eChurch Blog

Times:-

Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

Children to be baptised as their parents are married

The Church of England unveils a two-in-one wedding and baptism liturgy today as it seeks to make peace with families “living in sin”.

The “hatch-and-match” service allows couples to baptise their children after the wedding ceremony. Parents can even get baptised themselves.

The aim is to encourage cohabiting parents to marry as the Church tries to become more relevant to the way people live their lives, but critics said that it appeared to sanction having children out of wedlock. One bishop described the idea as “nutty”. The liturgy, costing £272, is being sent out to dioceses and parish clergy today.

The move comes after research commissioned by the archbishops of Canterbury and York found that increasing numbers of couples marrying in church already had children. The latest figures on births and marriages show that about 44 per cent of children are born to unmarried women.

The Bishop of Fulham, the Right Rev John Broadhurst, said that the service trivialised the Church’s role. He told The Times: “It is a pity they have not put in a funeral for grandma as well. What are they playing at? It seems trendy, and it reveals a complete lack of awareness of the reality of what goes on in parishes. I do not understand why they want to do it.”

Stephen Parkinson, of the Anglo-Catholic group Forward in Faith, said: “The proper place for a baptism is not during a wedding but during the Sunday morning act of worship so the congregation can welcome a new Christian. It is a shame that what should be a bride’s day now stands to be hijacked by screaming kids.”

David Phillips, general secretary of the evangelical Church Society, said: “Putting these services together seems unwise. The proper place for sex is within marriage. That should be what people are taught when seeking baptism. If this is going to confuse the teaching of the Church, it does not seem a good way forward.”

However, the Bishop of Winchester, the Right Rev Michael Scott-Joynt — an evangelical and the Church’s spokesman on marriage — said: “I suspect a lot of clergy have done services like this already. This will help clergy who might not otherwise feel competent when asked to do this.”

Stephen Platten, Bishop of Wakefield and chairman of the liturgical commission, which drew up the service, said: “This does not mean the Church is changing its teaching. This is a way for the Church to reinforce its commitment to marriage. The Church has always attempted to meet people where they are. But it has also tried to teach something of what it believes the Christian faith to be.”

Telegraph

By Norman Wells
Published: 3:02PM BST 21 Jul 2009

As the government’s consultation on making sex education compulsory draws to a close, Norman Wells, the director of the Family Education Trust, argues that the move would seriously undermine the role of parents.

The government’s intention to make PSHE (Personal, Social and Health education – including sex and relationships) a statutory part of the national curriculum is a cause for serious concern for several reasons.

First, it would limit the influence of parents. Making PSHE compulsory would inevitably reduce the influence of parents over what is taught. As one sex education and genito-urinary medicine consultant, Colm O’Mahony, puts it: ‘To improve sex and relationship education, legislation is needed to make it a statutory duty for schools to teach it competently. I think schools will probably even like this, because then parents can be told that this has to be done and the risk of parental complaints is greatly reduced.’

Schools are currently required to consult with parents with regard to their sex education policies and to be responsive to their wishes. However, making PSHE part of the national curriculum would make schools less accountable to parents in what is a particularly sensitive and controversial subject area.

The second concern is that it would limit the discretion of individual schools. At the moment, schools are free to develop their own policies on sex education in line with their own ethos. However, to mandate PSHE centrally would remove discretion from schools at the local level, to a greater or lesser extent. One of the Government’s stated aims is to ensure consistency. This raises the very real possibility that some schools would be forced to compromise their beliefs on controversial areas such as contraception, abortion and homosexuality in the name of consistency. Allowing schools flexibility to teach sex education in line with their ethical and moral values is incompatible with the goal of consistency.

Even primary schools would be affected. While they are currently required to have a policy on sex education, they are under no obligation to teach anything beyond the requirements of national curriculum science. However, if PSHE were to be made statutory at all key stages, the governing bodies and head teachers of primary schools would have no option but to provide sex education.

Not only would the move to make sex education compulsory hamper schools’ discretion and autonomy, it would also run contrary to the government’s proclaimed policy on education. At the end of last year, ministers stated: ‘Recent curriculum developments have been aimed at reducing the statutory core and allowing schools even more autonomy to organise their curriculum.’ Adding PSHE to that core would be a step in the opposite direction.

On top of all these concerns, there is a lack of firm evidence for the effectiveness of sex education. Surprisingly little research has been conducted to evaluate the success of sex education programmes. As the government’s own review group noted in its report last October: ‘[T]here is a dearth of good quality international evidence on SRE [sex and relationships education]. A literature review of the international evidence that does exist confirms that it is difficult to be precise about the impact of SRE, for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is not always clarity about what the objectives of SRE are… Second, there is such significant variation in the delivery of SRE that it makes comparisons between programmes difficult.’

Not only could compulsory PSHE be ineffective, it could actually lead to parents taking less responsibility for their children. Most of the components of PSHE are the primary responsibility of parents; for example, nutrition and physical activity, drugs, alcohol and tobacco education, sex and relationships education, emotional health and well-being, safety, and personal finance. If PSHE were to become a statutory part of the curriculum, there would be a very real danger that parents would no more consider themselves responsible for these aspects of their children’s physical, emotional and social development than they typically regard themselves as responsible for the teaching of English, maths, history and science.

If we are serious about encouraging parents to take more, and not less, responsibility for their children, the state, through its schools and other agencies, needs to take care not to undermine them by assuming a parental role.

New ‘Science Czar’ is From a Different Planet

WASHINGTON, July 22 /Christian Newswire/ — As the debate over President Obama’s socialized healthcare plan heats up, the depth of his radicalism is becoming more evident. John Holdren, Obama’s recent choice for “Science Czar,” provides the latest and perhaps most troubling example of extremism. In the name of population control, Holdren has advocated both forced abortion and compulsory sterilization through government-administered tainting of the water supply.

In a 1977 book he co-authored, called “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” Holdren called for a “Planetary Regime” to enforce mandatory abortions for population control and limit the use of natural resources. Holdren wrote: “There exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Holdren writes that “a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable. The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits.” He states that “sterilizing women after their second or third child” may be more practicable than sterilizing men and proposes a “long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin” at puberty and then “might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

He queried: “Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?” He wrote “that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution.”

Mathew D. Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, commented: “The new science czar’s scheme for a ‘Planetary Regime’ that would force pregnancy and coerce abortion under some bureaucratic population control master plan is beyond extreme. Where in the world does President Obama find these people? No wonder Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to condemn China’s inhumane one-child policy. The people with whom the President has surrounded himself are the most extreme abortion advocates on the planet. We cannot continue on this path of human destruction. God is just, and His justice will not sleep forever.”

By Damian Thompson, Telegraphonline

As Ed West points out, the head of the Catholic agency Marriage Care, Terry Prendergast, reckons “there is no evidence that suggests that children do best with heterosexual couples”. This is nonsense, and Catholics are rightly cross that the head of a Church-funded charity should be spreading this myth. But it’s by no means the only nonsense in Prendergast’s lecture delivered to the conference of the gay Catholic group Quest.

I’ve heard rarely read a more mediocre, jargon-ridden or thorough trashing of Catholic teaching on marriage. And I’d be very interested to know how the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, justifies Church support for this outfit, which as James Preece observes, receives funding from the Bishops of England and Wales.

Prendergast’s lecture is painful to read, not least because it’s couched in the sociological jargon of the 1970s and 80s, when he did his “MA in Managing Change in Community from the University of Bradford”. It’s toe-curling stuff, it really is – with misspellings aplenty (”Magesterium”, for example). Also, even a GCSE sociology student should be able to distinguish between the Platonic ideal and Max Weber’s ideal type. Here’s a sample of the prose:

If we explore the biography of family, in its many cultured settings, we end up with a myriad set of constructions, though it is possible to discern some givens.

“Discerning givens”, eh?  Sounds almost as much fun as “celebrating diversity”. Anyway, on to the substance of the talk, which rubbishes, sneers at or undermines every aspect of Catholic teaching on marriage. Forgive me, but I’m going to give you a big stodgy chunk of Terry’s argument:

But, we also seem to run into a real problem immediately in our own Church which seems to have the rules really sewn up when it comes to defining family. It is man and woman, and children, and we have recently had this re-emphasised by Rome. We have had this definition reiterated often enough to know what the ‘rules’ are. And whilst, it is possible to perceive these rules as an ideal type, it is also clear that some sections of the Catholic community see it as the norm, and not as ideal. So, other family forms do not partake of the Church’s blessing, in legislative terms, though it is also possible to perceive a more pastoral and compassionate view if you search. But, it is not the view purveyed by the Magesterium. So, many families, and the individuals that make up these groups, other than married man, woman, and added child, find themselves discriminated against or denigrated. The list is long and current – single-parent families, re-constituted families (where the relationships are deemed to be irregular), cohabiting families, same-sex families. The irony for me is the way that all these attempt to live out good, Catholic lives whilst being judged and bracketed by those in authority, or those who appear to have reached the Kingdom already!

And, just in case you don’t get the point, Prendergast spells it out with a play on words that illustrates the impish sense of humour of elderly Tabletistas:

It is also a fact that many of the unreal images find their roots in evangelical, right-wing religious thought, so not much help here, I fear. I was often regaled with the ‘family that prays together, stays together’ – we tried, but we didn’t, and many families who pray together, then prey on other people through their self-righteousness.

Pray/prey – geddit? Terry then moves on to the superiority of the secular State’s conception of marriage to that of the Church (and remember, Catholics in the pew pay for his agency’s work):

How these definitions are made by the State and Church are contained in what I have suggested above. For example, from the point of view of Church, a proper family must have a marriage in it – as I have just said, we have had this repeated over and over. As I have said elsewhere, I am more interested these days in the concept of the sacrament of relationships, rather than merely marriage, but this is certainly a bridge too far for our own Church. So, we do get a clear idea from Church, even if we don’t subscribe to it, of what family is, or isn’t!

The State is much more open to other forms and is perhaps driven by other considerations, not least the views of the electorate. But it is ironic that the State appears to be much more pastoral and compassionate in its acceptance of what family is. The fact that there are all kinds of benefits available for different family forms, and legal imperatives to support families suggests that the State is even more concerned for families than Church.

How about a bit of old-fashioned class warfare?

Abuse is rampant, if one can use that term within families yet there is a massive unconscious process that we engage in to deny this. There is an image of the lone paedophile, for example, preying on children and whilst these do exist, most sexual abuse of children happens in what we call a family. Abuse is not respecter of class or economy. So, whilst single-parents low down the socio-economic scale are headlines in some newspapers, abuse rages in middle class and upper class families, often unseen and unheard.

Just consider the power within such a family structure – you will recall the awful trial not many months ago of the Austrian man who sexually assaulted his daughter for years; the infamous West family in Gloucestershire; and many others who come to our attention where I, and probably you, ask – How can this happen in a family, and today!?

In a violence of a different kind, but nonetheless abusive, we have to remember that family is dominated by patriarchy, or has been, and that marriage itself was about male power and property rights.

But marriage is still a sacrament, right?

We should be less concerned, as Church, with the purely civil, and focus on sacrament that is more about the expression of the presence of God mediated through commitment, consent and covenant. Where this exists in married couples, in cohabiting heterosexual couples and same-sex couples, there is sacrament, I believe.

By now, sharp-eyed observers will notice that something is missing (and it’s not just the inevitable definite article before “Church”): the slightest hint of orthodox Catholicism. This is, in effect, a self-regarding diatribe against Church teaching, albeit of such low intellectual calibre that it’s not worth engaging with: you can find its propositions better expressed by writers who understand them more clearly.

The real question is this: what is this man doing representing a marriage counselling agency funded by the Catholic Church? And how typical are his views of the bureaucracy of the agencies connected to the Bishops’ Conference?

This is what you’ve inherited, Archbishop Vincent. What happens now?

Los Angeles Times

Worshippers taking communion usually drink from a communal cup that is wiped with a cloth after each person takes a sip.

However, the two dioceses say, for the time being, parishioners won’t share a cup, and will only participate in communion by eating consecrated bread.

Britain has reported 30 deaths from swine flu and seen thousands of people taken ill.

The Christian Post

Orthodox Anglican Leader: Choice is Between Life and Death

The head of the newly established Anglican Church in North America released an open letter to the entire Anglican Communion, contrasting the recent actions of his orthodox body to that of The Episcopal Church.

In the letter, dated Wednesday, ACNA Archbishop the Most Rev. Robert Duncan compared the two bodies to two cities – one of which is the City of God and the other of which is the City of the World.

“Both cities are in crisis, but one operates from received values and behaviors, while the other attempts to re-make the world to its own revolutionary tastes,” he wrote.

Duncan, obviously, referred to the ACNA – comprised of conservative Anglicans in the United States and Canada who broke from The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada – as the body of believers who “embraced the values and behaviors familiar to Christians in every age” during their inaugural assembly last month in Bedford, Texas.

The Episcopal Church, meanwhile, “blessed the values and behaviors of a re-defined Christianity,” including “confusing received understandings of Scriptural truth” and “enabling a revisionist anthropology,” during its General Convention in Anaheim, Calif., this month, Duncan noted.

“There are times in the history of God’s people when the prevailing values and behaviors of those then in control of rival cities symbolizes a choice to be made by all of God’s people. For Anglicans such a moment has certainly arrived,” he wrote. “The cities symbolizing the present choice are Bedford, Texas, and Anaheim, California.”

Last week, Episcopal leaders approved resolutions that open the denomination’s ordination process to all individuals, including practicing homosexuals, and also call for the development of theological and liturgical resources around the blessing of same-sex unions.

Although the Episcopal presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said they are still committed to the wider Anglican Communion – which had urged U.S. Episcopalians not to pass any gay-affirming legislation – and clarified that the resolutions did not rescind an earlier ban on gay ordination and does not authorize public rites for the blessing of same-sex unions, orthodox Anglicans say The Episcopal Church has gone too far.

Earlier, Anglicans disaffected by what they argue is The Episcopal Church’s departure from Scripture and traditional Anglicanism established their own conservative province in an attempt to distance themselves from the U.S. body and stay aligned with the global Anglican Communion. The ACNA is seen as a rival body to The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

“For Anglican Christians, for the Instruments of Unity (Communion), for interdependent Provinces, for ordinary believers, there is a choice to be made,” Duncan stated in his letter. “The choice is between two religions, two roads, two cities, two sets of conflicting values and behaviors. In Deuteronomy, chapter 30, Moses sets the choice as between blessing and curse, life and death. For contemporary Anglicanism the present choice is this stark.”

The Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Delaware, interpreted the letter as saying the ACNA is an instrument of life and a blessing while The Episcopal Church is an instrument of death and a curse.

Harris says Duncan’s letter makes it impossible to consider a worldwide Anglican Communion in which both The Episcopal Church and the ACNA exist together and are both recognized as provinces in North America.

It is unprecedented to establish an Anglican national province where such a national church already exists. The ACNA has not received formal recognition from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the global communion, but nine of the communion’s 38 provinces indicated support for the ACNA.

Please see my original post on Richard Branson’s Global ‘Council of Elders’

The Elders a group of eminent global leaders say Religious and traditional practices discriminate against women and girls

By John-Henry Westen and Patrick B. Craine

July 12, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A grouping of twelve ex-world leaders convened by billionaire Richard Branson and Anglican Archbishop Nelson Mandela who refer to themselves as “The Elders” has attacked the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and any other religious tradition that refuses to permit women to become ministers, priests, or bishops.  In the media campaign for the new initiative, former US President Jimmy Carter notes that he left the Southern Baptists because women are “prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.”

“We believe that the justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable,” says a statement by The Elders.

The group describes itself as “an independent group of eminent global leaders” who work together to promote peace and the “shared interests of humanity,” and to fight human suffering.  In addition to Mandela and Carter, “the Elders” include ex-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; former Irish Prime Minister and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson; Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who serves as chairman; former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland; former Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, and others.

“We especially call on religious and traditional leaders to set an example and change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions,” says the release.

Carter has been the most prolific on the matter. Writing a column for the UK Observer which has since been republished elsewhere, Carter claims: “During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn’t until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.”

Carter ties in the refusal to ordain women to the priesthood with abuse of women, saying that the decision to restrict ministry to men “provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.”

But Carter’s claims are “ridiculous,” says John Paul Meenan, Professor of Theology at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Ontario.  Asked about Carter’s claim that women were ordained in the early Church, Meenan told LSN, “There’s absolutely no evidence of that,” adding that there is also no evidence that at any point the Church decided to “not allow” women clergy, as Carter claims. “So Jimmy Carter would have to provide evidence that there were female bishops, priests, and deacons in the early Church, and I can tell you that that’s never going to happen because there is no evidence.”

“What we see in Scripture is that Christ only ordained men to the priesthood, the Apostles.  And even in the post-Gospel writings, … especially St. Paul, but the other writings, the overwhelming evidence of Scripture is that only men were priests.  There was never any evidence that women were priests or deacons, and never mind bishops.  That’s just ridiculous.”

Many of “the Elders” have spoken out against what they consider religious discrimination against women in videos produced for the campaign.  Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso says in his video, “the idea that God is behind discrimination is unacceptable.”

Mary Robinson, further, describes what she perceives can be the effect of religion and tradition on women’s lives.  “They are submissive,” she says.  “To be well thought of by God they must accept their role.”

Meenan, however, contests the notion that a male priesthood “discriminates” against women.  “There’s nothing discriminatory about [God choosing men to act as priests],” he said. According to the Church, “The priesthood is sort of a supernatural analogy of [the] male/female distinction. That’s not discriminatory, it’s just a natural and a supernatural distinction, what it means to be male and female.”

Meenan explained that the Church views the priesthood as “a continuation of Christ’s incarnational work in His humanity” and “since Christ came as a male we continue the priesthood in the male line.”

The Roman Catholic Church has been one of the most steadfast and vocal proponents of the male priesthood, but the Church also maintains that her teaching in fact promotes the dignity of women, in that she is handing on the religious tradition passed down by Christ.

According to Professor Meenan, Christianity ought to be credited for promoting the dignity of women.  “It is the Church that invariably improved the lot of women in the lands that were converted and Christianized,” he said.  “Disorders that crept in (subjugation of women, etc.) were just that:  disorders, and never part of Church teaching.”

The late Pope John Paul II affirmed the Church’s teaching on male ordination, but in so doing also championed what he called the true fullness of the dignity of women.  In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, on the male priesthood, the late Holy Father John Paul II declared that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women,” because this tradition was given by Christ Himself.

In limiting the priesthood to men, he wrote, Christ “exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time.”

“The presence and the role of women in the life and mission of the Church,” he writes further on, “although not linked to the ministerial priesthood, remain absolutely necessary and irreplaceable.”

The words of God do not justify cruelty to women
http://theelders.org/media/news/words-god-do-not-justify-cruelty-women

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

Jimmy Carter’s Leaving Southern Baptists Seen as Political
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2000/oct/00102001.html

Clinton, Carter to Lead Faction of Baptists Away from Biblical Truth on Life and Family
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/jan/07011104.html

Nelson Mandela’s Group of Global “Elders” a Who’s Who of Pro-Abortion, Pro-Population Control Movement
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/jul/07072303.html

By Hilary White

LONDON, July 22, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have issued a statement distancing themselves from a marriage counseling service, partly funded by Catholic parishes and dioceses, which promotes contraceptives and whose chief executive last week endorsed the homosexual “family.” Terry Prendergast, the head of the charity Marriage Care, told a group of homosexualist activists last weekend that same-sex partners can be as successful as heterosexual married couples in raising children and vilified the natural family as “abusive” and the product of “patriarchal” ideas.

A spokesman for the bishops said, “Defining ‘family’ is a notoriously difficult task. Yet the views expressed by Terry Prendergast about the definition of family and marriage are clearly not a reflection of the Church’s teaching, nor those of the Bishops’ Conference.”

Marriage Care’s president is the sitting archbishop of Westminster, currently Archbishop Vincent Nichols, and the Church retains a presence on its board of directors in the person of Fr. Michael Cooley, a priest of the Archdiocese of Westminster. Prendergast told LSN in an interview last week that at least £89,000 of its annual budget of £900,000 comes directly from parish and diocesan donations and that its volunteer counselors are largely drawn from the Catholic community.

Founded in 1946 as a Catholic organization dedicated to preserving Catholic marriages, Marriage Care is listed in the most recent edition of the Catholic Directory, an official list of Catholic services and organizations put out annually by the bishops.

The bishops’ spokesman said, “Responding to the needs of children is also complex. The Church’s vision is that the crucially important quality of stability in family life needs gender complementarity and role modelling too.”

The statement did not refer to the funding of Marriage Care by the Catholic Church or whether Archbishop Nichols intended to sever the connection between the group and the bishops of England and Wales.

Prendergast was invited to speak last weekend at the annual conference of Quest, a “gay rights” group that pressures the Catholic Church to change its “policies” on homosexuality. Speaking of “sacred desire and the presence of God in same-sex relationships,” Prendergast said, “Traditionally we have talked of the sacrament of marriage and I hope that today you have been able to consider that we might be able to talk about the sacrament of partnerships or relationships.”

In his talk, Prendergast disparaged the family as the seat of “rampant abuse.” “We have to remember that most violence, and murder as the extreme of that, happens in families. Abuse is rampant, if one can use that term within families yet there is a massive unconscious process that we engage in to deny this.”

“There is an image of the lone paedophile, for example, preying on children and whilst these do exist, most sexual abuse of children happens in what we call a family.” He added, “We have to remember that family is dominated by patriarchy, or has been, and that marriage itself was about male power and property rights.”

Prendergast slammed the Christian image of the Holy Family, of Mary and Joseph and Jesus as the product of “evangelical, right-wing religious thought” and questioned the “helpfulness” of the image for formulating their ideas about the family.

Marriage Care has produced a manual for teachers entitled “Foundations for a Good Life,” which, in the section titled “safe sex,” gives extensive information on artificial contraceptives, including male and female condoms, diaphragms and caps, and abortifacient drugs. The group also provides links to organizations that offer abortions and contraceptives, including the Family Planning Association, one of Britain’s busiest abortion advocacy groups.

At the end of its section describing different contraceptives, the group offers the disclaimer, “In providing this information, it should not be assumed that Marriage Care is recommending the use of contraception.”

Found this one quite interesting:-

By Hilary White

LONDON, July 22, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A British journalist and activist has come under fire from a homosexualist activist for revealing the names of key figures involved in a deliberate long-term plan that resulted in the success of Britain’s “gay rights” movement. Nicholas De Jongh, a theatre critic, playwright and homosexualist activist, accused journalist Matthew Parris of “blowing” the confidentiality enjoyed for four decades by a small cadre activists who brought the movement to its maturity in late 1980s Britain.

In a June 27th article in the Times of London, Parris described the “strangely clandestine atmosphere” surrounding meetings of a group of activists who organized in 1988 to oppose Section 28 of the Local Government Bill. That bill for a short time outlawed the “promotion of homosexuality” as “a kind of pretended family relationship.” In addition to De Jongh, Parris named the actor Ian McKellen and financial baron and politician Peter Mandelson as key figures in this group.

Later, the group that was to become Stonewall, one of Britain’s most influential political lobbies, “put gay equality and homosexual law reform on to the mainstream national agenda” Parris wrote.

“Two decades on we British have overtaken the Americans. After successive reductions in the age of homosexual consent until an equal age was reached, after the Civil Partnerships Act, and after a long and remarkably steady shift in not only the rules but social and media attitudes too, nobody would dispute the success of this slow-burning, 40-year-old crusade.”

Parris wrote that contrary to the usual homosexualist doctrine, the movement did not start with the infamous “Stonewall riots” in New York in 1969, staged after police raided a popular homosexual nightclub in Greenwich Village. Instead it was started and nurtured by “valiant, patient, ‘respectable’ pioneering organisations” and individuals who had “been plugging away for decades.”

In a letter to the editor on June 30th, De Jongh, who organized the meetings in the late 1980s, complained in the Times that Parris’s characterization of the group as a conspiracy was “inaccurate and lurid.” Despite, this, however, De Jongh, wrote “Our meetings were off-the-record, since some of those present were closeted. Confidentiality was maintained for years until Parris, without consulting anyone, blew it.”

The success of the movement can be judged by Peter Mandelson’s appointment by the Labour government as First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Lord President of the Council. Mandelson (one of those “conspirators” named by Parris) – along with former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – is regarded as one of the key figures in the “New Labour” government that has brought in unprecedented legal changes favoring homosexuals.

The Christian Institute

Isle of Lewis gets first same-sex partnership