Like Julie Burchill or Suzanne Moore, Julie Bindel is always either spectacularly right or spectacularly wrong.
They are all among the many figures without whom I cannot imagine British journalism, nor would I wish to.
We need Free Speech Halls, as once there were Temperance Halls. A national network of them, in university towns, but off university property.
Meanwhile, here come Theresa May's quaintly named Extremism Disruption Orders.
Every religious organisation in the United Kingdom that is not the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Church in Wales or the Church of Ireland derives from a refusal of State registration and control.
Where those which are present as a result of relatively recent immigration are concerned, that is implicit, although it is no less real for that. For everyone else, it is very explicit indeed.
The pluralist religious histories of Scotland, Wales and what is now Northern Ireland are well-known. At no point since the mid-Victorians first bothered to check has the Church of England accounted for more than half of the churchgoers in England, with various other things always having been found to predominate very heavily across great tracts of the country.
Moreover, the Church in Wales, as such, and the Church of Ireland, as presently constituted, derive from Acts of Disestablishment, while the Church of Scotland's current form and legal position have their origins in a formal recognition by the State of the limits of its own competence.
Even the Church of England has been an underground body in its time, while key elements within it all have revered forebears who were in some degree of conflict with the Royal Supremacy, at least in practice, and sometimes in principle. Much of its current following has its roots in Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical missionary activity abroad.
All in all, it ought not to be difficult, and it would certainly be a very splendid thing, for there to be a national register of religious leaders who had declared in advance that they would not be registering with Mrs May (the daughter of a clergyman whose pronounced sacerdotalist teaching and ritualist activities would in an earlier time have occasioned his imprisonment), but were available for public comment precisely on the basis of that non-registration.
Not least, in the Free Speech Halls.
Every religious organisation in the United Kingdom that is not the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Church in Wales or the Church of Ireland derives from a refusal of State registration and control.
Where those which are present as a result of relatively recent immigration are concerned, that is implicit, although it is no less real for that. For everyone else, it is very explicit indeed.
The pluralist religious histories of Scotland, Wales and what is now Northern Ireland are well-known. At no point since the mid-Victorians first bothered to check has the Church of England accounted for more than half of the churchgoers in England, with various other things always having been found to predominate very heavily across great tracts of the country.
Moreover, the Church in Wales, as such, and the Church of Ireland, as presently constituted, derive from Acts of Disestablishment, while the Church of Scotland's current form and legal position have their origins in a formal recognition by the State of the limits of its own competence.
Even the Church of England has been an underground body in its time, while key elements within it all have revered forebears who were in some degree of conflict with the Royal Supremacy, at least in practice, and sometimes in principle. Much of its current following has its roots in Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical missionary activity abroad.
All in all, it ought not to be difficult, and it would certainly be a very splendid thing, for there to be a national register of religious leaders who had declared in advance that they would not be registering with Mrs May (the daughter of a clergyman whose pronounced sacerdotalist teaching and ritualist activities would in an earlier time have occasioned his imprisonment), but were available for public comment precisely on the basis of that non-registration.
Not least, in the Free Speech Halls.
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