From Mr Giles Rowe SIR – David Cameron’s claim in his interview with BBC presenter Andrew Marr (Report, November 4) that “premier aid giver” Britain will be attaching more strings to its taxpayerfunded largesse in terms of “do you persecute people for their faith or their Christianity?” rings pretty hollow. Just as hollow, indeed, as his claimed concern at shockingly low adoption rates in Britain.
In 2007 Cameron voted for the sinister Sexual Orientation Regulations, or SORs. The SORs expose innocent people to prosecution simply by virtue of a homosexual or homosexual activist saying they are offended, regardless of whether any offence was in reality given. So much for the basic legal principle of intentionality.
The procedure is administered by Harassment Warning Notices, issued to the accused by the police purely on the say-so of the accuser. The accused has no access to an independent hearing, no means of denying the accusation and no way to clear their name. Fines and prison terms can be imposed if the warning is deemed not to have been heeded. It is the SOR legislation which caused the closure of the Catholic adoption agencies.
Britain is now one of the premier persecutors of Christians, with Cameron publicly declaring his support for gay “marriage”. It is already wellknown that any couple who refuse to declare a willingness to promote homosexuality to children in their care are excluded from adoption. This is tantamount to a shibboleth specifically designed to detect and exclude Christians. The absence of suitable adoptive parents is therefore largely down to exactly the bigoted anti-family ideology to which Cameron subscribes, and his double talk about supporting a diversity of family types is part of the mechanics of this marginalisation. It is not the deployment of taxpayers’ funds overseas that Britain’s Christians should be worrying about.
Yours faithfully, GILES ROWE London SW12 From Mr Anthony Hofler SIR – Robin Harris, in his mainly historical article about Conservatism and the Church (Feature, November 11), wrote that the single common interest of orthodox Christians in Britain is to halt and reverse the growing coercive power of the state, because otherwise it will “in today’s conditions” be misused at the Church’s expense.
That misuse is clear already, but the problem is not the state’s power but the fact that it is held by people whose attitudes contradict Church teachings. In my long experience, typical Catholics (ordained or lay) show no sign of even noticing that, far less an interest or practical effort to change it.
The state’s coercive power is useful to whoever can exert it. “In today’s conditions” our enemies use it against us. Instead of dismantling it and then, in better conditions some day, having to rebuild it in order to bolster the improvement, we should work (I emphasise work; it will not happen automatically) to get it into the hands of our friends.
Yours faithfully, ANTHONY HOFLER Wolverhampton, West Midlands