IT’S MAKING A MOCKERY OF OUR RIGHT TO OWN OPINION

THERESA May has embarrassed herself by demanding Boris Johnson apologise for mocking conservative Muslims who put women in sacks.

How weak is the British Prime Minister? How much hope is there for the West when even a Conservative leader kowtows to a medieval oppression of women?

Boris Johnson, May’s former foreign secretary, last week argued against banning the niqab – the full-faced covering which some Muslim women wear, blotting them out of public life

It was “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes”, he said, and universities should not have students “looking like a bank robber”. Uproar followed, and May told Johnson to apologise: “Some of the terms Boris used describing people’s appearance obviously have offended.”

Pardon? Why should Johnson apologise for causing exactly the offence he intended?

Why do we now demonise offence-giving – at least when the offended are approved minorities or the Left? Why? Because it’s easier for the intellectually weak to scream they’re offended than to win an argument.

Here in Australia, it’s the same. We have racial discrimination laws that make it unlawful simply to “offend” someone with your opinions.

Indeed, the ABC devoted nearly half of this week’s Media Watch to denouncing a column I wrote on ethnic and religious enclaves as “inflammatory”, “divisive” and “toxic”. My crime was not that I was wrong, but that I’d offended ABC thought.

This must stop. I don’t approve of crude abuse or needless offence, but mockery and, yes, offence-giving must be better defended.

If we cannot mock even the niqab, what primitive relic must we silently accept? Stoning?