Apologies

I've just realised that I haven't posted for nearly a week. There is no reason for that, except that time flies when you're not having fun.

Despite the shade of triumphalism I expressed over the defeat of the GPA by the Advertising Standards Agency, I noticed yesterday that the Liberal Democrats are calling for Ruth Kelly to resign for bringing her religious beliefs to her job. I would be interested to hear if they think that gay people who bring their beliefs about human sexuality to their political jobs should also resign. I would also like them to affirm that they would be opposed to Muslims in government, since they think Catholics are beyond the pale.

We are steadily, and deliberately, narrowing the public sphere, excluding different views and ways of life. The public sphere will, eventually, be completely homogenous, with all alternative views held only in secret. Some people, like Richard Dawkins, are pretty open about this; others, like gay rights groups, hide behind an exclusionary concept of "diversity". As a consequence of such principles, as has happened in some parts of the USA, Catholic adoption agencies, unable to take gay couples, will close, when the new equality laws are passed. Hence whole swathes of the public sphere will be destroyed and this is fine, because the alternative views are all based on "hate", pure and simple. This word has become so debased and cynically manipulated as to be almost meaningless now. But it's good for one kind of diversity, pretty awful for another.