by Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald
[…] The reason for this may be that the Catholic Church and faith is perceived as one of the greatest threats to the secularisation of our society. Catholicism calls the inclusive bluff, exposing it as hollow and self-contradictory at the centre. This is not welcome.
Why is Catholicism alone a threat? It is because there is no coherent political philosophy on the right, and among the religious alternatives Islam is playing possum; and anyway, the left has adopted it as its favourite totemic victim. If it were ever to be asked how the movement “Gays for Gaza” might fare, all would be lost. So the BBC ensures that never happens.
But Catholicism is dangerous to them, and they know it.
This became clearest when the BBC confronted both the Protestant Tim Farron and the Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg over their views on same-sex “marriage”.
The BBC has become one of the leading propagandists for LGBTQ+ issues and takes no prisoners when Christians declare their preference for heterosexual marriage. Within the organisation the percentage of LGBTQ+ staff does more than mirror the population in general: it is six times higher. (A freedom of information request sent in by the Christian Institute reveals that 11.5 per cent of BBC bosses and 10.6 per cent of staff are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual, whereas the Office for National Statistics most recently recorded the gay percentage as about 1.7 per cent of the population.)
In an interview on BBC “Question Time”, for example, Tim Farron, as a leader of the Liberal Democrats, was asked whether or not gay sex was a sin. He had the utmost difficulty not walking into the trap of self-inflicted public social excommunication as he tried to articulate the traditional Christian ethical view on the practice of one’s sexuality. Despite all kinds of verbal qualifications, he failed.
But whereas he and other Protestants constantly found themselves in trouble and vilified for their hate crime and homophobia, Jacob Rees-Mogg, much to the frustration of his interviewers, took a very different approach.
When asked what his views on homosexuality were, he smiled demurely and explained that the views he took were not personally chosen as his own, but simply those laid down by the Catholic Church, where the place of sex between consenting adults was understood to take place within marriage, with the purpose not primarily of recreation (as the secularists believed), but of procreation.
“If you find that problematic,” he gently murmured, “please take it up with the Pope, not with me”.
With one swift stroke this produced a check-mate with the interviewer who was seeking to establish that Christians are guilty of hate crimes against liberal-minded people in general, and gay people in particular.