Author: Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.

Born to kill?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

More of the infuriating madness to which the Late Late Show exposed us was the subject of Charles Moore’s column in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. But as he sees it, all this is not just madness but is also bad and very dangerous.  He wrote:

 Last week, I appeared on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions? in Guildford. We were asked whether we thought women should be allowed to take part in full front-line combat roles in the Armed Services. I said I didn’t think that it would be an advance in human civilisation if women abandoned their traditional association with peace and started killing people as men do.

This did not please the questioner, an intelligent student from the politics department of Surrey University, or her supporters sitting with her. They thought that the only question was the ability of the woman – if she was fit to fight, fight she should, and no one should stop her.

Afterwards, I reflected on the oddity of the situation. It did not seem that the student and her colleagues were particularly interested in military matters in themselves. They also did not seem the sort of people who, in other circumstances, would be at all keen on people killing people. I could imagine them protesting against militarism. Yet here they were, pushing for a woman’s right to kill.

Why? Because of Equality, of course. It gets you into strange situations.

(Read the full article in the Telegraph)

Illogically induced brain trauma

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters4 Comments

I was in the Late Late Show audience last night. The show, on Irish television, is the longest running “chat” show in the world – we are told. I was invited on the basis of my being on the side of traditional  marriage in the forthcoming debate on gay “marriage” which is going to begin raging in this jurisdiction soon.

One homosexual person on the panel, “married” with children, objected to the term gay being attached to their campaign for legislative change. He said that what their campaign was about was “marriage equality”. A strange signal hit my brain cells – like when someone says something entirely illogical but you cannot at once put your finger on the illogicality. Essentially the nerve-ending which was touched was the one which sent a signal to my brain when writing the last paragraph telling me again that when gay is used with the word marriage then that word marriage must be put in inverted commas – because as a compound noun, gay marriage does not, and cannot, exist if marriage is accepted as a bond between a man and a woman sharing rights which depend on their complimentary biological nature.

Marriage in this sense, the sense in which the marriage bond has been understood from time immemorial, has nothing essentially to do with love. A marriage contracted between a man and a woman may be loveless and it will still be a marriage. A marriage without the commitment to share the couple’s complimentary sexual faculties is not in the proper sense a marriage at all.

I thought to myself that there must be some logical formula which can unravel this fallacy? Perhaps this is it?

Current meaning of marriage: “biological man+ biological woman+(children)”. That’s it.

What the “marriage equality” campaign is proposing is the following: “biological man+ biological woman+(children)” = “biological man+ biological man+(children)” or  “biological woman+ biological woman+(children)”.

Is this not patently false?

If you want to see the somewhat unbalanced discussion and experience first-hand the same brain trauma you can check it out at 1 hour sixteen minutes into the show.

In defence of Ironic Man

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“Irony”, Stanley Fish told us in the New York Times (January 28) “is a stance of distance that pays a compliment to both its producer and consumer. The ironist knows what other, more naïve, observers do not: that surfaces are deceptive, that the real story is not what presents itself, that conventional pieties are sentimental fictions.” Fish is taking his fellow critics to task for their love of irony and their mauling of the new movie version of the stage musical version of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, “Les Misérables”. The movie, like the musical, is devoid of irony.

This is a thought-provoking piece – not so much along the lines of his thoughts as along other, perhaps opposing, lines. Fish is essentially defending the musical and particularly its recent cinematic incarnation against nearly all the “serious” critics of the world. Let us leave Victor Hugo’s novel on which the musical is based out of this. The novel is an indisputable masterpiece. The musical bears but the most tenuous connection to it – as any examination of its very extraordinary genesis will reveal.

What Fish has to say about the musical is interesting enough but what is really interesting is what he has to say about irony and the great divide between a life examined through an ironic prism (or is it prison) and a life which is devoid of this sense. Life in the former mode is presented as one in which we encounter and deal with anguish, doubt, uncertainty; life in the latter mode is one of simplicity, certainty and untrammelled feeling. But is it as simple as that? What worried me not a little was the thought that the two main authorities whom Fish quoted in support of the unexamined raw emotional life, Mark Rothko and David Foster Wallace, both tragically took their own lives as their ultimate response to the vision of the world which they embraced. Fish makes no mention of this.

Post-modern irony seems to me an excessive and misguided expression of a very real perception of the fact that there is much more to the world and the human condition than meets the eye. In some way it seems to mock our folly in not seeing what we should see – but does not want to do anything about it. However, a genuine ironic stance is no more than an approach we take to getting beyond the surface of appearances to the reality underlying them.

The common cultural mode today is one in which we respond with enthusiasm and abandon to the superficial emotionalism of popular entertainment. This is typified by our consumption of pop music, Hollywood film and television, musicals since the 1970s – when Andrew Lloyd Weber and the likes of  ‘Les Misérables’ became the cultural phenomenon of the late 20th century. The parallel emergence of the multi-billion spectator-sport industry is another of its manifestations. All this consumption is devoid of that vital question-mark which distinguishes the response of the thinking creature from the unthinking creature.  We either feel good or bad about something. That is all there is to it. Sentiment is put above all else and when that happens sentimentalism becomes the core value of our ideology. Sentimentalism is, as D.H.Lawrence defined it, the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. That is the ultimate destructive self-deception.

Since the consumers of these products are in fact creatures destined to think and not just to feel, when they are deprived of the challenge to do so they will not then bother to think. Their culture deprives them of the opportunity to develop that vital habit of being which is necessary for the fulfilment of their true nature. Ultimately this will leave them with a vision of their existence which will appear meaningless. The consequences of that may be the response of Rothko and Wallace, and so many others who have taken the same nihilistic path for the same nihilistic reason.

Does all this help explain in part the apparent readiness of Western societies to embrace euthanasia, abortion, and many other life choices which only make sense when perception itself is limited to the surface appearances of our existence? Does this explain the appalling superficiality of Barack Obama’s presidency and in particular the content of his second inaugural address. His appeal to the superficial and the emotional is relentless. The speech, as fork-tongued as it was banal, paid lip-service to the ideals of the Founding Fathers but the connections between his sentimental politics and their real-life politics were remote. He gushed:

“The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few, or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people. Entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. And for more than 200 years we have. Through blood drawn by lash, and blood drawn by sword, we noted that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half slave, and half free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together… For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

OK, it is just a speech, but as Janet Daly reflected in her article in The Daily Telegraph last weekend, it is a speech which chillingly betrays a fundamental change in the very nature of our democracy. While it was superficial and trite it was no less significant for that – indeed, that its trite message could pass for real political thought and be a harbinger for a new political reality was what was frighteningly historic about it in her eyes. For her it was a coming to America of the same trite political thought which New Labour brought to British politics in 1997.

“The core message was pounded home relentlessly: American government”, she wrote, “is now in the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers’ conception of a nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over the individual. This is the new credo of American nationhood: the government, not the community or the household, will be the moral arbiter of social virtue. The traditional suspicion of the overweening power of the state is now a thing of the past. Democracy is about electing a government that will be there to protect you from hardship, shelter you from the storm and absolve you from sin. Well, no, maybe not that last one – but the concept of the state as moral saviour is not so remote from this, is it?”

And what has this to do with Stanley Fish? Perhaps this: nurture our society on superficial sentimentalism and feed it nothing more demanding than emotional highs and lows and you will take away our capacity for irony. With our sense of irony gone, and with it the capacity to see beyond superficial appearances, we will have to live with the spectre of a world in which we are represented by people who think in the way Obama thinks. We will see no hope beyond the quagmire of superficial emotionalism and sentimentalism in which they are threatening to engulf us. Our sense of irony at least gives us a gateway to a deeper and truer reading of our condition and some prospect of redemption.

Reason speaks to reason but questions remain unanswered

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

questions

It may be a pastoral letter – from a bishop to his church in a diocese in just one part of the world – but it speaks reason to reason and not just to faith to reason. What is more, it put questions to those who claim to be reasonable. Those questions have been asked before but have not been answered – they have just provoked abuse. The fear of many – and it is echoed in this letter –  is that this abuse will soon become judicial and violent, and the questions will still remain unanswered.

Thomas John Paprocki is the Catholic Bishop of Springfield in Illinois. He has written to the Catholics of his diocese, but his message can resonate around the whole of the Western world which is now in the grip of the campaign for the redefinition of human nature and the institutions society has forged from within that nature to help its own true fulfilment. He writes in the context of the state of Illinois’s consideration of a legislative proposal called “The Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act.”

Without mincing his word’s, Paprocki says, “A more fraudulent title for this dangerous measure could not be imagined. The proposed law is, in truth, a grave assault upon both religious liberty and marriage.”  The bill as drafted would in the first instance, he says, be trying to legislate an untruth.

What is that untruth and why is it untruthful? He explains why, with rational precision, and in terms which can be transferred with very little difficulty to every legislature in the world which is contemplating similar legislation :

The pending bill would, for the first time in our state’s history, redefine marriage to legally recognize same-sex “marriages.” But neither two men nor two women – nor, for that matter, three or more people – can possibly form a marriage. Our law would be lying if it said they could.

 The basic structure of marriage as the exclusive and lasting relationship of a man and a woman, committed to a life which is fulfilled by having children, is given to us in human nature.

 

Notwithstanding the vanity of human wishes, every society in human history – including every society untouched by Jewish or Christian revelation – has managed to grasp this profound truth about human relationships and happiness: marriage is the union of man and woman.

 The bill’s sponsors maintain it would simply extend marriage to some people who have long been arbitrarily excluded from it. They are wrong. The pending bill would not expand the eligibility-roster for marriage. It would radically redefine what marriage is- for everybody.

 It would enshrine in our law – and thus in public opinion and practice – three harmful ideas:

  • What essentially makes a marriage is romantic-emotional union.
  • Children don’t need both a mother and father.
  • The main purpose of marriage is adult satisfactions.

 These ideas would deepen the sexual revolution’s harms on all society. After all, if marriage is an emotional union meant for adult satisfactions, why should it be sexually exclusive? Or limited to two? Or pledged to permanence? If children don’t need both their mother and father, why should fathers stick around when romance fades? As marriage is redefined, it becomes harder for people to see the point of these profoundly important marital norms, to live by them, and to encourage others to do the same. The resulting instability hurts spouses, but also – and especially – children, who do best when reared by their committed mother and father.

 Indeed, children’s need – and right – to be reared by the mother and father whose union brought them into being explains why our law has recognized marriage as a conjugal partnership – the union of husband and wife – at all. Our lawmakers have understood that marriage is naturally oriented to procreation, to family. Of course, marriage also includes a committed, intimate relationship of a sort which some same-sex couples (or multiple lovers in groups of three or more) could imitate. But our law never recognized and supported marriage in order to regulate intimacy for its own sake. The reason marriage is recognized in civil law at all (as ordinary friendships, or other sacraments, are not) is specific to the committed, intimate relationships of people of opposite-sex couples: they are by nature oriented to having children. Their love-making acts are life-giving acts.

 Same-sex relationships lack this unique predicate of state recognition and support. Even the most ideologically blinded legislator cannot change this natural fact: the sexual acts of a same-sex couple (regardless of how one views them morally) are simply not of the type that yield the gift of new life. So they cannot extend a union of hearts by a true bodily union. They cannot turn a friendship into the one-flesh union of marriage. They are not marital. This is not just a Christian idea, but one common to every major religious tradition and our civilization’s great philosophical traditions, beginning with ancient Greece and Rome.

But the Illinois bill, which is seeking to have its cake and eat it, is also deceptive in another important way – as are the proposals of David Cameron’s coalition government in the United Kingdom and every other legislature we know of trying to do to the same thing. It is pretending that this legislation, if passed, will not conflict with the religious freedom of the citizens of any country which adopts its model. Those legislators who are not inherently hostile to religion – and many are – are burying their heads in the sand if they do not recognise that this legislation is going to lead to a denial of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and ultimately to religious persecution.

Paprocki continues:

The pending bill is not only a dangerous social experiment about marriage. It is also a lethal attack upon religious liberty. This so-called “religious freedom” would not stop the state from obligating the Knights of Columbus to make their halls available for same-sex “weddings.” It would not stop the state from requiring Catholic grade schools to hire teachers who are legally “married” to someone of the same sex. This bill would not protect Catholic hospitals, charities, or colleges, which exclude those so “married” from senior leadership positions. Nor would it protect me, the Bishop of Springfield, if I refused to employ someone in a same-sex “marriage” who applied to the Diocese for a position meant to serve my ministry as your bishop. This “religious freedom” law does nothing at all to protect the consciences of people in business, or who work for the government. We saw the harmful consequences of deceptive titles all too painfully last year when the so-called “Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act” forced Catholic Charities out of foster care and adoption services in Illinois.

 These threats do not raise a question about drafting a better law, one with more extensive conscience protections. There is no possible way – none whatsoever- for those who believe that marriage is exclusively the union of husband and wife to avoid legal penalties and harsh discriminatory treatment if the bill becomes law. Why should we expect it be otherwise? After all, we would be people who, according to the thinking behind the bill, hold onto an “unfair” view of marriage. The state would have equated our view with bigotry – which it uses the law to marginalize in every way short of criminal punishment.

He proposes to the citizens of his state, and his proposal con be considered by every reasonable citizen of the world: The only way to protect religious liberty, and to preserve marriage, is to defeat this perilous proposal. Please make sure our elected representatives understand that and know that they will be held to account. We should all do the same when this campaign – as it certainly will where it has not done so already – puts pressure on our democratic representatives to consider similar legislation.

(Also posted to MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog this morning).

Now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it again

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
A mystified David Quinn, Director of the Iona Institute

What is going on? Now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it again. Google has been involved in some sinister censorship – or perhaps they just blundered and then caught themselves on.

Late this morning the Irish Times in Dublin ran an online story that YouTube had terminated, without explanation or prior notice, the account of the Iona Institute, an Irish-based think-tank defending  the family, marriage, education and religion. Without giving any specifics the Institute got an email saying the the account had been closed “due to repeated or severe violations of our terms of service”.

By mid-afternoon the Irish Times story changed: the account was back in good standing again – but still without any explanations being given on the details of its mysterious death and resurrection.

Whether all this was a glitch or whether the furious cyber activity on Twitter which followed the Iona account’s demise caused Google to re-evaluate its censorious move we may never know. All attempts to prise information from the search engine have so far failed. Watch this space – but don’t hold your breath.

The only reason that David Quinn, the Director of the Institute, can give for the unilateral decision to terminate the account is that Google disapproved of a video which they have run on YouTube explaining the nature of marriage.

That they should have taken offence at this still mystifies him. There are many such video’s on the channel and why this one, not in any way offensive –  just soberly factual – does not make sense to him. Whatever the story, “all’s well that ends well”. Whether the Google gremlins behind this are likely to strike again we will have to wait and see.

Blind and shameless collusion in abortion news coverage

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

We are of course rejoicing at the success of the phenomenal pro-life demonstration in Dublin on Saturday. It was achieved in the face of what one could only describe as a media blackout of the event in the weeks leading up to it. It must surely have given both the conscientious and the crowd-following public representatives something to think about. The conscientious will have had their convictions reinforced by the platform speakers who sent out loud and clear statements and illustrations of the crime that the killing of the unborn is. For the populist crowd-followers it gave evidence that pro-life people power is on the move and for them this is a chilling signal that their cosy parliamentary seats might also be on the move.

More than 25,000 people from all over the country gathered in Merrion Square to protest at the coalition government’s proposal to legislate for abortion within the jurisdiction of the Irish Republic. Abortion is currently prohibited under the terms of a constitutional amendment passed overwhelmingly by the people 30 years ago. An estimated 150 pro-abortion demonstrators presented themselves at the venue as well.

But we are also once again confronted with the story-within-a-story. The story of the shameless bias of the media which spells out one fact over all others: the majority of those in the positions of influence in the media in this country are openly and unapologetically campaigning for the pro-abortion cause.

If anyone needed confirmation that there is collusion between the Irish media – orchestrated, one suspects, from behind the closed doors of sub-editing rooms – and the international press one has only to scan the reports of the Vigil in the newspapers over the following days. It did not make the front page of a single broadsheet on Monday. The Irish Times reported on it without the slightest allusion to its significance. Even RTE managed to rise to using the term “game-changer” in its Saturday evening report. That this surprised us speaks for itself. Can you imagine what we would have been reading and listening to had such numbers turned out for a pro-abortion rally? Try. You won’t find it very taxing.

How did Independent Newspapers report this the following day? The opening paragraph of a report attributed to Sarah Stack and the Press Association was this:

PROTESTERS for and against abortion have staged separate rallies in Dublin as each side step up their campaigning. The Pro-Life Campaign urged people to stand up for “the right of the unborn child” at its Unite for Life Vigil but were (sic) accused of going against legislation that would save the lives of women. Note that “right of the unborn child” in inverted commas.

The Government, we were reminded, has committed to legislate and introduce regulations to allow abortion if there is a real and substantial risk to a woman’s life, including the threat of suicide.

The report then entered even-handed mode when Pro-life spokeswoman Caroline Simons’ words were reported. She told the crowd, the biggest Dublin has seen for a decade or more, that the Government’s argument that abortion is needed to treat threatened suicide in pregnancy was demolished at the hearings on abortion held in the parliament over a week ago.

“The psychiatrists who addressed the hearings were unanimous that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal ideation”, Simons said. “But there is evidence that abortion increases the risk of future mental health problems for a significant number of women.

“The facts are simple. Where a pregnant woman’s life is at risk, Irish law and current Irish medical practice allows doctors to intervene to ensure women receive whatever treatments are necessary to safeguard their lives, even where this unavoidably results in the death of the baby.”

But that was as even-handed as it was going to get. Separately, Stack then told us, – without mentioning the number protesting – that pro-choice campaigners staged a counter-demonstration nearby and said pro-life groups are protesting against the introduction of legislation that would save the lives of women living in Ireland.

“They’re protesting against legislation that the majority have voted for in a referendum. They’re protesting against a supreme court decision. They’re protesting directly against what the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) says Ireland needs to do to protect the human rights of pregnant women,” a spokesperson for this group complained about the 25, 000.

Then came the red-herring inbthevform of a report of a two-day-old story about the opening of an inquest into the death of Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar on October 28 after she suffered a miscarriage. The international media has – with the help of its Irish fellow-travellers – sat in judgement on this and has decreed that Savita died because she was refused an abortion. On the information currently available there is absolutely no basis whatsoever for that conclusion.

Stack’s report then goes over the background to that case – all in the context of the demonstration in Dublin. No mention is made of the multiple statements made by gynaecologists, and by speakers at yesterday’s demonstration, that there is no evidence that an abortion need ever be resorted to as a solution to a complication which might arise in pregnancy.

Stack then proceeded to report on the formation of a new pro-choice group, Abortion Rights Campaign, being established in the country.

She reported that Clare Daly TD said the campaign is not a sprint but a marathon. “We’re here for the long haul,” she said. “In the meantime, we want the immediate introduction of legislation for the right to safe, legal abortion when a woman’s life is at risk, including from suicide.

“We also want the simplest, broadest legislation that includes the right to abortion in the case of fatal foetal abnormality. We will keep the pressure on until we get this.”

She did not say what everyone knows, that the pro-abortion campaign wants abortion on demand, and knows that prime minister Enda Kenny’s “restrictive” legislative proposal is the best way to get it.

The entire report devoted about 150 words to the demonstration by 25,000 people while the cause being promoted by the pro-choice group got the lion’s share of attention with over twice that. Shameless. Admittedly another report, seen online, by two reporters from the group’s newsroom did carry more of the content of what was said at the demonstration. But it was not much more and it also laboured the Halappanavar case which in the end of the day may have nothing at all to do with abortion and be revealed as a sad case of a woman dying from the effects of an infection.

For some serious coverage of the demonstration a more balanced report can be read here. See this short YouTube video for an atmospheric snapshot of the event.

All this is happening in Ireland while conscientious Americans are mourning the more than 55 milion lives sacrificed on the twin altars of, on the one hand, false compassion, and on the other of selfishness and self-indulgence. This is the toll of lives taken over the 40 years since the US Supreme Court conceded the right to life of the unborn in Roe V Wade.

Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, keeps telling his people that he is not entering the same road as this. He offers no plausible reasons for this assertion, no reasons at all in fact, but instead moans about receiving abusive letters among which are some which suggest that he is “worse than Herod” who slaughtered the Holy Innocents. Well, he may not be worse than Herod. But if he presides over the passing of legislation which will lead to the intentional killing of babies in the womb, even one baby in the womb, then he will bear responsibility for that act and will join a significant number of public representatives who are running Herod a close scond. Is there any other moral reasoning which will deny that? These babies are the new Holy Innocents.

The US picture is truly horrendous. Since that fateful decision by nine men on the Supreme Court in 1973, there have been approximately 55,772,015 abortions that have destroyed the lives of unborn children. Looked at another way, that is 1,392,500 abortions each and every year, 116,191 abortions each and every month in all 50 states. The math breaks down to 26,813 abortions each and every week nationwide. And every day, that’s 3,820 abortions.

Almost 4,000 children have died in America from abortions each and every day since.

“No light, but rather darkness visible”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The tower of babel…an new incarnation?

Rod Liddle’s brilliant summing up (Spectator) of the latest tea-cup turbulence in the Northern Isles begins with the spoon which started it all:

‘Women … are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’
— Suzanne Moore

He then continues suggesting that “One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries.”

Sulphur might be more like what we will smell. How these people hate each other?

“Please let that day come quickly,” Liddle continues. “In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves.”

I don’t really think this is very enjoyable. It is in fact, one of the saddest sights on earth because it is a horrific reminder of how our civilization is being dragged into an abyss of fear, hatred and utter contradiction of everything beautiful and reasonable.

Suzanne Moore’s quote comes from a piece she wrote in the New Statesman. For Liddle the row it caused simply gives an insight into the metro left’s bizarre psychosis. “That anodyne sentence above, which is presumably meant to express the pressure women feel to conform to a particular body-type, was taken amiss by Britain’s vibrant community of transsexuals. They eviscerated Moore for doing what I just did and referring to them as transsexuals rather than transsexual people, but also stuck the boot in by suggesting that the writer was mocking their gender, was perhaps bullying them. Undoubtedly, they asserted online and later in print, this was evidence of deviance — not sexual deviance, but deviation from political correct orthodoxy; Moore was revealing an inner hatred of transsexual people. And she was cissexist. Now there’s a term. Have you heard it before? I hadn’t. It is a wonderful day when we can stumble across a new hate crime of which we might all one day be accused: cissexism is the suspicion that transsexual people’s ‘identified gender’ is somehow less genuine than that of people born to the gender in which they remain. Are you guilty of cissexism? You bastard.”

All that was bad enough while it was raging in the egg-cup of the New Statesman’s followers. But then the storm spread futher afield when Moore’s friend Julie Burchill jumped to the defence of her ideological soulmate in The Observer newspaper. Liddle quotes one very witty commentator’s online description of the effects of this intervention: ‘Julie Burchill poured oil on troubled waters. Then she put some seabirds in the oil. Then she set fire to the oil.’ Burchill described the transsexuals as ‘screaming mimis’ and ‘bedwetters in bad wigs’.

But this is also where the whole thing gets sad and worrying because a government minister intervenes, none other than one of those behind David Cameron’s push to destroy marriage. See how it all fits?

Lynne Featherstone tweeted in defence of all transsexuals and describes Burchill’s article as ‘bigoted vomit’ and suggested that both she and the editor of the Observer, John Mulholland, should be sacked. Is it any wonder that the press is worried about the implications of the Leveson Report for a free press – threatening to put control of media in the hands of such as Featherstone? She is the minister for International Development. What is going on?

If this case is anything to go by the press is already knuckling under to the PC-gay-transexual mafia which seems to control Westminster. “How did Mr Mulholland respond?” Liddle asks, and gives the worrying answer: “Did this titan of the press, this staunch and stoic defender of freedom of speech stand by his columnist? Um, not exactly. He instead apologized for having run Julie Burchill’s article and within the hour the piece had been expunged from the joint Guardian-Observer website, no trace of it remaining. But in making his apology Mulholland did say that the Observer supported freedom of speech and did so terribly bravely sometimes. Just, er, not this time.”

“Another fine mess…”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

One can only hear the words of Oliver Hardy to poor old Stan Laurel when we read a story like the one reported in the London Telegraph on January 9 last. Courts and judges are not only having to turn themselves upside down but also inside out to deal with the madness they are now bei ng confronted with – and they are doing it all with a straight face. How long more can it last?

Two “divorcing” gay men are arguing with each other before a Canadian court, the one denying the “rights” of another because the jurisdiction in which they first registered their civil partnership does not recognise it as a “marriage” while the jurisdiction in which they now live does. With a straight face – although we have no photographs to prove it, – the Canadian judge ruled that it would be “impermissible discrimination” not to view Wayne Hincks, 44, from London, as married to his partner Gerardo Gallardo in exactly the same way as a husband and wife.

Yes, she did say “exactly the same way” – and claimed that the distinction in UK law between civil partnerships and marriage “violates human dignity”.

(Read more of this on Conjugality, posted there a short time ago.)

An unashamedly partisan post

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This is going to be a defining year for Ireland. Let us ensure that the definition of Ireland remains honourable and true.

Many people are already aware of the event which is taking place in Dublin on Saturday, January 19 – the Vigil for Life in Merrion Square, Dublin. However, we can take no chances and must do everything in our power to get as many people as possible to take part in this demonstration which must show that the majority of people in Ireland are determined that this country will not provide services enabling the intentional and deliberate destruction of children in their mothers’ wombs.

That this will never happen depends on a concerted effort across a number of critical battle fronts – one of which has been engaged in over the past few days in Dail Eireann where experts and advocacy groups have been battling it out for the life or death of multitudes of the unborn. Although the pro-life champions did very well, that battle could only ever be inconclusive. But wars are seldom won in single battles – and this is a war which will continue through a series of battles over the coming year. What is important is that every foot-soldier with a weapon to use – the ear of a TD, access to a talk show, a voice to offer next week in Dublin which will send a clear message to politicians that we do not want ANY unborn child’s life to be deliberately taken on any pretext – will engage in this combat of peace and good will.

Details:

Join with thousands of others at the UNITE FOR LIFE vigil at 4.30 pm on January 19th, at Merrion Square in Dublin.

We all agree that pregnant women should receive all treatments necessary to safeguard their lives. However, those pushing for abortion are dishonestly blurring the distinction between necessary medical treatments and abortion.

Ireland, without abortion, is a world leader in safety for pregnant mothers. Yet, right now, we are closer to abortion here than ever before.

It is a defining moment for our country. Will YOU stand united to be a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves? Can we count on you being there on the day? Your presence is vital. The situation could not be more grave.

Transport to the vigil is being organised locally. For further information, please visit our ‘Vigil for Life’ facebook page and http://www.unite4life.net or telephone us at the numbers below. Posters will be provided on the day.

For more details please contact

Denise on 087 9709998

or Katie on  087 7020255

Please invite your friends also.