The hounding of Farron and the corrosive bid to drive Christianity out of public life

HOWEVER you rate Tim Farron – leader of the Liberal Democrats, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, who chirps through life with the general mien of a happy hamster – his ordeal in the past week has not been edifying.

A General Election has been called and he commands a party with shiploads of policy, a moderate outlook, a high regard for cool reason and important emphases (especially in the day we are in) on individual liberty, the right of privacy and dread of any police state.

And, whatever you think of Brexit, the Liberal Democrats are the only party utterly and unambiguously opposed to it and determined to fight to the last ditch to keep us in the European Union.

But no one, it seems, is listening. All anyone has wanted to ask Tim Farron about – a sincere and committed Christian – are his views on homosexuality. Does he believe gay sex is a sin? Might he even think being gay is wrong? And how very dare he?

He was assailed on this by colleague Norman Lamb – no, I had never heard of him either – even during their 2015 fight for the party leadership. Cathy Newman of Channel 4 wanted to know about nothing else, once Farron had won it, and last week renewed her assault. He was pressed on the question in the Commons and ripped into at a campaign event on Monday, by Darren McCaffrey of Sky News… to say nothing of the posturing of the self-regardingly righteous on social media.

The Lib Dem leader evidently oozes ‘intolerance and prejudice’, stormed comedian and luvvie David Walliams. He is an ‘absolute disgrace’, pouted Owen Jones. And Facebook, Twitter and every available platform is clotted with denunciations from the virtue-signalling generally.

Drawn from an admittedly limited pool of talent – only eight Liberal Democrat MPs survived the last general election – Mr Farron is not good at thinking on his feet. He has repeatedly made a poor fist of answering this question and, on Tuesday, rather pathetically recanted, insisting now that he does not believe, at all, that being gay or having gay sex is morally wrong.

In such gutlessness he is, inevitably, diminished. But the whole extraordinary row highlights the gravest issues.

FOR one, he has never on any public platform raised the issue. He has no association with the unpleasant Christian Institute. He has never deplored homosexuality in a speech or proposed to overturn any of the related changes in our law in the past half-century. He was among nine Lib Dem MPs who abstained at the third reading of the Marriage Bill, despite previously voting for same-sex marriage legislation.

And the sincerely held belief that homosexual acts are sinful is in no way remarkable. It is the clear teaching of the Bible. It is the unambiguous position of the Catholic Church. It is, besides, an Islamic conviction. And it was the view of the vast majority of British people until very recent years, as the law itself reflected. Gay sex was illegal in Scotland until 1980.

Few sensible Christians bang on about homosexuality. References to it in Scripture, though unambiguous, are few; and Christ never mentioned it. There are far more denunciations in the Good Book of oppression of the poor and the cruelties of the rich.

Yet the highly paid metropolitan commentariat, last week, could press Tim Farron about nothing else.

The issue central to the unnerving auto-da-fé, however, was never about anything Tim Farron had said or done. It was what he might think – and that is more terrifying than anything, both because to be in an age when one’s very thoughts may be policed is alarming and because it is part of a wider and increasingly ferocious bid to drive Christianity, or any meaningful expression of it, out of the public square.

The process has, of course, been in train for quite a few years. In 2010, David Cameron and the Conservative Party disowned their candidate for the North Ayrshire seat, Philip Lardner, when it emerged he had expressed trenchant views to the local electorate.

‘As your MP,’ he had written, ‘I will support the rights of parents and teachers to refuse to have their children taught that homosexuality is “normal” behaviour or an equal lifestyle choice to traditional marriage.

‘I will always support the rights of homosexuals to be treated within concepts of (common sense) equality and respect, and defend their rights to choose to live the way they want in private, but I will not accept their behaviour is “normal” or encourage children to indulge in it...’

The gay press had a feeding frenzy, the Conservative Party withdrew all campaign support and Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie tied herself in knots, on live radio, condemning his views as ‘completely unacceptable’ while refusing to comment on, for instance, the identical stance of the Catholic Church.

THERE are no doubt respected politicians who hold such views. But no one in the day we are in would dare to express them and hope long to prosper in the hallowed halls of democracy. The issue is hardly relevant now, with every meaningful reform granted since 1997 and with openly gay or bisexual people leading three Scottish political parties and running the Scotland Office.

Yet there are other battlefronts. In 2013, an Edinburgh teacher was effectively dismissed after, in response to a question in his physics class, confirming it was his personal view that the world had been created by God. In recent weeks we saw a determined bid to diminish the reputation of Scotland’s highly respected Catholic schools. Advocates for the transgendered are demanding changes to the very English language itself.

Nationalist MP Tommy Sheppard has been caught on tape crowing about plans to remove Christianity from schools step by step and by stealth and, in the Western Isles, there is growing community anger over a vocal and vituperative minority (largely, though not exclusively incomers) clamouring on social media for the opening of the local sports centre on Sundays and denouncing anyone who dares demur.

There are two infuriating aspects to all this. The first is the insolent stance of atheists that they alone stand for sweet cold reason, against irrational God-botherers who persist in annoying everyone else with their superstition.

But atheism is not rationality. It is a religion – a faithbased belief system, like any other religion, and in whose name some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century were committed. And the fanaticism and hatefulness of so many atheists suggest their position is not, in truth, there is no God; it is that there is no God, and they hate Him.

They get away with their flash-mobbing, grandstanding and sheer nastiness because we seem largely as a society to have lost any sense of what true tolerance is. Tolerance is not living peaceably in a society with nothing but fuzzy, warm views for the beliefs, attitudes and lifestyles different to our own. It is living peaceably in a society alongside beliefs, attitudes and lifestyles we personally deplore.

And, increasingly, uneasily, for those of faith generally and Christians in particular, it is in the knowledge that more and more people, and increasingly people in powerful places, long for our annihilation.