With Friends Like These

I have just heard the repeat of this week’s Moral Maze. Evan Harris, scourge of the Act of Settlement, was loudly cheered by the clearly well-packed audience for this five hundredth edition when introduced as the man who had brought about the repeal of the blasphemy law, and then claimed to “know of no theistic state” where women and all manner of other people were treated with any sort of equity.

In response, Melanie Phillips was at pains to insist that “everyone here is in favour of the separation of Church and State, that is common ground”. Not only was this never challenged by panellist always introduced as “the Catholic writer Clifford Longley”, but Harris told her that this was “just lucky because we are here”, and the only reason why she, considering her “gender”, was permitted to speak at all. Phillips replied that “that may very well be”.

That there is a “separation of Church and State” in this country, and that this country is not a “theistic state”, should be taken up with the Head of State, who presently happens to be a person of the same “gender” as Melanie Phillips.

And Catholics should have nothing to do with the machinations of Evan Harris (Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, Vice-President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, member of the Board of Social Responsibility of the Church of England’s Diocese of Oxford) or his ilk.

They want to repeal the Act of Settlement, just as they wanted to repeal the blasphemy law, because they want to disestablish the Church of England, disestablish the Church of Scotland, abolish chaplaincies in the NHS and in the Armed Forces, abolish every civic expression of Christianity from Coronations to Remembrance Sunday ceremonies, end Christian RE and collective worship in state schools, and, in short, repudiate Christianity as the basis of the British State.

We must not allow ourselves to become their Useful Idiots.