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.
There is a very interesting post in MercatorNet’s Demography is Destiny blog again today. It focuses on a generally uncritical review in The Guardian of a new book by that famous doomsayer from the Sixties, Paul Ehrlich.
Ehrlich was described by many as alarmist in the 1970s but was taken seriously by at least as many more. He now says most of his predictions have proved correct…‘Most of the predictions [in Population Bomb] have proved correct’ The Guardian reports.
Really? The Daily Telegraph calls that particular bluff in its look at some of his predictions. There, on April 26,Tom Chivers gives us a taste of their accuracy:
“1) “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he said. He predicted four billion deaths, including 65 million Americans.
What actually happened: Since Ehrlich wrote, the population has more than doubled to seven billion – but the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25 per cent. Of course there are famines, but the death rate has gone down. I don’t think a significant number of Americans have starved.
2) “The train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion.” India was doomed, and should be left to die in a “triage” system that would concentrate resources on those places that can be saved.
What actually happened: The Green Revolution, a series of technological and agrarian advances led by a man called Norman Borlaug, transformed our ability to produce food. These techniques were introduced to India by one Prof Monkombu Swaminathan. “They [Ehrlich, and Paul and William Paddock, authors of Famine: 1975!] said Indians, and others, were like sheep going to the slaughterhouse. They’ll all die,” Swaminathan told Gardner in an interview. But thanks to Borlaug, Swaminathan, and human ingenuity, India is now one of the few countries with a booming economy, and is a net exporter, rather than recipient, of food aid. But if Ehrlich’s and the Paddocks’ advice had been followed, there could have been tens of millions of deaths, says Swaminathan.
3) “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
What actually happened: I’m not hungry. I just ate. Are you hungry? Were you hungry in 2000, especially? Does England exist?”
What is wrong with us? How do these people get away with it?
Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film on the inviolable seal of Confession, “I Confess”.
At the very heart of freedom is freedom of religion – and at the very heart of religious freedom is freedom of conscience.
The Irish Government has just published a piece of draft legislation which places a time bomb in this very heart, and if the legislation is enacted it will blow a people’s freedom to smithereens.
Is that first assertion too much? No. Every freedom which has been won for mankind, by mankind, over millennia of our history shows that where freedom was truly won it was won essentially in the context of a freedom of religion and the right to freedom and integrity of personal conscience. Freedoms won by forces hostile to religion – the freedoms won by the French Revolution, the freedoms won by the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution – have invariably ended in tyranny and have never succeeded in establishing authentic freedom until they have recognised the need for freedom of religion and conscience.
In contrast with the tyrannies which emanated from those struggles for freedom you have the greatest freedom of all, that won by Christians through centuries of persecution by the slave-owning and humanly deluded powers of the ancient world. In more modern times you have the great freedom won by the enslaved races of the 18th and 19th centuries, a struggle driven above all by a Christian consciousness of injustice. Accepted, history is more nuanced than this, but nevertheless the core truth is undeniable. Without recognition of the inviolability of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, the pursuit of freedom will be fatally flawed and will promise only tyranny.
The Irish government, seeking to deal with the problem of protecting children from abuse by adults, has now gone down this very path. In its proposed legislation it not only ignores freedom of religion and conscience but directly denies it head-on. It is promising to penalise and imprison any Catholic priest who does not report to the relevant secular authorities a sinful act for which a penitent sinner seeks the forgiveness of God as promised to him, as he believes, by the teaching of Jesus Christ. This is not stated explicitly in the draft but will be the inevitable outcome if the legislation is enacted.
Ominously the Irish Times reports today, “The Department of Justice was unable to confirm last night whether priests will be legally obliged to report serious offences against children to gardaí (police) that are disclosed during Confession.” That is a lame and disingenuous kicking to touch. This issue has been in focus for several months now and a number of government ministers have gone on record saying that the so-called sacred seal of confession no longer stands as a legal entity. Justice Minister Alan Shatter confirmed the mandatory reporting requirement would apply to priests hearing confession. Some priests have already proclaimed their defiance in defence of the freedom of conscience of those who come to them as penitents.
In this proposed legislation the State has effectively invaded a sacred realm of the religion of Christians and has countermanded that power which Christian believers understand to have been given by Christ when he said, “whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you shall retain they are retained.” What the State does not recognise in this whole matter is that while the same act may be both a sin and a crime, these two things have to be resolved in separate ways and in separate fora. A Catholic person accused, convicted and condemned to death for murder, innocent or not, may go to Confession before his execution. The priest who hears that confession might, by revealing all he had been told by the penitent, redeem that person’s reputation. Even to achieve that justice, he may not do so. The two realms are absolutely separate and the priest’s silence about what was confessed must also be absolute.
By invading this realm of conscience in this way the Irish State has now taken away the freedom of a sinner to get the absolution promised by God because it has radically changed the terms and conditions for that absolution – that is, the secrecy given to the act of confession by the wisdom and teaching of the Catholic Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit as that sinner’s religious faith leads him to believe.
Let there be no doubt about it. This is a draconian law, posturing as a necessary law under the shadow of the crimes of child abuse with which Irish society, among others, has been plagued for over 40 or 50 years. It is also a bad law, penally hostile to the practice of the religious faith of the majority of the citizens of Ireland. The fact that a draconian executive is not running the country – although some might dispute that – is irrelevant. For nearly 300 years the Roman Empire had penal laws against Christians in place. For most of that time Christians were free to practice their religion but periodically the executive power of the time deemed that they were bad citizens by practising their faith and moved murderously against them. The pattern has been repeated many times throughout history whenever and wherever laws of this type came into being. Ireland beware.
Demography is destiny but this shows us that messing with it is madness – the madness of the 4-2-1 society. Are China’s leaders really this crazy – charging like lemmings into oblivion? Check out this from The Economist, posted today on the MercatorNet blog, Demography is Destiny .
MercatorNet.com’s blog, Conjugality, is pro-marriage. It exists because, in its effect, the drive to redefine marriage to enable it to encompass civil unions between same-sex couples will destroy marriage. It will simply drain it of the meaning it has in nature itself. This argument is simply not being faced up to. The tactic of the opponents of a piece of legislation being processed in North Carolina in the United States in the next couple of weeks – and the media generally in its opposition to those who defend the nature of marriage – is to paint them into an anti-gay box and throw as much mud at them as they can. They are ignoring the need to maintain truth in language itself – indeed this is but another wound they are inflicting on human kind.
Let us leave aside the question of the rights or wrongs of the use and abuse of sexuality and simply work this controversey out in the context of all the things which the institution of marriage has been about since the first conjugal union of man and woman took place, of what its essence is. Perhaps then we may see some light in the suffocating darkness created by these multiple smoke screens which surround us.
On Tuesday, April 24, Frances Kelly asked in her Home Griddle blog, “Why does media call pro-gender measure ‘anti-gay’?” This was all in the context of media treatment of the legislation being processed in North Carolina.
“Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.” Amendment 1, North Carolina. Kelly wrote:
When it votes on Amendment One in two weeks, North Carolina will decide whether or not to uphold gender integration in marriage. This pro-gender bill would ensure gender-diversity in families. Rather than intentionally depriving children of either their mother or father, this measure would ensure that children have both.
However, opponents call this pro-gender language “anti-gay.” For example, the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner called Amendment 1 “one of the toughest anti-gay measures in the country.”
Why is pro-gender language called anti-gay?
Isn’t it more accurate to consider pro-gay measures as anti-gender?
The answer to that question is, “Yes, of course it it.” The answer to the former? Because smoke screens hide us from the truth.
Meeting of the International Federation of Catholic Doctors Associations
While gay and lesbian groups try to prosecute a Spanish bishop after he gave a sermon repeating the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexual behaviour, and his subsequent endorsement of psychological treatment to help people to deal with same-sex attraction, an international group of Catholic doctors has come out in his support.
Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla of Alcala de Henares has been attacked in the liberal press after remarks made in a Good Friday sermon in which he condemned sexual practices he believes to be harmful – in line with Catholic moral teaching.
The International Federation of Catholic Doctors Associations (F.I.A.M.C.) in an April 17 statement (reported in CBCP News)voiced support for the bishop and defended his criticism of the destructive behaviours which he described within the local gay community. The federation supported his remarks as a valid insight.
“Catholic doctors”, the statement said, “profoundly respect persons with homosexual traits,” but “do not support the practice of homosexuality.”
The bishop’s address provided a wide-ranging critique of sexual behaviour in modern society and he lamented how some with same-sex attraction are encouraged to “corrupt and prostitute themselves or go to gay night clubs” in order to “validate” their struggle.
The Federation pointed out the broader issues addressed by the bishop – such as the scourge of sex trafficking in Europe and controversial sex-education programs aimed at young children.
“Catholic doctors,” the statement said, “profoundly lament the failure of modern states and of public international institution to combat ‘sexual tourism,’ involving adults or children,”
They also joined the bishop in denouncing “the contents of some textbooks,” especially those used in Spain’s recently axed Education for Citizenry course, which encouraged children “to ‘explore’ all areas of sexuality.”
“We are right in every way to consider these lessons perverse,” the doctors said, “And Bishop Reig is right in every way to condemn these and other abuses of the human being.”
Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Plà’s Good Friday sermon was on “the death of the soul as a result of sin.”
Referring to various kinds of sinful behavior, including adultery, theft, and failure to pay wages to workers, Reig Plà added homosexual behavior to the list as well. With regard to each example of sin, the bishop spoke of the act itself, and the resulting destruction of the soul.
After expressions of outrage regarding the bishop’s statement, which reflects the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church on sexual deviance, Reig Plà gave an interview to the Internet news service Religion en Libertad (Religion in Liberty), in which he explained his statement in more detail, and added that homosexual tendencies can be cured through therapy.
In contemporary society, we are confronted with “a program of calculated ‘deconstruction’ that is tolerated in every setting (in education from the earliest stages of childhood, in part of the media, in work and leisure, etc.) which additionally includes the promotion and protection of a great number of evil laws and some powerful lobbying groups that determine what is politically correct, and therefore, socially acceptable,” said the bishop.
“Based on these factors, many children, adolescents, and adults are increasingly invited to question their sexual identity, and eventually they are urged to ‘verify and prove’ their ‘sexual preferences’, and some fall into the trap,” he added.
“Those of us priests who know about the private lives of people, listening to and helping those faithful who request it, know that the consequences for many people are suffering and destruction, colloquially speaking a ‘hell’ in their lives.” You will find a fuller report on the controversy on LfeSiteNews.
Martin Sheen begs a lot of questions in his recent statements explaining his support for changes to marriage legislation to allow gay people to call their unions marriage. Apart from dubious definitions of “the Church” he professes allegiance to and its relationship with God, there is far too much vagueness in his concept of conscience to enable us to take seriously what he is trying to say to us. Where did he get his conscience, we would like to ask?
But the main point he seems to miss about the marriage issue is that it is fundamentally a political one, one about how we organise our society in the interests of the common good. Above all it is about what kind of social environment we are creating for the children who will be procreated through the union of men and women who join together in nature’s own natural bond – marriage.
Before Martin says anything else on this subject it might be very helpful for us all if he were to have a look at the book just produced by Michael Cook and MercatorNet, “Same-Sex Marriage: Dangers, Difficulties, Deceptions”. This book, full of incisive observations and powerful arguments, will make any reasonable person think twice about opening the Pandora’s Box of miseries which same sex marriage is going to inflict on society. For many people this question is tied up with conscience and religious belief, but before that it has an awful lot to do with rational thinking and common sense.
Fair enough, Sheen was asked, as LifeSiteNews reports, about the apparent conflict between his Catholic identity and his stance on marriage by the Wilshire & Washington blog, following his performance in a play that raised $2 million for a gay rights lobby group. Sheen played the role of one of the plaintiffs in the play “8,” a dramatic rendition of the Proposition 8 trials written by Dustin Lance Black, who also wrote the screenplay for the 2008 gay advocacy movie, Milk.
“My religion’s highest standard is conscience. Nothing can get between your conscience and God, not even the Church.” Sheen said, as quoted by the blog. How, we wonder again, does he think God chose to help him form that delicate flower, conscience?
Although known to support generally liberal views – he was a strong advocate for Barack Obama’s presidential run – Sheen has voiced opposition in the past to some leftist cultural positions, such as assisted suicide and abortion. Just last year, he spoke of his opposition to abortion, revealing that his wife was nearly killed by abortion after she was conceived in rape and describing how he supported unplanned pregnancies in his own family.
Martin Sheen’s moral judgement hits the nail on the head on some very important issues. However, one wonders about the logic and joined-up-thinking behind his political judgement. A bit more homework might be in order and then he might reach a different conclusion on this vexed issues.
(This article was posted to MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog earlier today)
Throughout the thirties, Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, supported the appeasement of Hitler, like a good number of other prominent people in Britain. Furthermore, however, Rothermere was an admirer of Hitler and after the Munich Pact, the high watermark of appeasement in 1938, he sent a telegram to the Fuhrer which is shocking to read now.
MY DEAR FUHRER EVERYONE IN ENGLAND IS PROFOUNDLY MOVED BY THE BLOODLESS SOLUTION OF THE CZECHOSLOVAKIAN PROBLEM STOP PEOPLE NOT SO MUCH CONCERNED WITH TERRITORIAL READJUSTMENT AS WITH DREAD OF ANOTHER WAR WITH ITS ACCOMPANYING BLOODBATH STOP FREDERICK THE GREAT WAS A GREAT POPULAR FIGURE IN ENGLAND MAY NOT ADOLF THE GREAT BECOME AN EQUALLY POPULAR FIGURE STOP I SALUTE YOUR EXCELLENCYS STAR WHICH RISES HIGHER AND HIGHER.
By September 4, 1939, all had changed and Rothermere’s Daily Mail proclaimed “We now fight against the blackest tyranny that has ever held men in bondage.” But it was too late. The appeasers had landed the world into the second of the twentieth century’s mega-bloodbaths.
Hindsight is one of the more facile and useless of man’s natural gifts. Foresight is one of the most useful, but also one of the most difficult to attain. A great many people claim it but History is a ruthless agent when it comes to sorting out the sheep from the goats.
Just now there seems to be a small publishing industry developing around those who are prophesying a dire future for western civilization – and the future of its number one protecting power , the United States of America.
Among recent books looking at our future prospects are The World America Made, by Robert Kagan, Eclipse: Living In The Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, by Arvind Subramanian, After America: Get Ready For Armageddon, by Mark Steyn, and Becoming China’s Bitch and Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now, by Peter D Kiernan.
These were all usefully reviewed by Gideon Rachman in The Financial Times last month. Add to that the latest by Patrick Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? This was reviewed in the current issue of The American Spectator by Matthew Kenefick, a Church historian and a Research Fellow of the Faith and Reason Institute.
Buchanan does not assert that the country will not survive, Kennefick tells us, but rather argues that it will no longer be the country that the Founding Fathers envisioned.
If the United States does not alter its current trajectory, Kennefick hopes that the book will survive to be read centuries from now by some future Gibbon as a prophetic cri de coeur unhappily ignored in its time.
“Perhaps”, he speculates, “ that writer will ask how a republic blessed with a continent of great natural resources, a Constitution unique in human history, and a populace blessed with the Christian faith could have committed suicide. However, Buchanan reminds us: ‘Demography is Destiny.’ In the United States since 1973 more than 50 million future citizens have been aborted, the contraceptive mentality has brought the middle-class population below replacement level for the first time in our history, the top money-making entertainment industry is Internet pornography, and the easing of divorce laws has encouraged adultery and split up families with devastating impact on millions of children. Now, in perhaps the final step, traditional marriage between one man and one woman is gradually becoming merely one more option.
“The number one health problem in our country in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Depression is not hunger, but obesity. The real question is whether America is worth saving. One thing for sure, it is no longer ‘Exceptional.’ Consider what is left of Europe for a sobering view of our future. The only hope for our country is a moral and spiritual revival. Are we up for the challenge? The next decade should give us the answer.
“That’s why ultimately we should look in the mirror for the cause of our decline. In the immortal words of Pogo: ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’”
But if Pogo’s problem was the physical pollution of the environment this is as noting as compared with the pollution of our very spirit – and the enemy here is still ourselves and our reluctance to face the truth about ourselves.
All these books have a different take on the predicament of the West after the first decade of the 21st century. Some are optimistic, some are pessimistic, but they all ask us to wake up. They all recognise that something is broken and needs to be fixed. The appeasing instinct of Lord Rothemere, if we indulge in it, will be as lethal to us now as it was then. Sleeping it all off in the interests of a quiet life is not an option. The time-bombs which Buchanan lists are already ticking away and unless they are defused soon their destructive force will end it all for us – perhaps this time not with a bang, but with a whimper. Indeed time-bomb is the wrong metaphor. The metaphor for all this in our age is an all-consuming bacterium invading our bodies and our souls. Quick, where are the anti-biotics?
Currently Rick Santorum, US presidential hopeful in the race for the GOP nomination, seems to be having much more attention paid to his religious views than to his political views. Some are presenting him as a dangerous regressive who wants to abolish the whole principle of the separation of Church and State in the US constitution. Whether he is or is not is a debatable subject in its own right.
A side-show of that debate, however, is the question of the candidate’s relationship with the Catholic organisation, Opus Dei. That issue was usefulelly explored on US radio station NPR this week. Here are two clips from that broadcast which throw some clearer light on that topic than you are likely to find in the New York Times, the Washington Post – and certainly clearer than you will find in the general blogosphere. The first is Opus Dei member, John Coverdale, putting the record straight. The second is John Allen, author of a book on Opus Dei and religious affairs journalist, giving an outsiders common sense overview of the issue.
John Allen’s take – in this week’s National Catholic Reporter – on some of the things Pope Benedict said in Mexico makes quite interesting reading. It is even more so in the context of the onslaught on Rick Santorum for the views he expresses about the human integrity which is shown when a person maintains consistency between his Faith and his actions in political life.
Allen notes that,
Especially in the West, Catholic politicians who don’t vote in accord with official church teaching on contentious issues such as abortion and gay marriage often distinguish between their private beliefs and their public roles. I may privately oppose these things, they argue, but I can’t impose those convictions on a pluralistic culture.
As a result, rejection of this private/public distinction has become a staple of Catholic pro-life rhetoric. The argument is usually that it’s at best inconsistent, and at worst a form of cowardice, to espouse one position in church and another in the halls of Congress.
Pro-lifers often cite a famous remark by St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei: “Have you ever bothered to think how absurd it is to leave one’s Catholicism aside on entering a university, or a professional association, or a scholarly meeting, or Congress, as if you were checking your hat at the door?”
Pope Benedict XVI has echoed that position during his current trip to Mexico, which is his first to Spanish-speaking Latin America. Aboard the papal plane on Friday, he too took a swipe at those who try to drive a wedge between private and public ethics – pointedly calling it a form of “schizophrenia.”
“One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality,” Benedict said.
“Personally, in the individual sphere, they’re Catholics, believers. But in public life they follow other paths that don’t correspond to the great values of the Gospel which are necessary for the foundation of a just society. It’s essential to educate people in order to overcome this schizophrenia, educating not only about individual morality but also public morality.”
The pope partly may have had the culture wars in mind, especially given that a number of Catholic legislators in Mexico City have in recent years voted to legalize both first trimester abortion and same-sex unions.
Yet what’s most striking about the pope’s comment is the very different context in which it arose.
Benedict XVI was asked by a famous Mexican journalist not about abortion or gay rights, but rather the strong contrast between rich and poor across the continent and whether the Catholic church was doing enough to promote social justice.
“Naturally the church must always ask itself if it’s doing enough on behalf of social justice in this great continent,” Benedict said in reply. “This is a question of conscience which we must always ask ourselves.”
The church is not a political party, Benedict said, but it is a moral force, and because politics is supposed to be a moral enterprise the church always has something to contribute to political life. The pope said the church’s first duty must be to form consciences, imparting a strong sense of moral responsibility both at the personal and the public levels – and it’s that second level, he said, “where perhaps the problem lies.”
That was the lead-in to Benedict’s strong denunciation of political “schizophrenia” and his insistence that the “great values of the Gospel” must be the basis of a just society.
In other words, Benedict took a staple of Western pro-life rhetoric, which is the need for coherence between a Catholic’s private beliefs and public positions, and gave it a far broader spin.
Santorum has been accused by some of cherry-picking Catholic doctrine and of failing to show the integrity he proclaims by not condemning capital punishment. In attacking him for this his critics are simplyfing the Catholic position with regard to capital punishment. It is not at all as clear-cut as is its proscription of the killing of innocent unborn children.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2266 and 2267) puts the teaching this way:
Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well‑founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty. For analogous reasons those holding authority have the right to repel by armed force aggressors against the community in their charge.
The primary effect of punishment is to redress the disorder caused by the offense. When his punishment is voluntarily accepted by the offender, it takes on the value of expiation. Moreover, punishment has the effect of preserving public order and the safety of persons. Finally punishment has a medicinal value; as far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender.[67]
If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
This is very wise and a very humane appeal to Catholics to prudently judge the situation in the light of the prevailing circumstances in their society. It does not, however, categorically say that the taking of life is never justified. One may well feel – looking at American society – that the application of the death penalty in some states is a blemish on the face of that society. One may hope that in time the electorates in those states where it still applies will be moved to see that it is not necessary and deem it unjustified. Catholic teaching does not yet, however, take on itself the authority to tell them that they are, morally obliged to judge this to be the case.
As posted this this afternoon to MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog where you can read much more and stay up to date on the issues facing the institution of marriage.
Sometime after David Cameron’s election as leader of the Conservative Party in Britain he began to make positive noises about the importance of the family – and of marriage as the institution which gave it stability in society. When the Tories won enough votes in the last general election to enable them to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats some thought things might improve.
The people to whom these things really matter were very hopeful that at last something might be done about the slippery slope on which they perceived both institutions were rapidly sliding into deep trouble. But not Peter Hitchens, London Daily Mail columnist and brother of the late-lamented Christopher. Hitchens says he saw through the real David Cameron from the word go. He pulls no punches in his reading of Mr. Cameron on the same-sex marriage issue.
Hitchens, whose pet name for the British PM is “Mr. Slippery”, in his column this weekend tells us a little smugly that “Hardly a day passes without someone ringing me up or writing to me to say that they now realise that our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, is a fraud.” Many tell him that they are now sorry they are that they refused to believe him when he told them this, over and over again, before the last Election.
“Well, as the Scottish pastor said to his wayward flock as they called up to him from the flames of Hell ‘We didn’t know!’” Hitchens replies ‘You know now’.
Citing u-turns by Mr. Carmeon on other issues, he has no sympathy for his correspondents. The evidence was there and they should have known.
“But people would keep telling me”, Hitchens complains, “that he somehow ‘really means it’ about his (rather feeble) scheme to recognise marriage in the tax system. They seem to have thought that one day he would rip off his suit and reveal himself to be ‘SuperTory’.
“Well, as for marriage, he now claims to be much more concerned about helping a few hundred homosexuals get married than about helping millions of heterosexuals to stay married.”
As far as Hitchens is concerned, Mr. Cameron doesn’t care tuppence for homosexuals and he is just playing to a gallery which he thinks is important because it makes him look more “with-it”. “This is, in fact, a wind-up. I shouldn’t think Mr Slippery cares even slightly about homosexuals, and I wonder what he used to say about them in private before he learned how to be cool.”
But he knows that driving homosexual marriage through Parliament will enrage the suburban voters he despises. He longs to be assailed by them, because it will make him look good among the Guardian-reading metropolitans he wants to win over.
Garvan Hill 