Question Time

There seems to be a growing assumption from the Right (http://jamesdelingpole.com/) that it’s only po-faced Liberals who are against the BNP appearing on this Thursday’s Question Time.

So, for those who didn’t spot it: Claire Fox wrote just as compelling a piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard (http://tinyurl.com/yjwv6p6) as Melanie Phillips did in yesterday's Daily Mail (http://tinyurl.com/ygod45p).

Let's hope the BBC Trust doesn't lose its nerve.

Some depressing news from the U.S...

A couple of weeks ago The Washington Post ran a leader that was critical of the Methodist Church in Britain’s Conference resolution to ban BNP members from becoming members of the Church.

“If the Church is going to make gospel standards a requirement for membership, the BNP soon will be larger than the Church,” the article concluded cynically.

(Here it is in full: http://tinyurl.com/mfa68k)

Today I came across a story online featured in the American publication, Christianity Today, bearing the news that United Methodists have defeated amendments which would have made Church membership open to all Christians regardless of sexual orientation.

So, should the observation be: “If the Church is going to make gospel standards a requirement for membership, homosexuality soon will be larger than the Church”?

I don’t think so.

Daniel Burke, the Christianity Today reporter, goes on:
“Delegates at the United Methodist Church's General Conference last year approved the sexual orientation amendment…The amendment followed a controversial case in 2005 in which a Virginia clergyman denied membership to a gay man who would not agree to change his sexuality. The UMC's high court later backed the pastor's decision.”

Asking someone to change their sexuality is the same as asking someone to change their sex or the colour of their skin.

Daniel quotes Mark Tooley whom he calls “a Methodist and president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy” (http://tinyurl.com/l77zp7).

“'It is only thanks to the African and other international delegates that United Methodism has upheld biblical standards about homosexuality,' Mark Tooley, a Methodist and president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, warned in April.
"'Liberals increasingly resent the growing African influence in our church and know they cannot win when the African churches are growing and the U.S. church declines, unless they can at least partially separate the U.S. church from the African churches,' he wrote in lobbying against the amendments.”

I should point out that Mark is a United Methodist – which is a different Church to the Methodist Church – in case there was any confusion. That said, I feel for the United Methodists fighting against this mentality.

European Elections

The European elections are only a week away and, in case you haven’t heard yet, it’s really important that we vote. Nick Cohen is wrong when he argues that extremism isn’t on the rise in the UK; it is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/24/bnp-european-elections-nick-cohen

It is tempting to go for a knee-jerk reaction following the expenses’ gravy train and just stay at home, but the European elections are actually a chance influence the way Europe is heading economically, politically and socially. Vote!

By-Election

Anyone who has walked past our house over the past few weeks will know who I am voting for today. I have never put an electioneering poster in the window before, but because the BNP has tried to grow roots in our ward, I took on the self-imposed social responsibility to show other voters who I won’t be voting for by showing who I will be voting for. And I thought I would do my bit to show democracy in action.

This has turned into a crazy by-election with six candidates, including UKIP. The BNP canvassed out house again last week. This time the pamphlet was slightly more sophisticated than the last one (sophistication relative to the BNP). They are really trying to push it. Hope Not Hate came around as well with the headline DON’T VOTE FOR SCUM on the front of their leaflet (not so hopeful a headline).

Anyway, away from the election mania, here is a picture I took of the bluebells in Wanstead Park last night (it was taken on a mobile phone). We bumped into a couple who said they had lived in Wanstead for 17 years and had never known about the bluebells! They may have been more excited about the blackberries that come out by the lake in the autumn, but we forgot to mention that.

At The Friends Meeting House...

An anecdote to share from ten minutes out of my day today:

Walking down Euston Road on my way to see a friend at The Welcome Trust, I happened to spot the administrative centre of Quakers in Britain. Curious, I stepped inside.

People were filing out of the main Friends meeting hall and into the lobby. In the lobby was a table playing host to what looked like electioneering pamphlets. Almost all of the leaflets were anti-EU on one subject or another. I looked around at the well-dressed crowd milling about the lobby – probably all of them over 35 and mostly Caucasian. Some of them were wearing badges with CIB written on them. Who on earth were these people?

I searched out the friendliest face in the room – an elderly man standing alone by the door – and asked him. Funnily enough, he was a Quaker and nothing to do with the CIB lot (he was there for another meeting in a smaller hall). CIB, it turns out, stands for Campaign for an Independent Britain.

I asked the man what the Quakers had to do with the CIB group. Nothing. They had just rented out the hall to them. He explained he didn’t know what the vetting procedure for renting out the hall was, but that they (The Quakers) were quite desperate for money.

I said I hoped they would draw the line at the BNP. He said he was sure there weren’t any BNP members there. He also said the CIB group hadn’t filled the hall; there were probably around 100 of them.

I had another browse of the table and a man behind it spoke to me. It turned out he was author Philip Foster, a sceptic of man-made climate change whose books include, "Sustainability – The New Religion” and “Evidence For The Reliability Of The New Testament”. He was there to promote his latest book, “While The Earth Endures”, which contains a forward by climate change sceptic, David Bellamy. Philip was also a CIB member.

I had never heard of him, so I asked him what he thought caused climate change. He said it was mainly radioactive energy from sunspots, completely outside mankind's control, and that CO2 played only a miniscule part. He told me that it was worth looking up the International Conference on Climate Change held in New York last month (which I hadn’t heard of) as opposed to the Copenhagen Conference (which I had). The New York Conference, I discover from google search, was a large gathering of global warming sceptics.

Philip also laid into the 2007 IPCC report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), saying the number of scientists who believed climate change was man-made had been incorrectly reported by the cobbling together of signatures.

He chose to close his argument by showing me pictures from his book of 16th century landscapes where the painter had depicted overcast skies. During that period, he said, sunspot activity was low and we were experiencing a Little Ice Age.

It could just have been that the artist liked painting overcast skies, but I didn’t fork out for the book to find out more.

British National Party Canvass Our House

Last night when I came home my jaw dropped when I saw an electioneering pamphlet from the British National Party on the table in the hall where our post sits. This, to my knowledge, is the first time they have stood for election in the ward where I live (we are having a by-election on April 23).

The headline for the flyer was a quote by a mum to a local newspaper: “My daughter seems to know a lot about Eid and Diwali, but if I ask her about Jesus, she looks at me like I am mad.”

The inference is that Christianity is exclusively western, that Jesus was Caucasian and Britain has a monopoly on him.

Jesus was Jewish, which is probably news to the BNP. He also taught people to love their neighbour as themselves.

The problem with refuting the illogical arguments of the BNP is whether it is giving them the publicity they so crave. I think that it is a judgement call to make depending on the circumstance. Holocaust denier David Irving debating at Oxford University in 2007 is a case in point. I agreed with the Union’s decision to allow him to debate because it would enable his arguments to be knocked down one after another in the chamber and the protests outside the Union would illustrate the strength of feeling against him. But he is not the kind of speaker who should be invited to debate on a privileged platform on a regular basis.

Using the vote to fight against extremism is certainly one reason to get down to the polling booth on Election Day.