Integration tsar Dame Louise Casey has a problem with ‘religious conservatism’

Jan 11, 2017 by Jill

by Archbishop Cranmer:

In 2013 Dame Louise Casey was named by BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour as one of the Top 100 most powerful women in the UK. She was duly appointed by David Cameron and Theresa May to examine issues of community cohesion, extremism and integration. Her report – The Casey Review – sounds deafening alarm bells and offers a few cogent solutions. “We need to be much bolder in not just celebrating our history, heritage and culture, but standing up for our democratically decided upon laws of the land,” she summarised for the Telegraph. “I have become convinced that it is only the upholding of our core British laws, cultures, values and traditions that will offer us the route map through the different and complex challenge of creating a cohesive society.”

Which is all well and good, until you examine what she means by “core” values.

In oral evidence to the Communities and Local Government Committee this week (video HERE), she expounded some of her beliefs about faith schools (that is, schools with a religious foundation, which have considerably expanded under the process of academisation and the establishment of Free Schools). She said:

More importantly, when does a teacher running a secular school say, “No, it’s fine for you not to do theatre,” or music or those sorts of thing? When is that okay? I do not really have any view on which religion it is that it is promoting those sorts of views, but they are not okay, in the same way that it is not okay for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage. That is not okay either—it is not how we bring children up in this country. It is often veiled as religious conservatism, and I have a problem with the expression “religious conservatism”, because often it can be anti-equalities.

And so, in Louise Casey’s secular world, religious orthodoxy – which some might term religious conservatism – must be subsumed to the overarching ‘equalities’ agenda, which then becomes the superior moral framework by which society is regulated. Millennia of moral teachings on, for example, normative sexuality or societal beliefs about the nature and purpose of marriage must conform to the new egalitarian social-justice imperative. Of course, ‘homophobia’ and ‘anti-gay marriage’ are in the eye of the beholder: for some, a rational argument for the maintenance of the Anglican marriage liturgy is ‘homophobic’; the exclusively male Roman Catholic priesthood is ‘sexist’; to question any aspect of Mohammed’s character or action is ‘Islamophobic’, and so on. One may no longer argue for the values of religious conservatism without the forefinger of bigotry being prodded directly into one’s forehead. And Louise Casey – whose whole political mission is virtuously dedicated to integration and social cohesion – has just jabbed another finger (not quite the middle one) at all those who call themselves religious conservatives, for “often” they invoke that very term to cloak their anti-equalities bigotry in a shroud of holiness.

Read here