According to the Daily Telegraph, Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury says worshippers are being “vilified” by the state, treated as “bigots” and sacked simply for expressing their beliefs. In a written submission to the European Court of Human Rights before a landmark case on religious freedom, the former leader of more than 70 million Anglicans warns that the outward expression of traditional conservative Christian values has effectively been “banned” in Britain under a new “secular conformity of belief and conduct”.
His comments represent one of the strongest attacks on the impartiality of Britain’s judiciary from a religious leader.
He says Christians will face a “religious bar” to employment if rulings against wearing crosses and expressing their beliefs are not reversed.
Lord Carey argues that in “case after case” British courts have failed to protect Christian values. He urges European judges to correct the balance.
The hearing, due to start in Strasbourg on Sept 4, will deal with the case of two workers forced out of their jobs over the wearing of crosses as a visible manifestation of their faith. It will also take in the cases of Gary McFarlane, a counsellor sacked for saying that he may not be comfortable in giving sex therapy to homosexual couples, and a Christian registrar, who wishes not to conduct civil partnership ceremonies.
Vilification, violence and discrimination are still a reality in the 21st century.
What was the most vilified religion in Scotland in 2010-2011? Not Islam – only 2.1 percent of religious hate crimes were directed against Muslims. Not Judaism – only 2.3 percent were directed against Jews. According to a report by the Scottish government, 95 percent of all religious hate crimes were directed against Christians.
"These statistics show the shameful reality of religious hate crime in Scotland,” the Minister for Community Safety, Roseanna Cunningham, declared last year. “Like racism, this kind of behaviour simply shouldn't be happening in a modern Scotland but sadly, it seems there are still those who think hatred on the basis of religion is acceptable.”
Christians are also the targets of most religious hate crimes in France. A report released last year showed that 84 percent of cases of religious vandalism had targeted Christian sites in 2010 – an increase of 96 percent in two years. Two hundred and fourteen cemeteries were vandalized, along with 272 chapels, 26 war memorials and 10 crosses.
Christian monuments are not the only targets. Earlier this month the hacker group Anonymous crashed the Vatican website, leaving a message: “Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organization spreads around the world."
According to its director, Dr Gudrun Kugler, all Christian denominations in Europe face “a broad phenomena of intolerance and discrimination caused by those who reject and disrespect Christianity as a whole: radical lobbies which have gone overboard, seeking to limit the practice of the Christian religion and with it fundamental rights and freedoms.”
Is she over-dramatising the issue? Dr Kugler responds that many religious leaders and politicians in Europe have been hitting the alarm bell.
Last year Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a senior Russian Orthodox prelate with a PhD from Oxford, warned that there is a “basic danger of attempting to use religious diversity as an excuse to exclude signs of Christian civilization from the public and political realities of the continent, as though this would make our continent friendlier towards non-Christians.”
And a Muslim government minister in the UK, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, admitted that Christianity was under siege by militant secularism in a landmark speech earlier this year.
“I see it in United Kingdom and I see it in Europe: spirituality suppressed; divinity downgraded… at its core and in its instincts [militant secularism] is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity and failing to understand the relationship between religious loyalty and loyalty to the state.”
Dr Kugler admits that the hardships faced by European Christians are minor compared to the daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment and torture in countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. But, she says, “History teaches to address injustices before they become a slippery slope towards even greater injustices.”
Dr Kugler says that the growing intolerance and discrimination take several forms.
Human rights violations and discrimination. Christian are being denied the right to educate their children when there is a conflict between the parents’ convictions and state required sex education. The Catholic Church had to shut down adoption agencies in the UK because they were being forced to accept same-sex couples as adoptive parents.
Workplace discrimination. French pharmacists are required to sell the “morning after” pill which causes an early abortion. Midwives and nurses in Scotland must oversee abortions. Workers in the UK are threatened with dismissal for wearing crosses.
Marginalization and negative stereotyping. The media is constantly projecting hostile images of Christians and Christian values. The Norwegian killer Andres Breivik was instantaneously and wrongly called a “Christian fundamentalist” even though he had no connections with any mainstream Christian churches. Last July the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe even passed a resolution to “encourage the media not to spread prejudices against Christians and to combat negative stereotyping”.
Hate crimes. Violence against Christian sites and clerics is becoming more common. Churches, shrines and cemeteries are often torched or desecrated. “It is indisputable that hate crimes against Christians occur in the OSCE region,” Janez Lenarčič, of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, told a conference in Rome last year. “Such attacks instil fear, not just in the individuals they target directly, but also in the wider community, particularly where the Christian community in question belongs to a minority.”
But if most European countries are at least nominally Christian, isn’t it ridiculous to talk about a vilified minority? Wrong, says Dr Kugler. It is not nominal Christians who are getting the sharp end of the stick, but people who take the precepts of Christianity seriously. And these are a minority.
“South African blacks were not a minority when they suffered from apartheid. Also women always constituted a majority in history. Rocco Buttiglione was not accepted as an EU commissioner due to his adherence to Christianity, the majority faith. It is true that intolerance and discrimination more often affect minorities. More essential than numbers is power: who sets the tone, who is listened to, and who creates the agenda. Every day Europe’s majority faith is being treated disrespectfully; its faithful are faced with hostility and cultural animosity; and its free exercise is confronted with unjust limitations.”
Amazingly, statistics on “Christianophobia” are sketchy, a failure which Dr Kugler’s group is trying to set right. It acts as a clearinghouse, logging incidents of discrimination and intolerance which have been reported in the media.
As she points out, people need to know these grim stories to ensure that history does not repeat itself. In 2010, graffiti at the University of Barcelona sparked a minor controversy in Spain. “Los cristianos son como ratas. Apunta bien,” it said. “Christians are like rats. Shoot straight.” This happened in a country where thousands of Christians were shot like rats in the Spanish Civil War just because they went to Mass. Europe cannot afford to let this happen ever again.
A report specifically dedicated to cases of intolerance and religious discrimination towards Christians in the Old World
MARCO TOSATTIROME
The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDCE) published its annual report listing incidents of anti-Christian discrimination in all member states of the European Union. As stated, it chronicles the “most striking” cases in which Christians have encountered either outright hate crimes or legal restrictions, including arrests and lawsuits, targeting their freedom of expression, belief and conscience.
The report documents that discrimination against Christians and their principles is quickly growing throughout the continent also in those countries that used to be leaders as far as freedom of opinion and conscience were concerned, like the United Kingdom. The Public opinion is ready to embrace these new negative stereotypes. An iconic example given in the report is the case of the Norwegian psycho-killer Andres Breivik “who was instantaneously and wrongly” labelled a “Christian fundamentalist” by the world’s media. “Anti-Christian prejudices needed a Christian equivalent to Muslim terrorism to prove true,” one of the report’s authors, Dr Gudrun Kugler wrote, with the result that a “thoughtlessly” and too-hastily attributed label “was gratefully received by the world’s media.”
The report points out that there is currently no mechanism in Europe for collecting and examining data on anti-Christian discrimination. The OIDCE says that its annual report for 2011 is not intended to be comprehensive, but to offer “impressions of the phenomenon, revealing to the reader its diverse aspects and far-reaching scope.”
It lists over 200 incidents, ranging from Christians who have been arrested and jailed for preaching against homosexual activity to vandalism of churches and cemeteries, particularly in Spain and France.
The Commission of the Bishops Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) welcomed the OIDCE report, calling the phenomenon of anti-Christian discrimination one of increasing “international significance.”
Bishop András Veres said that the report confirms “how some values and fundamental rights proper to Europe, such as freedom of religion and the legal recognition of our Churches, are far from being an established reality in some nations of the continent.”
In the second century B.C., the foreign tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes decreed that all Jews should be forced to violate their religious consciences by publicly eating pork and food sacrificed to idols. “If any were not willing to eat defiling food, they were to be broken on the wheel and killed” (4 Maccabees 5:3). It was a command of gratuitous forced submission as a sign of Antiochus’s supreme authority to compel obedience by a subject people.
“Contraception” is not exactly the right term. The HHS mandate implementing Obamacare requires insurance plans of religious employers to provide not just contraception but also sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs—“morning-after” (and even “week-after”) pills designed to cause the death of a co...
In Germany, home-schooling is illegal. The state claims responsibility not only for protecting children from abuse and neglect in their homes, but also from their parents' teaching and values. In a recent case, a mother of 12 has been sentenced to prison for refusing to enroll her children in sex ed classes. Such classes, as in the U.S., normalize premarital sex.
A German mother is in prison as a result of resisting state measures to force objectionable “sexual education” on her children. Her husband has already served his 43-day sentence. The couple bring the number of Christian parents imprisoned for this reason to 10.
In January 2010, a U.S. immigration judge granted political asylum to a German family persecuted by the German state for wanting to homeschool their children.
Tennessee Judge Lawrence Burman ruled that, after several years of run-ins with the authorities in Germany, the Romeike family’s human rights were being violated in their own country and that they had “a well-founded fear of persecution” if they stayed there. Burman said homeschoolers “are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress” and this was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”. Strong stuff, and it is not yet clear what political actions may follow.
(Retrieved March 4, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/german_homeschooling_family_granted_political_asylum_in_usa/)
Another German family sought asylum in Alberta, Canada after fleeing there to avoid persecution in their native country.
Canadian Member of Parliament Maurice Vellacott (Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, CPC) has decried the German law, and called on the Alberta board to protect the rights of this family.
“Canada has a strong legacy of parental rights and home schooling has been an accepted expression of these rights in Canada,” he said. “I commend these valiant parents for the commitment and devotion they have to the best interests of their children. I hope the Immigration and Refugee Board in Alberta gives a favourable hearing to this case.”
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Mother of twelve jailed in Germany for refusing to enroll children in sex ed classes
BY MATTHEW CULLINAN HOFFMAN
Wed Feb 23, 2011
Authorities Ask German Homeschooling Family to Give up Custody of Other 5 Children
GERMANY, February 23, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A mother of twelve has been sentenced to 43 days in jail in the German town of Salzkotten for refusing to enroll her children in the sex education program in a local elementary school, according to two German Catholic news sites, Kath.net and Katholishes.info.
The woman, whose name is not revealed in the articles, is reportedly a Baptist who is opposed to the program based upon her religious convictions. The couple says that their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Germany is a signatory, are being ignored.
They cite article 2 of the convention’s first protocol, which states: “the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.” The local elementary school has reportedly ignored this right since 2005, and is being supported by the judiciary.
The woman’s husband says that “his wife has really missed her family, but finds her solace in God” according to Kath.net, which also reports that the younger children “miss their mother,” but that suffering injustice is part of the experience of being Christian.
The persecution of Germans who homeschool or reject government sex education is an ongoing phenomenon. In April of last year the website Kopp Online reported several cases of German mothers who reside in Salzkotten spending up to a week in jail for refusing the local sex ed program for their children. Similar persecution was reported in the same town, which is located in the district of Paderborn, in December of 2009.
In January of 2010 a German family was granted asylum in the United States after years of harassment by the German government for homeschooling their children.
Contact information:
Embassy of Germany in the United States
2300 M Street NW
Washington, DC 20037
Phone (202) 298-4000
Email: http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/Kontakt.html
Embassy of Germany in Canada
1 Waverley Street
Ottawa, ON, K2P 0T8
Tel.: 613-232-1101 Fax: 613-594-9330
Email: germanembassyottawa@on.aibn.com
Embassy of Germany in the United Kingdom
23 Belgrave Square
London
SW1X 8PZ
Phone: 020 7824 1300
Fax: 020 7824 1449
Email: http://www.london.diplo.de/Vertretung/london/en/Kontakt.html
Retrieved March 3, 2011 from http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/mother-of-twelve-jailed-in-germany-for-refusing-to-enroll-children-in-sex-e/
The implications of this case are staggering. The ruling seems to mean that any faithful ("traditionalist," in the language of the Court) Christian, Orthodox Jewish, or Muslim family can be barred from fostering children in need of foster homes unless they are willing to teach the children in their charge that what they and their traditions for millennia have held to be immoral behavior is in fact acceptable. Orthodox religious belief or even traditional moral beliefs can no longer be tolerated in the Brave New World of secularized Britain. The position advanced by Richard Dawkins, apparently as a polemical provocation - that teaching children the Christian faith (or other religious orthodoxy) is a form of child abuse - is now official state doctrine. We are indeed, as MacIntyre says at the end of After Virtue in the midst of a new Dark Age. The barbarians are already inside the gates.
Here is Michael Kirke's justified rant on the Australian dignitarian blog, MercatorNet:
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This was inevitable – and it is only beginning. Everyone is blaming the judges for the decree handed down by the High Court in Britain on Monday that Eunice and Owen Johns, a Christian couple, married almost 40 years, could no longer foster children aged between five and 10. They are deemed unsuitable, in law, to do so any longer because they are unwilling to promote a homosexual lifestyle to a child. Neither Mr nor Mrs Johns has anything against gay people but they are not in favour of sex before marriage, whatever an individual’s orientation.
But this is not the fault of the judges. The law is not an ass. That is too easy. It is the law-makers who are asses. As soon as the steamroller of “gay liberation” got rolling on its relentless way and sought to have legislation to back all the rights it set itself up as having, the law-makers began to make asses of themselves. And this goes for every other politically correct tom-foolery which late twentieth century men and women allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by and sought legal standing for.
Commonsense has been abandoned. These laws are so flawed and so full of inherent contradictions in the context of the whole fabric of the common law system that they inevitably lead to the kind of judgement which has just been handed down from the British High Court. The confusion, the anguish and the distress of two innocent people is the outcome of this debacle
The statement issued by Owen and Eunice Johns after the judgement reveals the depths of their anguish. “We are extremely distressed at what the judges have ruled today. All we wanted was to offer a loving home to a child in need. We have a good track record as foster parents. But because we are Christians, with mainstream Christian views on sexual ethics, we are apparently unsuitable as foster parents.
“The judges have suggested that our views might harm children. We have been told by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that our moral views may ‘infect’ a child. We do not believe that this is so. We are prepared to love and accept any child. All we were not willing to do, was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing.”
But all this is part of a campaign to obliterate any common sense and rational approach to dealing with ourselves as human beings. The language of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the moral views of the Johns may ‘infect’ a child says it all. This is now a society where the Church of the Equality and Human Rights is the arbiter of morality and all other moral viewpoints are dangerous infections against which society must be immunised. British society – and by extension and in time all western societies – are now being defined in such a way that the Church of Human Rights will rule supreme.
These two British judges have now solemnly declared and defined English society to be a “largely secular”, multi-cultural country in which the laws of the realm “do not include Christianity”. The judges remarked that it was not yet “well understood” that in British society the law really has no place for Christianity. “Although historically this country is part of the Christian West, and although it has an established church which is Christian, there have been enormous changes in the social and religious life of our country over the last century,” they said.
Homosexual rights campaigners of course welcomed the judgment which they describe as putting “21st-century decency above 19th-century prejudice”. The ruling in this case is only the latest in a series of judgments in which Christians have been defeated in the courts for breaching equality laws by manifesting their beliefs on homosexuality. Part of the problem here is that the question of homosexuality is being kept in the realm of “belief”. This protects the lobby from having to engage in rational debate about this issue on health, scientific or simple sociological grounds. As soon as anyone raises these issues there are screams of homophobia, prejudice, and bigotry.
All one has to do to get a glimpse of the depth of hatred towards anyone who questions the politically correct orthodoxy on this matter now is to read the comments on the story in the newspapers. The Daily Telegraph in London, as I write, has already clocked up over 1500 responses to just one of its stories on the subject. An Irish parliamentary candidate in the election there last week who has a somewhat nuanced position of the gay rights issue – she supported civil union legislation but considers marriage per se to be, in the interests of children, something for a man and a woman. The volume of hate mail and abuse which descended on her smelt very much like a jihad.
Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican bishop of Rochester, described the High Court judgment as absurd. “However, what really worries me about this spate of judgments is that they leave no room for the conscience of believers of whatever kind. This will exclude Christians, Muslims and Orthodox Jews from whole swaths of public life, including adoption and fostering.”
The judges saw their predicament as follows: “We sit as secular judges serving a multicultural community of many faiths. We are sworn (we quote the judicial oath) to ‘do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will’.”
It was in this context that the Daily Telegraph leader article put the blame firmly in the court of the law-makers. It had no qualms about declaring that we were now witnessing the emergence of a modern, secular Inquisition.
“The reason that they were even asked about their views on homosexuality was because Parliament passed the Sexual Orientation Regulations, making it an offence to discriminate on the grounds that someone is heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. These are the same laws under which Peter and Hazelmary Bull, Christian owners of a guest house, were fined last month for refusing to let a gay couple share a room. But in the case of Mr and Mrs Johns, where is the victim? They were not turning anyone away. Quite the contrary – they were offering a home to children who will otherwise end up in care, and there are precious few people who will. Furthermore, since the children would be aged under 10, matters of sexuality are hardly relevant – or is it being suggested that they should be? Astonishingly, the High Court suggested that it was not so much their Christian faith as the moral certainties of the Johns that were potentially harmful to children.”
There is another troubling aspect of this case, the Telegraph concluded.
“Equality laws are supposed to uphold the rights to religious belief. Yet the High Court ruled that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation “should take precedence” over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds. Why has it been left to judges to decide whose rights trump those of others? This should have been decided by Parliament but, yet again, another sloppily drafted measure will have far-reaching consequences for freedom of conscience in this country. Already the Roman Catholic Church has had to close its adoption agencies because they cannot conform to the law. Perhaps there is a historical irony here, because we are witnessing a modern, secular Inquisition – a determined effort to force everyone to accept a new set of orthodoxies or face damnation as social heretics if they refuse. Parliament and the courts should protect people like Mr and Mrs Johns, but have thrown them to the wolves. It is a disgrace.”
But then, what do asses really know about human nature?
Michael Kirke is a freelance writer in Dublin. He blogs at Garvan Hill.
Retrieved March 3, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/christianity_is_so_yesterday_says_uk_high_court/
in the midst of a new Dark Age. The barbarians are already inside the gates.