The avalanche of media contempt that nearly buried Kate Forbes and her political career has the most serious implications. They bear examining at different levels. Life is made of strata, which when combined reflect the complexity of human society. Political, economic, psychological and spiritual are four of the main ones.
Bearing in mind that the kind of question you ask shapes the answers you get, we ought to ask these different questions.
If we ask political questions they begin with: “Is it not the case that Christians are now banned from office if they believe that abortion may be morally questionable and that marriage is a heterosexual union?”
And if the answer turns out to be that this is the case, our democracy is in serious trouble. Of course this is not a political rule, it’s mob rule by the media.
Ian Macwhirter, the atheist Scottish journalist, commented:
“Kate Forbes is allowed to have religious beliefs just so long as she renounces them in public. She now faces disciplinary action for saying a rapist is a man. The SNP leadership race has turned into a Twitter witch hunt.”
Perhaps one of the most accurate ways of seeing this would be to see it as a secular anti-Christian reflex, from a culture that wants to make up its own moral rules and hates any reminder that Christianity makes moral claims on our behaviour. The self-indulgent hedonist ostrich buries its head in the sand, while placing its fingers in its ears and setting loose the dogs of contemptuous dismissal on any Christian voice questioning their assumptions.
John F Kennedy was attacked in the 1960’s because the media claimed his allegiance to the pope as a Catholic would interfere with his commitment to the American state. That’s either stupidity, bigotry, paranoia, or all three. It’s a combination we continue to meet at the hands of the secular press. Tim Farron was politically assassinated by the inclusive all-welcoming Lib Dems for daring to be a Christian who believed in heterosexual marriage.
But this isn’t a rational conflict. When I was interviewed on an evening news programme this week, the presenter poured abject scorn on Kate Forbes for believing in heterosexual marriage. When I asked why this subject of all subjects did not permit questions being asked, or arguments being pursued, the response was that only a mad person would question the gains made by sexual liberation and want to take us back to the past.
But the presenter had no answer to the question of how we tell the difference between progress and decadence, or even how progress is defined. Few people are aware of the intelligent well-documented backlash against the damage done (especially to women) by the sexual revolution. Louise Perry’s book The Case Against the Sexual revolution and Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex come to mind most immediately.
What democracy can survive this level of targeted censorship and cancelation and still look itself in the mirror in the mornings and call itself a democracy?
If in the pursuit of interrogating the sexual revolution you asked economic questions, the answer would come back that the cost to the state in terms of dysfunctionality, drug abuse and antisocial behaviour caused by single parent families without fathers to balance them, are a much greater economic drain on the community that married heterosexual partners looking after their own children. So a political policy that supported heterosexual marriage (while not prohibiting any other arrangements) would be of straightforward utilitarian benefit to society. What utter madness it is that a politician who believes in marriage should be punished for such a belief.
From a psychological perspective perhaps, is this self-indulgent ethical fundamentalism a feature of an immature and selfish society suffering from arrested development? A perpetual teenage strop? “I want freedom to do what I want when I want, and I will attack as a fascist anyone who criticises me.” In which case, where are the grown-ups? Why have they abandoned the public square? How was it they were driven out?
We can be forgiven in a Catholic publication for asking questions that deal in the language of theology. What echoes come back if we use spiritual sonar? It remains entirely possible that the rage against Christian morality is amplified by a collective resistant hedonistic individualism to the presence of God and His invitation to turn and surrender our self-harming aspirations. It is pre-eminently the Christian voices that are being censored and cancelled, and we ought to be saying so. The so-called witch hunt has been reversed into a saint-hunt. This could be confronted if the substantial numbers of people in our islands who self-declare as Christians in the regular census counts confronted the media’s pseudo-moral hysterics.
Even at the level of discovering that a politician has personal priorities that she is willing to stick to as a matter of integrity ought to make the politician more and not less attractive. Few politicians distinguish themselves as people willing to sacrifice popular pull for a matter of personal principle.
There are estimated to be over four million Catholics in these islands. If, sensing that free speech, freedom of conscience, personal integrity and the very presence of Christians in politics were under serious and near terminal threat, the Church roused itself in protest, led by its bishops, we might not lose Christian politicians on the pyre of hedonistic hubristic hypocrisy.
(Getty)
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