Scottish Catholic Observer

By Gerald Warner

If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keep people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it.” Sounds good; it sounds almost            as if he had been reading Papal encyclicals or studying Church social teaching.

Sound, of course, is all it was: soundbites in the wake of the recent riots and looting in England which brought out the chameleon in Dave, like any politician. As a breed, politicians have an inbuilt facility to reverse everything they have previously said or stood for, in response to embarrassing events. If you had just landed from Mars, you would think that Mr Cameron was an unremitting champion of marriage and the family. Nothing could be further from reality.

At the Conservative Party conference in 2006 Mr Cameron (right) momentarily enthused his audience by praising marriage, then went on to redefine it out of existence: “There’s something special about marriage… And by the way, it means something whether you’re a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man.” By taking all the permutations of relationships that are the negation of marriage and including them within the concept, he rendered the term meaningless— a classic piece of politician’s chicanery.

Now, alarmed by rioting that exposed the vulnerability of the decadent, immoral society over which he presides, the Prime Minister has set out to reinvent himself. He once wanted to hug hoodies, now he wants to jail them. Open-necked, open-hearted Dave the moderniser has turned into a good imitation of a brigadier in a bath-chair on Bournemouth promenade.

If the riots had gone on for one more night he would have been calling for the return of flogging and transportation to the colonies.

The Prime Minister is posing as Family Guy. Yet this arch-hypocrite is the man who, against the wishes of the majority of his party, voted to close Catholic adoption agencies because they could not in conscience place children with same-sex couples. Those agencies were admired for their success in placing difficult children for whom other organisations could not find a home. Now, because of his grandstanding to appease the militant homosexual lobby, they can look forward to lives in care and possible careers as rioters.

The two best antidotes to an uncivil society are Christianity and family. Mr Cameron’s government, and Labour before it have marginalised, persecuted both these institutions. There is no penalty for wearing a hoodie, but you can lose your job for wearing a Crucifix. Police who should be on the streets keeping order are too often busy interviewing Christians about alleged ‘hate crimes.’ In Scotland, Catholic schools are increasingly in the sights of secularist politicians. There is a concerted drive to debauch children with pornographic ‘sex education,’ the consequence of which is a relentless increase in teenage pregnancies.

In 2008 a tipping point was reached when the majority of Scottish births occurred out of wedlock. David Cameron has promised tax breaks for married couples—by 2015, which hardly suggests urgency.

There is a kind of innocence about politicians bleating fatuously after the riots: “Where were their parents?” What parents? How many youngsters have ‘parents’ (in the plural) today?

Year after year, statute after statute, our degenerate Parliament has promoted ‘alternative life styles,’ demonised the family, marginalised Christianity and undermined morality. Politicians have been aided and abetted by the media, descending into ever grosser vulgarity and sleaze—pushing the boundaries. Then, when the cesspit overflows, they all ask wonderingly what has gone wrong.

They are what has gone wrong. Before an opportunist thief stole a bottle of water from a wrecked store (and got six months’ imprisonment), the pinstriped hoodies at Westminster had stolen millions in fraudulent expenses from the taxpayers. There is no justification for sentimentality about the thugs who killed, maimed and burned during the riots; but their guilt is shared by the amoral generation of doctrinaire secularists who determinedly dismantled what was left of Christian society and opened the gates to anarchy.

We are living in the society that would have prevailed if Constantine had been defeated by the pagan Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. After a hiatus of 17 centuries, the ruthless, cruel, barbaric anti-civilisation of pre-Christian Europe is back. It is the responsibility of Catholics to reverse that situation. To do so, we must first restore order within the Church and then resume the work of re-evangelising a formerly Christian society that has fallen into apostasy.