Two years ago in the Blogorama I revealed why I sometimes have difficulty dealing with Christmas. It was witnessing the dreadful anguish of a family that had lost a newborn child and the realisation that Christmas Day would for them forever be a reminder of that grief.

This year there is another image. It is of a town in which Christmas will not be celebrated; a town that has packed away its brightly-wrapped presents, turned off its lights and taken down its decorations. A town that has been attacked – violated in the most disgusting, brutal and heartbreaking way conceivable.

Newtown.

They say that big boys don’t cry. This one did, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I defy any reasonable human being to witness all that anguish and be unmoved. It is a tribute to the innate decency of most people that the overwhelming majority of the responses to this vile act have shown that people care. America and the world has stretched out its arms in solace to the community of Newtown.

But it was only a majority. Would that it had been everyone.

In what has been described as a train wreck of a press conference, Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice-President of the National Rifle Association, bizarrely announced that the solution should be more guns. He called for an armed police guard in each of America’s more than 130,000 schools.

He wilfully ignores the facts.

In 2009 thirteen people were killed and 29 injured in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, an army base full of people with guns AND trained to use them.  An armed guard couldn’t prevent thirteen deaths at Columbine High School.  Finally, he ignores the first rule of attack – knock out the sentry!

You will never stop people from becoming unhinged, but you can mitigate the misery they can cause. On the same day as the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary a man in China went on the rampage in a primary school in Chenpeng. The difference?  He was armed with a knife and all his victims survived. Go figure, Wayne!

In the wake of the Hungerford and Dunblane shootings the UK government, with massive public support, tightened the controls on gun ownership. We remain comparatively free of these atrocities precisely because you cannot just walk into a store and buy a gun. Ease of access to weapons is the problem, and, until that is addressed America’s schools, its cinemas, its malls will never be safe.

And then there’s the repugnant ordure that is the Westboro Baptist “Church”. As sure as night follows day the WBC, with its usual foul insensitivity, froths at the mouth and wades in to say that it will picket the funerals of the victims of Newtown. It is impossible to find words to describe how far beneath contempt these evil creatures are.

Make no mistake. This is no church. No real Christian would behave that way. It stands rightly denounced, alone and isolated. It hides cravenly behind the 1st Amendment and bleats like a spoilt child when it receives a dose of the hatred it so liberally spews out.  (Surely by their own reasoning that’s to be expected – Galatians 6:7 – “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”)

It is, however, highly refreshing to see the tidal wave of disgust with which the internet has erupted in response and difficult to resist a little Schadenfreude as Anonymous systematically takes these scumbags apart.  An example (among THOUSANDS!) from Twitter “If #WBC is mad now, wait till the morning. Advanced monkeys with big wrenches are unscrewing their playhouse now.”

WBC justify their actions and claim that the reaction to their repugnant activities merely provides a wider platform for their message. They are wrong there too. What is clear is that people long ago gave up listening to the message and are now just incensed by the unfeeling, callous and deeply un-Christian way in which it is expressed.

I sincerely hope that you all have a great day tomorrow, but it somehow feels wrong to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. So, forgive me, I’m not going to do it. I will, however, say three things.

To all those who have raised their voices in challenge to the NRA’s nonsense and shown their willingness to tackle the political Behemoth of gun control in the genuine hope that one day we can really say “never again”  – THANK YOU!

To all those people – bikers, builders, police officers, firefighters, ordinary men and women of all creeds and none – who continue to turn out, in a spirit of human decency, to shield grieving families from the WBC’s filth – THANK YOU!

To the people of Newtown – we feel your pain and we weep with you.

Sunday morning again and the catholics are at it once more. In a letter to be read in 2,500 churches across the country Archbishops Nichols and Smith will argue once again against changing the law on marriage.

I’m not going to bother going to a church to listen to this, so I read it online. There’s a great deal in it that seeks to claim marriage as a fundamentally christian thing. It’s not. It predates Christ and, probably, the old testament.

There’s also a great deal in it about the procreation and upbringing of children – not surprising since the catholic clergy are obsessed with sex. Are the bishops arguing that people who are infertile, beyond child-bearing age or who just don’t want to breed can’t have valid marriages? Probably, yes, since in the penultimate paragraph it says:-

“A change in the law would gradually and inevitably transform society’s understanding of the purpose of marriage. It would reduce it just to the commitment of the two people involved.”

Reduce it? REDUCE IT????? What is the point of marriage if it is not, first and foremost, about commitment to each other? You don’t have to go far these days to find couples that are happily and responsibly bringing up their children outside of marriage. The bishops are conflating marriage and family life in support of their own scaremongering. Procreation and the upbringing of children stem from commitment, but they are not the primary reason that people get married. To suggest otherwise is just the blindness of a dogmatic institution, led by men who, by their own celibacy, can never fully understand the real nature of a committed life partnership.

The catholic church does not “own” the concept of marriage. It is entitled to its corporate opinion of what marriage should be, but it has no mandate to enforce that interpretation on anyone outside of those who chose to follow it. We wait to see whether the catholic laity will rise up en masse and man the barricades. I suspect not. Very many catholics choose to ignore the church’s stance on contraception, and they will probably do the same now.

And what will happen if marriage is redefined?

People will get married.

That’s it, in a nutshell. There will be no collapse of society. Families will not be torn apart. The sky will not crack asunder, blood will not rain down on the earth and there will be no plagues of frogs and locusts.

People will just get married.

As a PS to my earlier post there is one other comment from Cardinal O’Brien that I cannot let go unchallenged.

He says “Those of us who were not in favour of civil partnership, believing that such relationships are harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved, ….”

I rather skipped over this the first time round because I was so incensed by his misappropriation of Article 16. I take issue with him now.

I am a gay man. I have been in a stable, loving relationship with my partner for eleven years. We have been in a civil partnership for the last three years. Yes, we express that with sex, but that is only one part of our relationship. Above all we are each other’s best friend.

Anybody who knew me before I met Alex will tell you that I was a deeply troubled man. I had serious “issues”. And then, one day, this handsome, funny, cuddly, loveable, loving, adorable man came into my life.

He changed me – for the better.

I’m not the man I was – I’m better.

Life is not what it was – it’s better.

I did not enter a civil partnership with Alex because I wanted equality before the law, although it does have some advantages in that direction. I did it because I wanted to make a public declaration of my love for him and commitment to him. It was a beautiful experience to do so in the company of our families and our closest friends.

How dare this ignorant man suggest for one moment that my relationship is “harmful” in any way?

By the way. I am also an atheist, and if O’Brien is an example of “god’s love” I’m very happy to stay that way.

Two rants at deluded elderly christians within 24 hours? Well, it’s Sunday, nothing better to do and Cardinal Keith O’Brien is just being silly!

O’Brien is the 74 year old catholic archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh – Scotland’s only cardinal – and he has penned a little homily on same sex marriage for this week’s Sunday Telegraph. Clicky.

The Twitterati  have been  laying into O’Brien all morning – and quite entertaining they’ve been, too – some small proof that ordinary people are somewhat less than hung up on the issue of same sex marriage than the clergy. In any event what would a celibate know about being in a long-term committed and loving relationship?

I take issue with everything O’Brien has said, especially as he is being disingenuous. He prays in aid the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. It’s an odd thing about human rights law, many people quote it in support of their argument, but few people actually understand what it means. I speak as someone who has spent the last ten years of my working life writing on the practical application of human rights law to the individual. Continue reading Dear Keith … →

The cries of “persecution” are once again being heard in the hallowed halls of Westminster!

This week a cross-party group in parliament called for equality laws to cover religious beliefs. (I suggest they actually read the Equality Act 2010 – they’ll find that religion and belief are already protected characteristics.)

It follows a series of cases in which christians claim that they’ve been persecuted because of their religious beliefs.

Take the case of Celestina Mba. She is a 57 year old former care worker who has just lost an employment tribunal. She claimed constructive dismissal from her job with Merton Council because they refused to let her have every Sunday off. The tribunal heard that Celestina had been allowed Sundays off after starting work in 2007, but that in 2008 she was told this would end. When she refused to comply, she was threatened with disciplinary action. She resigned in 2010. The Tribunal found that she was contractually bound to work when required on Sundays and that keeping Sunday as a day of rest was not a ‘core component’ of christianity. Continue reading Never on a Sunday →

Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone has recently said that the government was entitled to introduce same-sex marriages, which she says would be “a change for the better”. She was responding to comments from Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said that “not even the church” owns marriage.

Alex and I have been in a civil partnership for just over three years. I often describe us as “happily married”, mainly because “happily civilly partnered” is such a bloody mouthful.

The law in the UK only recognises civil marriage or civil partnership as valid for its purposes. And it is in the law, and only there, that Ms Featherstone should be seeking equality.

Given that most of the objections to “gay marriage” are coming from the religiously inclined I have a simple solution to offer her. Repeal the Marriage and Civil Partnerships Acts and replace them with a “Union Act” which would deal with the relationship between two people and remove civil registration of that union from religious premises. ALL couples would be required to attend a Register Office and if they then choose to celebrate their union in a place of worship that is up to them.

Once that’s done the religions can go off into a corner and argue about the meaning of “marriage” or how many angels can stand on the head of a pin.

Eric Pickles has now flung his not inconsiderable weight into the dispute over whether local councils can hold prayers as part of their business. He’s going to rush through a commencement order for powers contained in the Localism Act 2011 which would give councils a “general power of competence”.

Now, while most of us would be only too delighted to see our local councils exercise some competence, there is some serious doubt whether the new powers would solve the “problem”. It all arises because of a recent ruling in the High Court that Bideford Town Council had acted unlawfully by allowing prayers to be said during meetings. I find it astonishing that, in the 21st century, we are even having this debate.

The business of a local council, or any body that exercises executive power, outside of the church itself, should not contain an act of corporate worship. I am a civil servant and if I suggested starting a meeting with christian prayers I would firstly be howled down and then, probably, subjected to disciplinary action. I also find offensive in all this the suggestion that you can only be a good councillor if you’re a christian.

We are a nation of many faiths and of none. The churches claim that 6 million attend regularly. That’s probably an over-estimate, but even if it isn’t it’s still less than ten per cent of the population and, therefore, no basis on which to incorporate religious worship into the public functions of organisations that exist to serve everyone.

Religious worship has its place, but that isn’t in the council chamber or, come to that, the chambers of the Houses of Parliament.

I make no apology for returning to an old soap box – the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) – since news came this week that several of WBC’s egregious websites had been hacked and taken offline by the anonymous group LulzFinancial.

I must admit to a reasonable degree of schadenfreude when I heard that WBC had been hit in this way – again! I seem to recall that some years ago someone hijacked godhatesfags and pointed it at godhatesfigs – a statement for which there is no small biblical justification!

If you read the bible literally (and particularly the old testament) you’ll find shed loads of things that god hates – adultery and sex outside marriage, for instance, and Shirley Phelps-Roper (Fred’s vicar in the real world) ought to know a thing or two about that. But you don’t see people waving vile placards at funerals to protest about eating meat on a Friday or wearing polyester. Continue reading Fred vs The Hackers →