The Golden Strawberry

In keeping with its long and glorious history of opposing progress, the Catholic Church is demanding that its publicly funded adoption agencies be exempted from new Equality legislation. This would allow it to continue gleefully discriminating against gay couples seeking to provide children with loving homes. All because, as the communiqué from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor to his fellow Believer Tony Blair states, ‘to consider adoption applications from homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents would require them to act against the principles of Catholic teaching.’

Let me briefly remind you what this teaching is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church believes that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’ as they ‘close the sexual act to the gift of life’. This prejudice informs all Catholic pronouncements on gay issues.

‘By not letting us discriminate you are discriminating against us!’ Wail the Faithful. ‘Our right to discriminate on superstitious religious grounds is more important than the right of gay people to be free from our bigotries! Our Faith trumps all!’ They moan. (And I paraphrase).

Well, that’s settled then. The Papists expect to get an exemption from the Law of the Land, no matter how bigoted their demands are. Their 2000 year old ‘holy’ text and the posturing of an old priest in Rome trump the authority of the democratically elected government of the UK every time. Heathens, heretics and child welfare be damned, the Church is Above the Law by virtue of its answering to a mystical Higher Power.

Of course, any serious analysis of the Catholic position on this issue reveals reams of inconsistencies and contradictions. Apparently, Papist adoption agencies don’t have a problem with single gay people adopting kids; it’s only if they have hitched up with someone that problems arise. This is connected to the Church’s demand that gays remain celibate, and has nothing to do with how fit they are to raise a child.

Let us not forget that subscribers to other superstitions have closed ranks with their credulous fellows on this issue. Discrimination against gay people is something that unites all the main faiths in Britain. Even the usually spineless Anglican Church has decided to take a stand, as has the Muslim Council of Britain.

All this stems from a peculiar obsession that Religion has always had with how consenting adults conduct themselves within the privacy of their own homes. If this were really a question of conscience, as the Churchmen claim, then they would do well to ask themselves what right they have to pronounce on matters which are, frankly, none of their business.

But, of course, they won’t. They never do. It is always their business, they make it their business. So, those of us who take an interest in opposing bigotry and reaction, and who believe that parenting is about love, support and nurturing and not what sex the carer happen to be, must make it our business to see that these people are fought, opposed and, ultimately, defeated.

Some may accuse the Government of blowing this out of all proportion. This is a pointless storm in a teacup, you may say. Why would gay couples even bother approaching a Catholic adoption agency, knowing full well the prejudices of the Church of Rome?

No teacup, but definitely a storm. This debate does reveal one of the central fault lines of modern political discourse– that of separation between Church and State. The tearing away of temporal power from the Church was one of the most glorious achievements of the Enlightenment. Do we, by making an exception for the Catholics, turn our back on this great liberation? Do we permit the religious lobby to have a veto over the areas of public policy with which they disagree?

The government has of course not caved in to the Churches demands, and for that it should be applauded. But the sheer nerve of an organisation which has such a poor record in caring for children in demanding to be exempted from a law concerned with protecting them beggar’s belief.

It pleases me to see the Catholic Church smacked down in so public a fashion. Let us hope that this furore persuaded many liberal-minded believers to escape from that rapidly sinking ship, its bigotry having being exposed by the glare of publicity.

-posted by Adam

An excerpt from the US response to an upcoming UN report on climate change:

the report tends to overstate or focus on the negative effects of climate change

It seems the UN report emphasised the possiblity of mankind's extinction, rather than the chances of olives being grown in Devon. Shame on them!

Despite this bleakness, I can't help but find this hilarious. Something needs to be done about my warped sense of humour.

Cory

Our esteemed Chancellor has made it to a list of the 100 most sexiest men.

Looks like I just got a new style icon to base the new "Cory-chic" look on...

Cory

This article will either make you indescribably angry, or make you laugh for hours:

Chris Proud and his wife Lorraine should be sitting pretty. The 41-year-olds have a combined income of more than £100,000. He is an accountant and she is a chef who runs her own business catering for executive events and weddings.

They live in an £800,000 detached four-bedroom home in West Sussex with their son William, 12, and nine-year-old daughter Emily. Like many other families, however, they are feeling the squeeze. Their cost of living is rising sharply and they are having to cut back.

“Both our children go to private school and the fees have risen above inflation for the past 10 years,” said Chris. Rising gas and electricity bills, the January hike in train fares, higher council tax and increases in other taxes are adding to the pressure on the family finances. The couple have a fixed-rate mortgage but are not looking forward to the time when it has to be renewed.

“Now we go on only one holiday a year rather than two. My wife is is having to do more functions to keep the balance. We are just having to be a bit more careful and forgo certain things such as fixing things around the house and around the garden. Car insurance has gone up and when my wife is working in London she has to pay the congestion charge.”

Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Laugh at them for not living in the real world? What? They've progressed from being better-off than everyone else ten years ago to being ten years ago now. Shall we have a whip-round, see if we can get them on that second foreign holiday of theirs?

 I'll just settle for shaking my hand angrily at the computer screen.

Cory

From Fisking Central via Inner West

Do you want Britain to have top quality Universities? If your answer is ‘yes’ then you must acknowledge that with quality comes cost, and that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you want the best, you must pay for it. In a globalising world, this means tough decisions.

Top up fees are the fairest and most pragmatic way of paying for those first class Universities we all want to see; they combine progressive redistribution of wealth, financial aid for the poorest students, more cash for Universities and a fair deal for the general taxpayer. They are an imperfect way to satisfy as many people as possible, and isn’t this compromise the meat and potatoes of governing?

A quick look at the alternatives for University funding makes the case for the fees even more convincing. Massive increases in general taxation are politically impossible, as well as being unfair to the taxpayer and harmful to the economy. The system as it was, with student grants and up-front fees, was regressive and elitist; working class taxpayers were essentially subsidizing middle class students. A London School of Economics study revealed that, under the old system, 81% of the children of professionals went to University, compared with only 15% of kids from poor families – this is why the Tories opposed top-up fees, they were simply playing their usual role as defenders of class privilege.

The NUS (an odd Tory bedfellow) is wrong about top-up fees, and has been from the beginning. By acting the populist demagogue and opposing them they are in effect campaigning to entrench middle class perks.

Central to NUS opposition to top up fees is its continued wailing about the large amount of ‘debt’ students will leave university with – as much as £25,000, in some cases. This is not distinguished from other types of debt – credit card dues for example, and as a result potential students might be scared away from the benefits of higher education.

It must be repeated again and again that a student loan is not as unforgiving as any other. Repayments are 9% of earnings above £15,000. Thus someone earning £18,000 repays £270 a year, or £5.19 a week, a deduction on the payslip alongside income tax until the loan has been repaid.

Income-contingent loans are very different from credit card debt, which has a high interest rate, a short repayment period and no forgiveness if earnings are low. Student loans have built-in insurance: low earners make low or no repayments; repayments drop to zero if someone stops earning; people who never earn much do not repay; and any loan that remains after 25 years is forgiven.

It is disgraceful that the NUS does not do more to explain the new system to students, especially to less well off income groups, who proportionately benefit out of the new arrangements. On average, graduates earn 50% more in their lifetime than those without a degree; to be blunt, they can afford to pay. Higher education is free for students; it is graduates who pay for it.

The case can also be made for an increase in top up fees. A recent survey of University Vice Chancellors has shown that a good proportion of them believe that there will have to be further rises in top-up fees when the system comes under review in 2009.

Many VC’s are casting their glances enviously across the Atlantic, at American institutions of Higher education – they are swimming in cash; oodles, mountains, piles of the stuff. Harvard has an endowment of over $25 billion, five times that of its nearest overseas competitor – Cambridge. Nine of the top ten best funded Universities in the world are in the US, and they routinely charge their students much more than we are currently paying. In today’s world wealth equals power and this is true in Academia as well as on Wall Street.

The key to freeing up our higher education system is to lessen its dependence on the miserly government for its funding – top up fees are the first step on a long and difficult path of reform.

When combined with a commitment to get 50% of young people in higher education by the year 2010, top up fees are part of a radical and progressive policy towards higher education, and one of this Labour governments finest (and bravest) domestic policy achievements. Bravo, Messrs. Blair, Clarke and Brown!

-posted by Adam

The Carphone Warehouse, quite justifiably, has suspended its sponsorship of Celebrity Big Brother after the racism row in which Jade Goody somehow managed to sink to a new low.

The wonderful thing is that I didn't know that the Carphone Warehouse was sponsoring Celebrity Big Brother until they announced this. I wonder if this was true for many other people? Talk about giving yourself negative publicity....

Cory

I've just watched the Trial of Tony Blair, broadcast on Channel 4 this evening.

It was alright. I certainly didn't think it was as bad as Clive Davis makes out:

I've just watched 25 minutes of The Trial of Tony Blair. Pathetic, truly pathetic. I couldn't bear to sit through any more, so I'll just have to read the morning papers to see if the script improved later on. How the production team must have chortled when they sat around reading those oh so funny lines about New Labour's warmonger-in-chief.

If I were Robert Lindsay, I'd be having a sleepless night tonight.

True, some of the script was a bit OTT. The scriptwriters could either choose to have a fairly plausible, factual account of a legacy-obsessed Tony Blair betrayed by Prime Minister Brown on trial for war crimes, or they could go for something outrageous but humourous. They plumped for the latter. Some of the funniest lines, like the sergeant in the police station telling a fussy, recently-arrested Blair, "We didn't have this problem with Lord Levy", just don't score well on the reality front. The script seems, well, scripted for the Blair-haters who want to cheer on as Robert Lindsay is extradicted to the Hague.

I'm glad I saw it though; Alexander Armstrong as David Cameron was particularly entertaining, even if the satire for him was not exactly original - the cyclist with chauffer behind him, who wears an open-necked shirt and is "down with da kids" (Still true though). In fact all the acting was superb - despite the overblown script, all parts were prevented from being mere caricatures.

Not that what was depicted could ever happen. Could it.....?

Cory

Apologies for the lack of blogging, had a 4000-word essay to write.

I was waiting for something happy to blog about, so how about the fact that England have broken the laws of physics by actually winning a cricket match.

Cory

From the HuffPuff:

Iraq is not a country. It is a collection of warring factions and ethnicities which happen to share a piece of land. It is no more of a country than Yugoslavia was after Tito. It is less of a country than Lebanon, than Afghanistan, than Gaza; it is hardly more of an "itself" than Somalia.

Prime Minister al-Maliki, on whom the Bush plan wants us to pin our hopes, is no Garibaldi. In the years since our invasion, no Iraqi has demonstrated the strength and the vision necessary to stop ethnic cleansing, disarm the militias, end twelve hundred years of religious strife and turn a country arbitrarily carved out of the Ottoman empire by the British and the French into an actual, functioning "itself."

Saddam Hussein, of course, did that, by wielding ruthless power. The Bush theory is that the same result can be accomplished not by a dictator's viciousness, but by a democratic ruler benevolently leading a free nation -- and that the only thing standing between us and that Rapturous outcome is extending the tours of duty of 20,000 battle-weary American troops for another couple of years.

It is as likely that this escalation will lead to an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself as it is that it will lead to an Iraq that can levitate itself, fellate itself and book itself on a cruise to Bermuda. This is terribly sad, tragic, just as it is tragic that the neocon crackpots who hatched this misbegotten adventure are not now being held accountable for the fantasy that with a wave of democracy's wand, a millennium and more of seething antagonism would blossom overnight into a civil society, a federal government and a Freedom Domino for the whole Middle East.

Bush and Cheney have not given up on this delusion. No facts on the ground will ever convince them that their mission is pathologically misconceived. Unless they are stopped, they will continue to spend American blood and treasure on it until January 20, 2009; they would rather go to their graves saying they did everything in their power to be the Founding Fathers of a democratic Iraq, than to admit that they made the most colossal what-was-I-thinking? mistake in the history of the United States.

There is no "itself" there in Iraq. There is only broken crockery. And there is no excuse for Congress to remain spellbound by the delusion that thousands of more American lives, and billions of more American dollars, will accomplish a make-or-break difference. That's how a junkie thinks, a doubling-down gambling addict, a fool. The President and the Vice President may inhabit a psychotic folie à deux, but there remains no reason for the rest of us to follow them on the road to this unspeakable hell.

-posted by Adam

In May, Oldham Athletic will become the first professional English team to tour Bangladesh. They will play the national team, and it is estimated that 120, 000 will attend the matches!

120, 000?!?!? That's stupid. Latics get less than 6000 every home game. It's the equivilent of Manchester United playing against about 13.5 million.

I'm stunned. But want the world to know. Oldham on the map, can't be bad...

Cory