Sacrificing all moral authority

PARISH priest Neil McNicholas argues that the Charity Commission – in successful challenging Catholic Care’s right to refuse adoption 
services to same-sex couples – and the Government – in attempting to make possible same-sex marriage in church – are both acting beyond their authority as these issues are covered by Church law and God’s moral law (Yorkshire Post, December 17).

I have news for Neil McNicholas. Most right-thinking people would say that the Church’s abject failure to use its law and its moral authority to protect children from its paedophile clergy has 
irreversibly ended any right 
it may have had either to claim the moral high ground or to 
argue for its ability to deal effectively with the cases which come before it.

From: Brian Sheridan, Redmires Road, Sheffield.

NEIL McNicholas’s case for Catholic Care’s opposition to gay adoption is flawed (Yorkshire Post, December 17).

He argues: “If I want to buy a pair of jeans I am hardly likely to go to a furniture shop to buy them. I already know they don’t sell jeans and that a jeans shop does.”

Not too long ago it was legal 
for guest houses to display notices saying “No Irish” or “No blacks”.

If I am Irish or black, I am no more likely to present myself there than I am to try to buy jeans at a furniture shop but that does not make such prejudice acceptable.

Father McNicholas invokes canon (church) law and God’s law and, crucially, excoriates the Charity Commission and the Government for daring to question them.

For those of us who are unable blindly to take the word of a God of whose existence we are unsure as an immutable, everlasting truth, the debate reaches an impasse.

From: Margaret Claxton, Arden Court, Northallerton.

I AM with Heather Causnett, I’m sick of hearing about gay marriage. Marriage is for the procreation of children. When somebody shows me a child produced by two people of the same sex, I’ll agree to gay “marriage”.

From: Maxwell Laurie, Victoria Terrace, Cockfield, County Durham.

IT is said that America and England are divided by a common language. Certainly, English divides Mr Brian Sheridan (Yorkshire Post, December 18) and myself.

I hope that all my children and my children’s children will be gay. I pray, however, that they will not be homosexual.

From: William Snowden, Butterbowl Gardens, Leeds.

BRITONS in Australia are the subject of a standing joke: “You can always tell when a plane load of Poms has arrived, because there is a whinging noise coming from the aircraft, even after the engines have been turned off.” Whinging Poms!

Like all good jokes, it has an element of truth.

Casting a critical eye over the tribulations of “the old country” today, however, even the moist stoical Aussie would have to concede that in PC Britain there is much cause for concern and complaint. Political correctness emanated from the campuses of America’s most radical universities.

Not in their wildest imaginings, however, could those left-wing academics have perceived how that virulent ideology would infect the body politic, not only in America, but Britain and, indeed, the West.

Every local authority, public body and personnel department has its PC commissar striving to indoctrinate and browbeat the workforce.

It is the new religion of a Godless age. And its adherents persecute “non-conformists” with the intolerance and zealotry of a latter day inquisition. Foster children are removed from the home of UK Independence Party supporters because they are alleged to “oppose multi-culturalism.”

A Christian couple, running a bed and breakfast hostelry, are successfully prosecuted for refusing to offer a bed in their own home to practising homosexuals.

A Christian nurse is condemned for wearing a cross, and offering to pray for her patients.

A manager of a housing trust is demoted and censured for daring to oppose the warped concept of gay marriage.

There is no such thing as
“equal marriage” because two men, or two women, cannot reproduce. That is the province of a man and a woman. For Christians (and other religious denominations) the marriage ceremony sanctifies the love of a man and a woman as the divine source of human creation.

No amount of puerile, political posturing by David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Boris Johnson et al can alter that irrefutable fact of life. Where, oh where is the politician of substance, who 
will champion traditional values and stuff political correctness back into its BBC-sponsored box!