David Quinn: Liberal attacks on DUP are deeply hypocritical
THE late Ian Paisley, back in the day, liked to compare the Catholic Church with the Antichrist. Why? Well, in his ultra-Protestant theology, the Catholic Church had subverted true Christianity so badly it deserved the label. It subverted the Truth itself, turning it inside out.
Ian Paisley had the same dim view of popes that the average Irish person today has of Donald Trump, or pretty much any Republican president for that matter. So dimly did he view that pope that when Pope John Paul II addressed the European Parliament in 1988, Mr Paisley stood up to protest and had to be ejected from the chamber.
“I denounce you, Antichrist. I refuse you as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist with all your false doctrine,” he told the nonplussed Pontiff.
It’s easy to imagine any of the hard-left TDs doing much the same if, by some miracle, President Trump got the chance to address the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas. He, too, would be roundly denounced.
In any event, in a rather ironic twist, it is now the party founded by Ian Paisley himself, that is the Democratic Unionist Party, which finds itself cast in the role of Antichrist, this time in liberal ‘theology’. It is against all good things, the very Truth itself.
When DUP leader Arlene Foster and her nine fellow DUP MPs emerged as unlikely power-brokers following the British general election, the British left started barking very loudly at the wolf that had entered the fold.
Leftist economist Richard Murphy condemned it as “a nightmare of prejudice”.
‘Guardian’ columnist George Monbiot advised the ‘Daily Mail’ to “devote its first 13 pages to the DUP’s association with terrorism”, meaning the likes of the UDA.
Channel 4’s Jon Snow tweeted: “One of the most extreme political entities in the British Isles, the 10 MPs of the DUP, is to wag the tail of Mrs May’s minority government.” Not even a party, but an ‘entity’, like something from outer space or a ‘B’ horror movie.
There was lots more of this kind of stuff. There were dark warnings that the DUP would seek to use its influence to water down Britain’s very permissive abortion law, or even to roll back same-sex marriage. This was total nonsense, of course. All the DUP wants is for Northern Ireland to have the right to decide these things for itself.
This isn’t a right Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is willing to recognise, by the way. While MPs from Northern Ireland must not dare to interfere with Britain’s abortion law, he wants to extend Britain’s abortion law to Northern Ireland, a law that brings one-infive pregnancies to a shuddering halt in Britain every year.
The DUP does have a decidedly mixed history. Members have had associations with terrorist organisations. But if we are supposed to put Sinn Féin’s past behind it (and Sinn Féin was the political wing of the IRA in a way the DUP was never the political wing of the likes of the UDF), then mustn’t we extend this courtesy to the DUP as well? Or is the forgetting to be all one-way?
But the real problem the liberal/ left in Britain has with the DUP isn’t its associations with terrorists, it is its present social conservatism and its Evangelical Christianity. It is these things that make it into a sort of Antichrist in its eyes.
A new and informal ‘test act’ is being introduced with the aim of preventing anyone from entering parliament who holds the ‘wrong’ views on certain key issues, especially those to do with sexual politics. The old Test Act forbade anyone who was not an Anglican assuming public office. They had to renounce the doctrines of the Catholic Church. This new informal one extends to anyone who is pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, Evangelical Christian or conservative Catholic.
It even extended to poor old Tim Farron, who has just resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Tim is an Evangelical Christian but his party is deeply suspicious of such a tendency.
He appears to have standard Evangelical beliefs about the likes of abortion and same-sex marriage, even though he voted for same-sex marriage in the end and wasn’t about to do anything to trim back British abortion law.
This was not enough for his party, or for the likes of the BBC which kept on hounding him about his beliefs. In the end, he felt he had to resign.
Think about this for a moment. Mr Farron’s beliefs about abortion and gay marriage are purely private. They have absolutely no public policy implications. He had sundered these beliefs from his role as a politician. But this was not enough. He was not even permitted to have these beliefs in the privacy of his own head. The Thought Police wanted to do just that; police his thoughts.
The 10 DUP MPs will do nothing about British abortion law or its marriage law. But again, this isn’t enough. It’s enough that they have the wrong beliefs and these beliefs are forbidden. Thus, do we see the new and informal test act take force.
Meanwhile, the same people who excoriate the DUP love Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party. This is despite the very questionable beliefs and associations of Corbyn and/or some of his party colleagues.
Take Andrew Murray, for instance. Mr Murray ran his election campaign. Murray is a former member of the British Communist Party and, in that capacity back in 2003, expressed solidarity with North Korea, possibly the world’s worst regime.
Corbyn himself has welldocumented associations with Sinn Féin going back to the days when the IRA was still running amok, and as recently as two years ago announced: “It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking... I also invited friends from Hamas to speak as well.”
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are listed as terrorist organisations by numerous countries. Hamas is regarded as such by the EU. Corbyn has since said they are no longer his friends.
His previous friendship wasn’t held against him in any case in those same circles that hate the DUP because Corbyn is a socialist. So these dalliances by him can be forgiven, if not actually condoned, while the DUP deserves nothing but condemnation.
Such is the hypocrisy of the modern left.
Liberals view the DUP in much the same way that Ian Paisley viewed the Catholic Church