Tim Collard was one of our men in Peking for many years before becoming HM Consul-General in Hamburg until his retirement. He is fluent in both German and Mandarin and now forms a part of the Oxford Union in exile which meets up every Wednesday evening in an Edinburgh swill shop to discuss matters of great weight and drink beer. He has resolved to enjoy a long retirement at the expense of the hard working family taxpayers of Nuneaton.
Tim Farron, the newly-elected Liberal Democrat leader, has been targeted with an obvious and predictable cheap-shot. Mr Farron is a
declared Christian, with his roots in the evangelical tradition. It is
well known that that tradition upholds a fairly conservative line on
sexual morality, one into which homosexuality does not – to put it at
its mildest – fit comfortably. To sum up, orthodox evangelicals believe
that sex outside heterosexual marriage is a sin, though – like other
sins – one which is readily forgiven by a merciful God. Knowing this,
certain cheap-shot merchants thought it would be funny and/or
‘challenging’ to ask Mr Farron the blunt and crass question “Do you
believe that gay sex is a sin?” in the hope that this would make him
wriggle amusingly.
Mr Farron, to his credit, refused to take
this rather stodgy bait. He was not prepared to answer. Of course this
is a game the shit-wit media can’t lose: if he’d answered, they’d be
able to twit him with his answer till Kingdom Come: if not, they could
bray “POLITICIAN REFUSES TO ANSWER QUESTION!” until they got bored.
(Personally, I’d have asked them precisely how a trend-crazed liberal
atheist defines the word “sin”, and persisted until I got a coherent
answer: but I, thank God, don’t have to try to get people to vote for
me.) Of course Mr Farron made it clear that he did not see it as any
part of his faith to force his views on others, and had no intention of
changing his party’s impeccably liberal policies: but that wasn’t
enough. He was portrayed as sounding homophobic, censorious and, worst
of all in Zeitgeistworld, ‘outdated’. (May I solicit the help of all
right-thinking persons in expelling that word, and anyone who uses it
seriously, from the public discourse? It’s not as if the world of the
21st century is anything to write home about.)
A few years ago,
the generally sensible Matthew Parris got his knickers into a fearful
twist over precisely this issue. The Italians, who tend on the whole to
be not entirely free from Catholic influence, had nominated as a
European Commissioner a man with the delightfully appropriate name of
Buttiglione. Signor Buttiglione, more candid than Mr Farron felt able to
be, said quite simply that he personally endorsed what he saw as the
orthodox Catholic belief that homosexual activity was a sin. Not
unreasonably, he was then asked whether or not he supported any kind of
legal sanctions against homosexuality. Equally clearly and candidly, he
stated that he did not, and made a clear distinction between a sin and a
crime. This was not enough for Mr Parris, who started to eject the
playthings from the perambulator. “I won’t tolerate anyone in authority
who won’t tolerate me!” he bawled, completely ignoring the fact that
Signor Buttiglione had explicitly committed himself to toleration. What
Mr Parris actually meant was that he wasn’t prepared to tolerate anyone
disapproving of any aspect of his activities and lifestyle.
Well,
one might say, surely it is understandable to resent people disapproving
of one’s private beliefs and actions, particularly in such an intimate
sphere? How would I like having my sex life disapproved of by people in
positions of authority? Well, I wouldn’t. But then, to be honest, I
don’t want anybody, in or out of positions of authority, approving of my
sex life either. It is none of their business, or anybody else’s
either, apart from mine and that of those with whom I choose to share
it. There may be accounts to be settled on the Day of Judgment. All I
require in the interim is to be left alone and not subjected to any
externally imposed sanctions.
Let’s get this straight: tolerance
involves not interfering with others when they behave in a way of which
you disapprove. If you don’t disapprove of anything, you can’t claim to
be tolerant. (You’re just one of those people whose minds are so open
their brains fall out.) ‘Liberals’ – by which I mean slaves of the
Zeitgeist rather than members of Tim Farron’s party – don’t understand
tolerance. They think that if you just “tolerate” something that is not
enough. You have to approve of it as well. And so, your pukka
Zeitgeister liberal approves of everything – except, of course, things
that cannot be approved of. And if you disapprove of something, such as
smoking tobacco, mentioning the name of God in the public sphere, or
using words that someone somewhere has declared taboo, then you jolly
well don’t tolerate it either.
