Friday 17 February 2012

More bizarre stuff from the culture wars

The dangers of arguing from social pathology:  
Boys should be allowed to wear skirts to school to avoid "serious distress" caused by gender-specific uniforms, Tam Baillie, Scotland's commissioner for children and young people, has argued. He suggested forcing children to wear such skirts or trousers depending on their gender could contravene laws set out by the UN Convention on children's rights. [Here]

From Canada: coming to a church near you? [here]
The problem of signing up to a radical agenda is that you don't get to decide which items get left out.
Ultimately, modern liberalism, like the orthodoxy it despises, prescribes what you eat from le menu du jour rather than à la carte.

The latest outburst from the historically and culturally blinkered Trevor Phillips. From Cranmer
Perhaps in this time of economic austerity Britain needs to train fewer social engineers and more real ones.

Embarrassment or very necessary irritant?
Lord Carey ruffles some feathers - Martin Beckford from The Church of England Newspaper:

"....I’m afraid that the sneering at Lord Carey is just another example of the Church being unwilling or incapable of seeing how it looks to the outside world. He has been one of the few clerics to speak about the “persecution” employment tribunal cases, was among the first to comment on the debacle at St Paul’s, he dared to contradict the Lords Spiritual on welfare reform and just last weekend was, as far as I could tell, the most senior person in the Church to weigh in on the council prayers judgement.

And what has been the reaction from his Christian brethren?
One bishop writes on Twitter that he was “ashamed” of the former Archbishop for having “disgracefully bought Tory dogma”.
One of the best-known clerics in the Church pens an entire magazine article about this “Thatcherite yesterday’s man” and orders him - despite being a golfer himself - to retire from public pronouncements and take up golf instead.
Another bishop writes an entire article for my paper about being “disappointed” that Lord Carey didn’t attend a Parliamentary debate that he later wrote about. (I did actually ask why he missed it, but haven’t yet received an answer.)
Others seem to view him as an embarrassment, rather like a drunken uncle at a party, and cringe whenever he opens his mouth.
Now he has committed the great sin of having written a book and done a few interviews to promote it, prompting fresh outrage.
Of course it’s fine if people want to disagree with his views on any given subject. His plan for specially selected religious judges in certain cases, likened to something out of a theocracy by Lord Justice Laws, stands out as a particularly odd one.
But I just cannot see why someone with all his experience of the highest levels of the Church, and the determination to express his strongly held convictions no matter how unpopular they may be, should not be allowed to have his say...
So, remember, don't rock the boat or upset the Club, as St Athanasius wouldn't have said.




2 comments:

  1. Pleased that you rate the man who championed the ordination of women in England in 1992 so highly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.
    I have, though, already commented on that particular paradox:
    http://letnothingyoudismay.blogspot.com/2012/02/giles-george.html

    ReplyDelete

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