SO WHO WILL STOP THE PC ZEALOTS
Christmas is under attack as tightens its stranglehold. Bu never before as political correctness is the voice of sanity finally being heard?
ANOTHER day, yet another example of how the agents of political correctness are running amok. All over the country, people are looking up from their newspapers, their faces aghast, and saying to each other: ‘I don’t believe I’m reading this.’
The top prize this week goes to Janet Taubman, superintendent registrar at Liverpool Register Office, who has replaced pictures of Victorian newlyweds and Romeo and Juliet with landscapes. And the reason? The pictures might have offended homosexual couples taking vows.
‘They were innocent pictures,’ admitted Ms Taubman, ‘ but the new paintings are less likely to offend same- sex couples.’
‘It is a complete waste of money and a travesty,’ fumed the editor of The Pink Paper, a gay publication. He, like the representatives of many minorities, is fed up with being protected by busybodies from things that don’t trouble them in the least.
Certainly this time of the year is the very worst for outbreaks of political correctness verging on the ridiculous. In the run-up to Christmas, we have the annual spectacle of the PC army — mainly funded by the hapless taxpayer — declaring open season on Christianity.
This has been going on for years. It is more than a decade since the PreSchool Playgroup Association ruled that nativity plays could be performed only if religious festivals of all other faiths were celebrated, too.
That was an early manifestation of the doctrine of religious equivalence. It was no longer enough to show respect and tolerance to minority religions: all faiths had to be given equal prominence.
The pressure was on to ignore the common sense view held by the majority: this is a Christian country with a Christian history and with Christian traditions in which anyone is welcome — but no one is obliged — to participate.
This being the tolerant country that it is, most parents have had little problem with their children being taught about other religions. In the past couple of weeks, even Christian schools will have celebrated Diwali (a festival for Hindus, Sikhs and Jains) and the Muslim Eid.
Yet there is a great deal of uneasiness about those schools where — under pressure from PC educationalists — carol services and nativity plays are being diluted or abolished.
For those teachers who want to keep Christian traditions, it does not help that outside the schools Christian symbolism is also under assault. Two years ago, the Red Cross banned the sale of religious cards from its charity shops and the Department of Culture, like the Scottish Parliament, banned cards with Christmas images or messages.
THIS YEAR, the rampant assault on Christianity has intensified: crosses removed from crematorium and hospital chapels; officers at Waveney District Council, in Lowestoft, Suffolk — an area where only 0.5 per cent practise a non- Christian religion — explaining that funding Christmas lights does not ‘ fit with the council’s core values of equality and diversity’; a museum curator replacing BC — ‘Before Christ’ — with BP (‘Before Present’); Inland Revenue managers banning staff from helping a Christian charity; the Home Office threatening to remove funding from a Christmas service for murder victims because it is ‘too Christian’ and so on and on.
Even Dr Rowan Williams, the gentle Archbishop of Canterbury, is concerned: he fears ‘ well-meaning secularists’ are threatening religion.
‘ I don’t worry that our heritage has been sacrificed,’ he said, when asked about the banning of Christian symbols, ‘but I do worry about the ill-instructed way that opponents of religious traditions are offended in one way or another. I don’t think moves that we read about do anything at all for community relations — not a sausage.’
Many will feel this mild reprimand on the enemies of Christianity was a bit rich from a man who recently declared it had been ‘sinful’ to export British hymns and carols around the world.
In any case, it isn’t religion that is under threat, Your Grace, it is Christianity, threatened simply because it is the religion of the majority.
Political correctness may have its roots in a benign desire to be nice to everyone, but it becomes destructive when its adherents exclusively protect minorities and trample over the interests of the majority. And nowhere is this more obvious than with religion: Sikh protesters close down a play in Birmingham; toy pigs outlawed in places of work lest they offend Muslims; prisoners allowed to practise satanism.
But tens of thousands of protests from Christians about the broadcasting of the gratuitously offensive and highly blasphemous Jerry Springer The Opera were greeted by the BBC with contempt.
Indeed, neurotic attention to the perceived touchiness of minorities has led us to the stage where Muslim and Hindu spokesmen are begging the authorities to stop banning Christian symbols in their name because they don’t want to be associated with such foolishness and fear a backlash.
What is really worrying is that so few are prepared to stand up and be counted on this issue. All the more praise for the Salvation Army, who showed their backbone last year when they refused to play carols for the switching on of the lights at renamed ‘Winter Celebrations’ at Oakengates in Shropshire.
‘ We decided to make a stand,’ said Major Malcolm Hampton. ‘ We are Christian church and this is a Christian festival which we do not want to se undermined or demeaned.
‘ We have no problem with any othe faith. Our gripe is with the politicians They decided to remove the word Christmas from the event and we felt i was the thin end of the wedge. Enough was enough.’
The truth is that the thin end of th politically correct wedge has been inserted in all our public — and man private — institutions and the conse quences look grim. But from across th world comes hope.
After six years under the feminist and socialist PC agenda of the Labour prim minister, Helen Clark, liberal- minde New Zealand has begun to revolt.
The opposition National Party ha appointed a ‘Political Correctness Eradi cation’ spokesman, Dr Wayne Mapp.
His analysis is that ‘the minority cap ture of public institutions by the politi cally correct is a cause of people losin faith in the institutions of government His mission is to reverse that trend.
This appointment is no gimmick. In Britain, Trevor Phillips, head of the Com
mission for Racial Equality (CRE), has said the hitherto unsayable, by pointing out that multiculturalism is leading to segregation, and minorities have duties as well as rights.
In New Zealand, the conservative National Party fears a drift towards segregation between the white majority and the Maori minority has been accelerated by poorly thought- out politically correct government policies, which are imposing two sets of laws and two standards of citizenship.
Under an agnostic Prime Minister, anti-Christianity is rife. Grace has been banned from official luncheons, yet most state occasions include celebrations of Maori spiritual traditions.
Like the British, New Zealanders pride themselves on being fair. Dr Mapp — who is married to a Maori — is no bigot, but he denounces the PC world of Ms Clark, which seeks to suppress those views she considers unacceptable.
In Britain, we are facing similar and growing problems. Laws against racial discrimination have been relentlessly expanded to include religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability and any other aspect of life the fanatical liberal elite have views about.
Under Trevor Phillips’s predecessor, Hermann ( now Lord) Ouseley, the drive to uncover discrimination was unstoppable.
I remember sitting openmouthed at a Press conference where he welcomed enthusiastically a ludicrous report commissioned by the CRE to investigate anti-Irish discrimination.
Since we Irish have little to complain about, the authors had to be inventive. One of their conclusions was that the reason so few Irish people reported discrimination was that they didn’t realise they were discriminated against.
NATURALLY, the recommendation was to throw ‘loadsa money’ and equality police into making the integrated Irish in Britain realise they were badly treated. New Zealand is even more extreme. Earlier this year, a Maori MP denounced the Labour Party’s ‘ Wimmin’s Division’ and its anti- male agenda. But that agenda goes way beyond the feminist agenda in promoting minority and alternative causes. Among those singled out by the new Political Correctness Eradicator Dr Mapp are the establishment of civil unions, the opposition to parents being informed that their daughters aged under 16 are having abortions and the promotion of brothels — all measures that sound startlingly familiar. In New Zealand, like here, debate has been discouraged, decisions come from the top and those who oppose political correctness have been demonised.
Meanwhile, a PC agenda has been institutionalised in government policies, legislative programmes and institutions.
We should take note of what is happening in New Zealand and stop grumblingly accepting that the march of political correctness is irrevocable.
It is an experiment that has failed and should be halted and, where possible, reversed, before it alienates mainstream opinion entirely and permanently poisons our institutions.
What we want in this country is a decent, fair society, not one in which dissent is suppressed and sectional interests given precedence over the good of all.
When the dust settles over the battle for the leadership of the Conservative Party, MPs would be well-advised to study what New Zealand is up to. A rational strategy for rescuing our institutions and society from this pernicious and self- defeating philosophy is overdue.
The long- despairing majority in this country are fed up with all this politically correct nonsense, but many of us fear the Tories are too timid to challenge it.
Are there enough people out there prepared to stop the pussyfooting and say — like the Sally Army — ‘Enough is enough’?