here is a slippery rhetorical trick - when your opponent criticises you, play the victim and accuse them of stifling your free speech, as if having a right to express your opinions and ideology freely was precisely the same thing as being entitled never to be challenged or criticised in any way. Arch-secularist Philip Pullman recently set out some rather more grown-up thoughts about criticism, offence and free speech:

No one has the right to spend their lives without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it, and if they open it and read it they don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me. You can complain about it. You can write to the publisher. You can write to the papers. You can write your own book. You can do all those things. But there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought or read. And that’s all I have to say on that subject.

Free speech is important, but the freedom to speak out doesn't equal the automatic right to be agreed with, or to have your views respected. Here's Russell Blackford pointing with a few more home truths to make the John Selwyn Gummers of this world squirm:

Some ideas do merit marginalisation, and some opponents do lack intellectual legitimacy. That isn't to say that these ideas and opponents should be censored. There are many reasons why it is best to allow people to speak their minds. But the political freedom to speak your mind does not entail a right to be taken seriously or given deference, or even to be accorded intellectual legitimacy. Indeed, there are plenty of ideas that people should be free to advocate, but which are so clearly foolish or even repugnant that they will, quite rightly, be ignored or treated with derision. Often, ideas that are treated with respect in one generation come to fall in this category in later generations.

The Russell Blackford quote is from his scarily-titled "Metamagician and the Hellfire Club" blog.