The Tablet this week has an article about those organizations that support people who make claims of discrimination on the grounds of their Christian faith.
Read Just cause? by Sam Adams.
A new campaign to encourage Christians to show their religion openly has been launched, echoing a concern felt by some that they feel discriminated against because of their faith. But the legal groups that advise them may be simply worsening divisions as they fight their corner…
Is it BECAUSE you have an established Christian church that Lord Carey and others feel beseiged?
We get our share of this silliness on our side of the pond, and it’s tiresome.
Yes, Great Britain, welcome to the world the US has been living in for the past decade at least. For members of the overwhelmingly dominant religion in a nation to claim they are being discriminated against is to live in Cloud Cuckoo Land. In both your country and ours, the birth of the savior is a national holiday. His resurrection–while not accorded the same recognition–is still celebrated in song and story on a yearly basis by the culture as a whole. Our holy book is more quoted in general speech than any other work except perhaps Shakespeare. What these people… Read more »
Hear, hear, Pat O’Neill! The Christians you speak of who scream “discrimination” usually feel that way because they can’t discriminate against others. There is real discrimination, harassment, and oppression of Christians in many countries around the world. For bishops sitting in the upper chamber of a country’s parliament by right, not by a vote, to shout “discrimination!” demeans those Christians, makes a mockery of the term, and sounds to this Yank very much like men used to leisure and privilege who haven’t seen the real world in years. England and the USA are no longer our grandfathers’ countries. Without irony,… Read more »
Would the whiners please show a single issue on which they have been discriminated against — except those connected with samesex relations.
How these Christians see sin everywhere, even where there is none. I have shared a bed with a straight friend on many occasions abroad without so much as a kiss between us but I bet these Christian Guesthouse people would have refused us. Isn’t it called judging – something Christians are warned against?
Spirit:
Oh, didn’t you know it is a case of extreme discrimination if I’m not allowed to wear my dangling cross around my neck where it might get caught in the machinery I’m operating?
There is a letter from one active and one retired Church of England bishop in support of one of these cases in today’s Telegraph, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/8194948/The-violence-of-demonstrators-intent-on-mayhem-in-London-showed-up-the-inadequacies-of-the-police.html Scroll 80% down the page. Text follows: Bedroom principles SIR – We wish to record our great concern that liberty of conscience is being eroded. Next week, two Christian pensioners, Mr and Mrs Bull, will appear in court because the guesthouse that they own and operate in Cornwall has a policy that couples must be married if they wish to occupy a double room (report, December 8). They offer single bedrooms to unmarried couples.… Read more »
I wonder whether they allow remarried divorcees to share a bed, or condemn them as adulterers and send them packing?
I remember years ago going with my choir to sing at a village in Cornwall where some of us stayed in a parishoner’s B&B. When it was realised that my partner was male there was a hurried swapping of allocated rooms so that we had one with a single and a double bed. Needless to say we slept in the double!
Nothing obliges Mr. and Mrs. Bull to have a gay couple or an unmarried couple sleep together in their house. They are free to cease operating their home as a guest house at any time. __________________________________________ SIR – We wish to record our great concern that liberty of conscience is being eroded. Next week, two Christian pensioners, Mr and Mrs Cow, will appear in court because the guesthouse that they own and operate in Devon has a policy that couples must be of the same race if they wish to occupy a double room. They offer single bedrooms to mixed… Read more »
I found an apposite quote on facebook the other day: ‘The new Christian martyrdom: Being denied the “right” to feed OTHER people to the lions.’ People should be free to wear a pendant cross or even neckties with the pietistic message, “I love Jesus”. They should enjoy the protection of the law to do so, if needs be. Just as Muslim women have the right to wear burqas and head scarves, and Sikhs to wear turbans. But what I think comes screaming out of the article in The Tablet is that there is a type of Xian wants to be… Read more »
Hear, hear William. I suppose it’s indicative that Bp. Scott-Joynt doesn’t actually take a fundamentalist view of scripture or he’d be stoning adulterers instead of remarrying them in church, ie. he has practised….let’s call ‘aggiornamento’….on that particularly awkward part of Jesus’s teaching (note, not Leviticus which is apparently not so awkward for him or his buddy exB. Nazir-Ali). As for the Bull’s why do they feel they have to police people’s bedrooms when there all sorts of other things they might be doing that the Bull’s would not approve of but would rightly consider was none of their business? Do… Read more »