Hounding Tim Farron about gay sex deflects from LibDem vote to abolish faith schools

May 2, 2017 by Jill

by Archbishop Cranmer:

While the Christian leader of the Liberal Democrats was being harassed and hounded day after day by liberal metropolitan journalists to pronounce on whether he believed homosexual acts were sin (which belief would surely be a mortal sin against liberal metropolitan orthodoxy, and so the end of his political career), all journalistic scrutiny was deflected from the real illiberal Liberal Democrat intolerance of fervent (Christian) faith, which is that they have voted to abolish state faith schools, or ‘schools with a religious character’.

It isn’t couched in such stark terms, but that is most definitely what their new party policy amounts to. A motion in their Spring Conference waffled on so very liberally about how “Religious communities make a valuable contribution to the cultural life of the UK”; and how “religious organisations have played a major historic role in broadening access to education”; and how “There continues to be a place for state schools with a religious character”; and “Where different bodies are allowed to sponsor state schools, religious organisations should not be discriminated against in so doing.” It’s all so deliciously super-duper; so effusively tolerant. But look at the detail:

Where religious instruction, worship or other religious practice takes place in state-funded schools it should not be compulsory..

That is to say, the religious character of faith schools may not be inculcated; the school’s religious ethos may not be reified to the extent that dissenting students might consider it an imposition. This actually turns the current law on its head: since the 1944 Education (‘Butler’) Act, attendance has been compulsory unless parents withdraw their children (and since 2006, sixth-formers have been free to withdraw themselves). The LibDems seek to give all children of all ages the right to withdraw from religious instruction and the daily act of collective worship, which will effectively kill both off. What 12-year-old boy would want to sit and hear someone drone on (and on) about God’s boring rules when the alternative is more cricket and football (it can’t be Maths, or that would be seen as punitive, and so discriminatory, and so illegal).

Read here