A harbinger of things to come to your town.
 
Agape <><
Mark Rouleau
rouleau-law@insightbb.com

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http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=447
 

September 7, 2006
How Britain is turning Christianity into a crime
Daily Mail, 7 September 2006

How long will it be before Christianity becomes illegal in Britain? This is
no longer the utterly absurd and offensive question that on first blush it
would appear to be.

An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green, was arrested and charged
last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or
behaviour.

So what was this behaviour? Merely trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at
a gay rally in Cardiff. So what was printed on those leaflets that was so
threatening, abusive or insulting that it attracted the full force of the
law?

Why, none other than the majestic words of the 1611 King James Bible. The
problem was that they were those bits of the Bible which forbid
homosexuality. The leaflets also urged homosexuals to ‘turn from your sins
and you will be saved’. But to the secular priests of the human rights
culture, the only sin is to say that homosexuality is a sin.

Admittedly, Mr Green is not everyone’s cup of tea; other Christians regard
him as extreme. But our society is now so upside-down that, by doing nothing
more than upholding a fundamental tenet of Christianity, he was treated like
a criminal. And yet at the same time, the police are still studiously
refusing to act against Islamic zealots abusing British freedom to preach
hatred and incitement against the West.

The Bible is the moral code that underpins our civilisation. Yet the logic
of the police action against Mr Green surely leads ultimately to the
inescapable conclusion that the Bible itself is ‘hate speech’ and must be
banned.

This bizarre state of affairs has arisen thanks to our human rights culture
which automatically champions minorities against the majority. As a result,
no one can say anything disobliging about a minority without being accused
of prejudice or discrimination.

The problem for Christianity is that it holds that homosexuality is wrong.
This, however, it is no longer allowed to say because it treats a minority
practice as sinful. So it can no longer uphold a central tenet of its own
faith without being accused of prejudice.

This dilemma is currently tearing apart the Church of England itself. But it
is also turning our whole notion of justice on its head.

Author Lynette Burrows received a warning from the Metropolitan Police
merely for suggesting that gay people did not make ideal adoptive parents.
The former leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, also
had his collar felt by police after he said that homosexuality was harmful.

Notably, in his case the matter was swiftly dropped. If there’s one thing
that terrifies our PC police even more than being called homophobic, it’s
being called Islamophobic — even though Islamic fundamentalism poses a real
threat to the human rights of gay people.

If this wasn’t all so frightening, it would be hilarious.

Christians, by contrast, get very different treatment. An elderly
evangelical preacher, Harry Hammond, was convicted of a public order offence
after he held up a poster calling for an end to homosexuality, lesbianism
and immorality. Although he had been the victim of a physical attack when a
crowd poured soil and water over him, he alone was prosecuted.

And Lancashire pensioners Joe and Helen Roberts were interrogated by police
for 80 minutes about their ‘ homophobic’ views after they had merely asked
their local council to display Christian literature alongside gay rights
leaflets in civic buildings.

Christianity is fast becoming the creed that dare not speak its name. It is
being written out of the national script by ideologues seeking to hasten its
disappearance. Yesterday, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said in a
radio interview that Britain was ‘no longer a Christian country’ because
people no longer went to church.

Local authorities and government bodies are systematically bullying
Christianity out of existence by refusing to fund Christian voluntary groups
on the grounds that to be Christian means that they are not committed to
‘diversity’.

Thus local and central government refused to replicate the vocational
training provided by the Highfields Happy Hens Centre in Derbyshire for
young offenders and pupils excluded from school despite its impressive
record of success, simply because it was run with a clear Christian ethos.

Norfolk County Council objected to the inclusion of the word ‘Christian’ in
the constitution of Barnabas House in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, which houses
homeless young men.

And the Housing Corporation, the major funder of Romford YMCA in Essex which
looks after hundreds of needy young people, objected to the fact that only
Christians were board members — which meant, it said, that the YMCA was not
capable of ‘diversity’, even though it was open to all faiths and none.

The ‘diversity’ agenda, in other words, is a fig-leaf for an attack on
Christianity. And to cap it all, we can no longer rely on our future monarch
to hold the line, since Prince Charles has said that when he becomes King he
will no longer be Defender of the Faith but ‘defender of faith’.

But Christianity is still the official religion of this country. All its
institutions, its history and its culture are suffused with it; Britain
would lose its identity, its values and its cohesion without it. But
minority rights are now being wielded against it like a wrecking ball.

What started as a commendable desire to ban hatred of the gay minority has
morphed into a hatred of the Christian majority. Behaviour which was
previously considered to transgress the moral norms of the Bible has now
instead become the norm — and it is biblical values that are treated as
beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour.

This is no accident. The sacred doctrine of human rights — which explicitly
sets itself up as the religion for a godless age — is the means by which
secularism is steadily attacking the Christian roots of our civilisation, on
the basis that religion is inherently unenlightened, prejudiced and
divisive.

Christianity has been dethroned as this country’s governing creed on the
basis that equality demands equal status for minority faiths and secularism.
As a result, it is being marginalised as no more than a quaint cultural
curiosity.

It is a process before which the Church of England has long been on its
knees, going with the flow of moral and cultural collapse in accordance with
the doctrine of multiculturalism — and then wondering why its churches are
so empty, while those of uncompromising evangelicals such as Stephen Green
are packed to the rafters.

As a result, Christianity is being steadily removed from the public sphere.
Various councils have banned Christmas on the grounds that it is ‘too
Christian’ and therefore ‘offensive’ to peoples of other faiths, and are
replacing it with meaningless ‘winter festivals’.

This attack on Christianity is not merely something that seems straight out
of Alice In Wonderland.

It is not merely a threat to freedom of speech and religious expression. It
is a fundamental onslaught on the national identity and bedrock values of
this country — and as such will destroy those freedoms which Christianity
itself first created.