Wednesday, March 16, 2005

It's 1588 All Over Again



At last the L3 have woken up to the fact that there exists a large body of religious loons who wish to overturn our democratic traditions and turn this country into a theocratic madhouse. It took a while but now the Left has come out against…. Catholics ? It's an outside shot, but what with these new revelations about the dangers of Papery and the Left's recent discovery that the IRA are scum, I'm off to William Hill to see what odds they'll give me against the next Labour leader being Ian Paisley.

What it's all about, of course, is abortion. Princess Tony's contribution to the debate has been to say that he 'does not believe abortion should be an election issue, arguing it is a matter for individual conscience. ' The word 'chutzpah' is somehow inadequate to describe the Great Regulator talking about the importance of individual choice. In fact, even Blair doesn't believe in that much choice - he wants it to be legal to kill foetuses, but not to hunt them with dogs. You might think foetuses aren't human, but they're a lot closer than little red doggies.

Maybe the Catholics should claim all abortionists are 'toffs' ?

Still, if Blair eulogising about individual choice is bad enough, what of Howard claiming to have moral qualms about abortion ? 'Moral qualms' ? Probably just indigestion. Still, there's more than enough humbuggery to go round. Of all papers, it's this one that let's the cat out of the bag, revealing that evil maniac Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor made his comments at a press conference to reveal the Church's 'traditional pre-election letter'. Yep, theophobes - a whole laundry list of theocratic nonsense just ready to fisk, yet you need to dig deep even to find that the letter exists. How come no one perceives the first stirrings of theocracy in the rest of these demands ? Need you ask. If they've kept to form the letter will consist of a trainwreck collection of dhimmitude, open borders nonsense, welfare white elephants and the whole rest of the L3 agenda hidden under a half millimetre layer of scripture [and in fact the omens aren't good - the Guardian calls the letter 'scrupulously neutral '].

But don't let the hypocrisy of the Left in this particular case blind us to their more general hypocrisy. The most prominent parliamentary pro-lifer right now is Ann Widdicombe, a Kent Conservative, but before that it was David Alton, Lib Dem from Liverpool. There's no stereotype for a pro-lifer - the only common factor is that these people have for whatever reason - religious, scientific or the voices in their head - decided that abortion is murder. It is the Left that has sought to politicise abortion, rebranding a sad and nasty medical procedure into some kind of bizarre fusion of the storming of the Bastille, the Red October tractor factory and the suffragettes.

It is precisely because abortion is a moral matter that the Church is justified in speaking out - certainly more so than on matters such as the taxation of dividend income. For the same reason, it is asinine for Blair (or anyone else) to claim that abortion is simply a matter of individual conscience. Pro-lifers believe that abortion is where somebody kills someone else. For anyone except uber-Libertarians to claim that the State has no compelling interest in preventing murder is surely absurd, yet this is what the Left - the speech-code, passive smoking, five-a-day co-ordinated Left - claims.

In a stunning proof of the stopped-clock hypothesis, Michael Howard stumbled onto the key question: where in the long haul from fertilized ovum to birth does the foetus become a baby ? This is a serious question and it deserves better than the Left's crude attempts to close down the debate, as so perfectly exemplified by this comment from Anne Weyman, chief executive of the Family Planning Association,:

What is the benefit to women, or to the potential child, of forcing a woman to have a baby?
No wonder the Left is so keen on more sex education.

No comments: