Saturday 28 February 2009

Germany may arrest Holocaust row bishop

Germany is considering issuing an arrest warrant for Bishop Richard Williamson over his controversial claim that no Jews died in the gas chambers during the Second World War.

The 69-year-old British-born bishop made the comments during an interview with Swedish television last year at a seminary for the ultra-orthodox Society of Saint Pius X in the Bavarian village of Zaitzkoven, near Munich.

Under German law denial of the Holocaust is illegal and an investigation was launched by prosecutors after the interview was broadcast last month.

Germany's Justice Minister, Brigitte Zypries, confirmed yesterday that officials were considering issuing a European Union-wide arrest warrant for Dr Williamson, who flew into Britain earlier this week after being expelled from the Argentine seminary where he had been living for much of the past five years.

Mrs Zypries said that if an arrest warrant is issued, Britain would be obligated to arrest the renegade cleric and extradite him to Germany under a European set of guidelines introduced last year to toughen up anti-racism and hate crime laws. Although Britain has no specific laws against denying genocides, in Germany Holocaust denial is punishable with up to three years in prison and because the comments were made in Germany, Dr Williamson may be liable for prosecution. Read more
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Friday 27 February 2009

Immigration is top issue for both Labour and Tory voters, YouGov poll shows

A Daily Telegraph/YouGov survey shows that it is the top concern that people want an incoming Conservative government to deal with.

Fifty-two per cent said they wanted a Tory administration to reduce immigration.

This week immigration figures revealed that one in nine people living in Britain was born overseas, highlighting a significant change in population make-up under Labour.

There were 6.5 million people born abroad who were resident in the UK in June 2008. This represented a rise of 290,000 on the previous year and 1.2 million since 2004.

The issue of foreign workers sparked strike action across the country when a refinery in Lincolnshire employed Italian workers to complete a contract, instead of using UK workers. Unions accused Gordon Brown of going back on his commitment to ensure there were "British jobs for British workers."

The issue caused consternation among many Labour MPs who watched their traditional supporters protesting so strongly against the Prime Minister. Read more
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Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns of surveillance culture

Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country's privacy watchdog has warned.

Richard Thomas told The Times that “creeping surveillance” in the public and private sectors had gone “too far, too fast” and risked undermining democracy.

The Information Commissioner warned that proposals to allow widespread data sharing between Whitehall and the private sector were too far-reaching and that plans to create a giant database of every telephone call, e-mail and text message risked turning everyone into a suspect. “In the last 10 or 15 years a great deal of surveillance in public and private places has been extended without sufficient thought to the risks and consequences,” said Mr Thomas, 59. “Our society is based on liberty and democracy. I do not want to see excessive surveillance hardwired into British society.” Read more
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Lesbian couple win fertility bid

A lesbian couple have won the right to NHS treatment to help them have a baby after threatening to sue health chiefs.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (GGC) had denied Caroline Harris and Julie McMullan IVF treatment as they were not classified as an infertile couple.

The health board said it had reviewed its position in light of regulations, including the Equality Act.

The women, who were suing the health board for treatment costs, have not decided whether to accept the decision. Read more

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Britain's Anti-Christian Kulturkampf

[...] One need not be paranoid to see that a deliberate war is being waged in Britain to destroy Christianity and Britain's Christian identity.

The actual intelligence directing this war is not so easy to see, however. None of the agencies responsible for the above cases is directly part of the national government, which answers ultimately to electors, whose Members sit in Parliament and comprise the Ministries and Cabinet. The apparatchiks responsible for these and countless similar acts tend to inhabit not in the Parliament of Westminster but local authorities and quasi-governmental agencies, hard to pin down, hard to call to account, and very hard indeed to tip out at elections.

This is not to say the government has not condoned them -- the Prime Minister or other ultimately responsible ministers could in each case have intervened with a telephone call or word to their departmental head, but did not. Certainly the allegedly highly religious (and now Catholic convert) Tony Blair did nothing that one could detect to stop such things -- and there were already then hundreds of such incidents -- when he was Prime Minister. The links with the Government are there, but they are fudged and deniable.

Shortly before Christmas a leading Labour Party-aligned think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, recommended that Christmas, if it cannot be obliterated, should be down-graded to promote multiculturalism. It said that because it would be hard to "expunge" Christmas from the national calendar (although this would apparently be desirable), public organizations must be made to give non-Christian religious festivals equal footing. [Ed: Actually, one of the report's authors denies this, but a summary of the report, which makes for interesting reading, can be downloaded by clicking here.]

The report was commissioned when Nick Pearce, who became head of public policy in the Prime Minister's Office, was the Institute's director. He has been described as "One of the leading policy-makers in Great Britain." Much of this activity, such as attempts to ban calling certain well-known holidays "Christmas" and "Easter," has been carried on by Labour-controlled councils, though many other councils involved are under the control of the trendy-left Liberal Democrats, such as Islington, where a Church of England school was ordered to drop the word "Saint" from its name. Some councils involved are even under Tory control.

Plainly there is more to it than Christianity. But here Christianity is the canary in the coal-mine. Non-believers also have cause to be deeply alarmed (certainly, too, Jews have cause -- anti-Semitism is increasingly tolerated and legitimized, but that is another story). There is really no longer even a pretence that what is under way under the slogan of Celebrating Diversity is anything but a massive kulturkampf aimed at creating a new Homo Britannicus. Traditional political processes of Parliament, votes, and even parties seem barely relevant.

So far, while many people are plainly angry and protesting, much of the reaction seems to be bewilderment. "Political correctness gone mad!" is a description used beyond the point of cliché for countess such outrageous incidents -- but if it is madness it is a very clever, cunning and strategically-conscious madness. Read more
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The Anglican Covenant: A House on Sand

As the March 9th deadline approaches for Provincial responses to the Covenant Design Group, an odd but telling paradox is emerging; in order to stabilise the Anglican Communion, it seems essential that the Covenant’s biblical foundations should be weak. During debate at the Church of England’s General Synod earlier this month, the Archbishop of Canterbury articulated a view which resonates with many in the liberal leaning Churches of the Communion when he stated that the Covenant is ‘part of an ongoing inquiry of what a global Communion might look like.” and “At every stage it is something which churches voluntarily are invited to enter into."

But how is this weakness? Is it not simply a commitment to listening with a generous spirit? Experience of the ‘listening process’ over the past ten years has taught the orthodox to be wary as in practice it has served to subvert discipline and lend credence to false teaching. And this persistent impression can’t be waved aside as the suspicious interpretation of those opposed to the revisionist agenda. Paul Elie in his March Atlantic Monthly article ‘The Velvet Reformation’ praises Rowan Williams for ‘prodding the communion toward acceptance of gay clergy’ as he doggedly persists in trying to keep everyone at the table.

The particular danger of this emphasis upon relationship and process rather than confessional integrity is that the orthodox become acclimatised to a church culture which dulls their biblical awareness. GAFCON clearly represents a significant break with that culture, but resisting it is a continual discipline and a recently released video of an interview with Dr J I Packer helps to keep things in proper context.

In a discussion about the difference between first and second order issues, he says that the closest parallel with the current crisis in the Anglican Communion is not even the Reformation, but the Arian controversy of the fourth century which threatened to undermine the whole Church through the denial of the incarnation. Even more striking than this parallel however is the strength of Dr Packer’s feeling; when asked how he feels, he says he is sick at heart, deliberately echoing the distress of the prophet Jeremiah (8:18) at the rebellion of God’s people and its destructive consequences. Read more



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Wednesday 25 February 2009

Are we losing our religion?

[...] My own church-going ended a long time ago. Funerals, increasingly these days, and the occasional wedding are the only times I darken their doors.

A loss of faith, Darwin, Einstein and the evil that men do lured me away from the Catholic church and religion generally.

In this I cannot be alone but neither will “losing my religion” cover the millions no longer attending church.

All over the country evangelical churches are thriving – some of the bigger ones have thousands in unison praising the Lord loud and proud.

What’s more, each God-fearing member puts their money where their faith is with a tithe exacted (a tenth of their earnings) and passed to their church and its pastors.

And that’s not mentioning the other two Abrahamic religions.

Judaism and Islam have never been healthier or with followers more enthusiastic about their respective beliefs. In the United States followers of right wing Christianity have never been more numerous – and, interestingly enough, matching Catholicism like-for-like in its homophobic and anti-abortion stance.

Each attract extremist elements while effectively communicating with their followers.

In the Catholic church an increasingly distant Pope Benedict XVI selects a Holocaust denier for high office and preaches a need for Europe to return to fundamental Christianity and turn away from secularism.

And, whereas the Holy Father will have his supporters in a church that boast almost 1.5billion members, his power and influence among the rank and file in England is waning.

As presumably is the Queen’s ability to rally middle England to the pews.

Again this cannot be the full story but only a part of a general malaise that sees the Catholic and English churches fall out of fashion.

The history of religion is littered with those that have fallen by the wayside.

However, “new churches” clearly indicate there is a need among people for a Christian belief structure.

Shunning rigid, traditional religions that have somehow lost touch with their flocks perhaps ironically, in the Catholic church’s case by a slackening of the “rules”, is an indication, at least in England, of a reduced dependency on organised religion.

Meanwhile there seems to be a growing need for a Christianity perceived as having a greater bearing upon individual needs.

Despite my own lack of a belief system, I am forever locked into the Catholic church.

Some of my best friends and the most interesting people I have ever met are left-footers.

My affinities and sympathies in my ancestral Ireland are with the Green side of the divide and I will forever argue the case against “our” oppression.

And, in a strange way, I miss the rhythm of the liturgical year where life isn’t governed by secular “feasts” such as Mothers’ Day and Easter eggs in the shops in January.

Just don’t ask me to go to church. Read more
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Is the liberal tide in the Church of England beginning to ebb?

In contrast to the bad natured meeting of July last year, this week’s General Synod of the Church of England has passed off not only peacefully, but also with a significant step forward for those who want to see the Church of England recover its confidence in the gospel. A motion (1) by lay member Paul Eddy affirming the uniqueness of Christ was agreed with 283 votes in favour and only 8 against.

Its significance was not lost on journalist Ruth Gledhill of the London Times who was quick to claim, under the headline ‘Anglicans called on to convert non-Christian believers’, that ‘The established Church of England put decades of liberal-inspired political correctness behind it in a move that led one bishop to condemn in anger the “evangelistic rants”. ‘

There was much resistance to this motion even coming to Synod, which is hardly surprising bearing in mind that in a 2002 poll of nearly 2,000 of the Church’s 10,000 clergy by Cost of Conscience, only half believed faith in Christ to be the only route to salvation. Paul Eddy himself in an interview shortly before the debate said ‘’there is good evidence to suggest that in many dioceses they [the diocesan bishops] say all faiths lead to God, therefore leave them [members of other faiths] alone.’

The success of the motion is all the more remarkable in that it goes against the grain of the general culture. Official attitudes to Christian witness in the UK are hardening and, to take one example of many, only today the London Daily Telegraph carries the story of a primary school receptionist now facing dismissal for seeking support from her church after her five-year-old daughter was reprimanded for talking about Jesus in class.

So are we seeing a turn of the tide? Only time will tell, but if such a process is indeed underway in the Church of England, sadly it will be inhibited by the influence of Archbishop Rowan Williams. It is not of course that he would oppose the idea of the uniqueness of Jesus, but that it would lose its force and clarity in the broad delta of Dr Williams’ mind. Read more
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Anglican-Buddhist is elected Bishop in Northern Michigan

The Anglican Communion’s first Anglican-Buddhist Bishop was elected this week at a special convention of the Diocese of Northern Michigan. The sole candidate on the ballot, the Rev Kevin Thew Forrester received the support of 88 per cent of the delegates and 91 per cent of congregations, according to a diocesan news release.

The nomination of Fr Forrester sparked controversy last month, when the diocese announced that he was the sole candidate for election. Critics charged it was unseemly that a single candidate was chosen by the search committee — which included Fr Forrester among its members — to stand for election. Concerns were also raised about the suitability of a professed Buddhist who said he had received Buddhist “lay ordination” and was “walking the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism together” being consecrated a bishop. Read more
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How Britain's mosques foster extremism

As a child, I was unsure if I belonged to Britain, India - or both, or neither. In the day I went to a multifaith, multi-ethnic state school in the East End of London. At school I was taught to question, think and see all religions equally. In the evenings, I attended Koran schools at a mosque on Brick Lane where I was forced to learn to read Arabic, but not to understand meanings of words. I was not allowed to question, but simply to bob to and fro and learn Arabic prayers without understanding. All our teachers were elderly Asian immigrant men, and we were not allowed to mix with girls. At school, our teachers were mostly English women and we were encouraged to mix with everybody.

I developed two personalities, two worlds, two allegiances: one at “English school” and another at the mosque. I was torn, confused and full of questions. But what now? Two decades on, surely Britain's Muslims are in a better place.

Today, there are between 1,200 and 1,600 mosques in Britain - no definite figure exists. Yesterday, the Charity Commission sought to gloss over the malaise in them by publishing figures on attendance, but not inquiring into difficult areas. At Quilliam, Britain's first counter-

extremism think-tank, we commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 mosques in 2008, during Ramadan when mosques are busiest. Despite employing Urdu and Bengali-speaking researchers, we could poll only just over 500. Most British mosques don't maintain a reception or service to answer questions, and not every one we did reach was willing to answer.

Quilliam's report, Mosques Made in Britain, reveals the true extent of the mess. We found that 97 per cent of imams, or leaders, were from overseas and 92 per cent were educated abroad, mostly in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Almost all mosques are controlled by first-generation immigrant men, leaving most British Muslims - women and young people - out of the management structure. Read more
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Kim Sengupta: We let radical groups settle in our midst – so this is no surprise

The reports of British Muslims in Afghanistan is, in many ways, a natural progression in the march of the global Islamist jihad and should not come as a surprise.
Related articles

* Exclusive: Army is fighting British jihadists in Afghanistan
* David Miliband: The army alone cannot defeat this Taliban insurgency

It was, after all, the West, with the UK and US playing leading roles, which helped create the Muslim international brigade sent to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was encouraged to spend his family's money there by the Saudis who funded most of that particular jihad, and, in the turmoil that followed, the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, propelled the Taliban into power.

The Islamist fighters went back to their respective countries, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc, and some returned to their ordinary lives. Others went on to raise the banner of fundamentalism and some of them have returned to Afghanistan to fight the latest batch of infidels. The most well-known of these returnees is, of course, Bin Laden who went to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan in 1979. In 1990, he was back in Saudi Arabia as a hero, but, two years later, he fell out with the government and moved to Sudan. In 1996, he was forced to leave and returned to Afghanistan to join forces with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

Egyptian-born Abu Hamza al-Masri had always claimed that he had lost his hands and an eye fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Afterwards, he lived in Britain and Egypt. During that time, it is believed, he also visited militant training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Associates say his injuries were caused at an al-Qa'ida training camp in Afghanistan in a nitroglycerine accident

The UK had allowed some of these Islamists, of various nationalities, to settle in the country. The official explanation was that having the Islamist groups here would allow the security agencies to infiltrate and monitor them. Foreign governments repeatedly complained that acts of terrorism were committed by Islamist groups based in the UK. Mosque after mosque weas taken over in Britain, with moderate mainstream Muslims driven out. Read more
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Army is fighting British jihadists in Afghanistan

British soldiers are engaged in "a surreal mini civil war" with growing numbers of home-grown jihadists who have travelled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, senior Army officers have told The Independent.

Interceptions of Taliban communications have shown that British jihadists – some "speaking with West Midlands accents" – are active in Helmand and other parts of southern Afghanistan, according to briefing papers prepared by an official security agency.

The document states that the numbers of young British Muslims, "seemingly committed jihadists", travelling abroad to commit extremist violence has been rising, with Pakistan and Somalia the most frequent destinations.

MI5 has estimated that up to 4,000 British Muslims had travelled to Pakistan and, before the fall of the Taliban, to Afghanistan for military training. The main concern until now has been about the parts some of them had played in terrorist plots in the UK. Now there are signs that they are mounting missions against British and Western targets abroad. "We are now involved in a kind of surreal mini-British civil war a few thousand miles away," said one Army officer. Read more
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Tuesday 24 February 2009

Anglo-Catholics warned of split threat in UK

Sustained wrangling marred much of a Forward in Faith special post-General Synod assembly in London on Saturday as delegates argued over the nature and structure of a Church of England with female bishops.
Anglo-Catholics warned of split threat in UK

The traditionalists' divisions were notably on display as delegates clashed over whether parishes should be urged to withhold their quotas if insufficient protection is given to them if and when females start donning mitres.

The sharp differences caused one priest delegate - who asked not to be named - to be heard to say as the assembly ended: "Forward in Faith? It should be renamed Backwards in Bitterness."

And bitterness emerged just as the extraordinary assembly began. A surprise attempt to scupper the already prepared agenda for the gathering was made by the Rev Donald Minchew of the Southwark diocese.

In a caustic broadside evidently aimed at the movement's council, its governing body, he declared: "I really thought the days of the politburo were over."

This was a reference to the agenda providing for fewer than 90 minutes for questions - during an assembly set to last for five hours.

Fr Minchew ringingly added: "This [the agenda] is more tightly controlled than the result of a Russian general election."

But the move by the 60-year-old vicar of St Michael's, Croydon, got nowhere. When his "scrap the agenda so we can have more debate" demand was put to the vote only about a dozen hands were raised in support - and nearly 400 went up against.

Later clashing comments centred on what traditionalists consider to be an entirely inadequate code of practice which is being offered to protect them from women bishops. Read more
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Faith unites Mormon filmmaker and lesbian priest

Filmmaker Douglas Hunter didn't set out to befriend or even to film the Rev. Susan Russell when researching same-sex marriage for a new documentary, he told an audience at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, on February 22.

Rather, the 40-year-old father of three wanted to explore "the dynamic between religion and sexuality" and to engage those outside his own Mormon faith, which teaches that gay marriage is taboo.

Russell, 54, definitely fit the bill. The president of Integrity USA, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Episcopalians, she campaigned last year to defeat California's Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage that was heavily supported by the Mormon Church.

"I discovered Susan as I started researching … and it led me to this path," said Hunter who eventually joined anti-Prop 8 rallies and spoke out publicly against the measure. California voters approved the ban by a 52-47 margin in last November's election.

That path led to surprises for both Hunter and Russell. They discovered a lasting friendship, a commitment "to never give up on each other" and the realization for which the film is named, that throughout life, change is "The Constant Process." Read more
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Degrading lyrics linked to earlier teenage sex

Teenagers who listen to rap and pop songs with degrading sexual lyrics are more likely to engage in precocious sexual activity than their contemporaries who listen to songs that, though explicit, are not considered to be sexually degrading, a study claims.

Researchers say they have found a strong link between early sexual experiences and popular songs that have offensive lyrics which degrade people – usually women – in a sexually explicit manner.

They do not, however, have any evidence that it is the music causing teenagers to become sexually precocious, only that the two are likely to go together in a world where many youngsters spend more time listening to music than to studying at school. Read more
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Monday 23 February 2009

Cutting carbon is focus of Church of England's Lent initiative

Advice from a banking boss, the latest eco-technology in a country church, lifestyle pledges in the North East and a cut-carbon-not-chocolate challenge from church and government leaders including the Archbishop of Canterbury are just some of the ways the Church of England is putting a green stamp on Lent as part of its Shrinking the Footprint campaign.

Ed Miliband, U.K. secretary of state for energy and climate change, is joining Diocese of London Bishop Richard Chartres, chair of Shrinking the Footprint, and Diocese of Liverpool Bishop James Jones to launch Tearfund's Carbon Fast this Wednesday (February 25). Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is also supporting the fast which is calling for a cut in personal carbon use over the 40 days.

Banking boss Nick Robins, head of HSBC's Climate Change Centre of Excellence, is one of the high profile speakers at a series of events run in the Diocese of Southwark (Merton Deanery) at Holy Trinity, South Wimbledon to promote Green Faith in Lent. St. Mark's Wimbledon, also part of the deanery, has set up its own Christian Ecology group and has distributed free low-energy light bulbs around parishioners claiming state benefits. The group is also drafting a green-focus leaflet for Christians across Wimbledon with helpful environmental tips. Read more
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Sunday 22 February 2009

Andrew Marr on the real legacy of Darwin

[...] So is there any natural connection between Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' and human violence?

It seems to me a wild leap of logic to take his patient explanation of how so many extraordinary varieties of living thing could emerge, over countless millennia, and then turn it into a political philosophy for the here and now.

What happened was that his scientific case about the evolution of species was so strong that ideologues of all kinds tried to steal it and apply it to their own agendas.

Hitler's generals quoted Darwin as they planned the 'final solution'. Karl Marx claimed Darwin's book justified his vision of class war. Imperialist Britons, Americans and French thought Darwinism explained the extermination or subduing of lesser breeds.

Yet Darwin believed from the beginning that man was a single species. There is no get-out clause for racism in his writing.

Nor for selfishness, even though many Darwinists asked themselves why, if life was driven by the survival of our 'selfish' genes, we should be kind to strangers. Didn't evolution by natural selection add up to 'devil take the hindmost'?

One of the brilliant men who worked on this was George Price, an unstable American who devised a mathematical formula to explain altruism in terms of evolution. He found the idea that goodness could be so reduced intolerable. He converted to Christianity, gave all he had to the poor and ended up killing himself in a dismal squat in London.

Price might have done better had he considered that, though science can explain much about what we do, it cannot be a guide to our behaviour.

'Why' and 'ought' are different; explaining something does not make it right. Unlike bees, dinosaurs or broccoli, humans have self-consciousness. They can reflect on their 'natural' behaviour and change it for the better.

But there is one remaining large area of Darwin-in-politics which has caused intense argument and much suffering. It is the simple idea that, if it is possible to breed more muscled cows, or bigger strawberries, or cleverer sheepdogs, it must be possible to breed better people.

This idea, known as eugenics, a term thought up by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, categorised humanity into different classes, ranging from useless criminals to the most brilliant people.

Galton drew up plans for encouraging the clever and industrious to have more children - medals, free housing, subsidies - and raised the notion of stopping the feckless from breeding at all. In this way, he thought, a society might advance to happiness far more quickly.

In fact, there is no necessary connection between that idea and Darwinism. It could have emerged just as easily from studying racehorse stud books. Yet the prestige of Darwin's evolution by natural selection and fears of racial decline a century ago made eugenics hugely fashionable.

British liberal and socialist thinkers - people such as Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells - were fans of eugenics. For a while Winston Churchill was also keen, as was economist John Maynard Keynes. George Bernard Shaw talked with relish of using the 'lethal chamber' to kill off misfits.

In the end, Britain was lucky. Parliamentary wisdom overcame this excitable enthusiasm.

But in America eugenics was taken up keenly amid fears that the American 'race' was being spoiled by the arrival of idle, criminal and idiot immigrants. Read more

Or listen to my own Darwin, Dawkins and Dictatorships, here

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Parents told [by government]: avoid morality in sex lessons

Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, said educating older children and teenagers about sex had to be a process of negotiation. “We do not know what is right and wrong; right and wrong is relative, although your child does need clear guidelines,” she said.

Hughes said the government “doesn’t bring up children but . . . it does have a role to play in supporting parents and giving them access to advice and information”.

Labour’s attempts to cut the rate of teenage pregnancy through education are showing signs of faltering. From 1998 to 2006, the under-18 conception rate fell by 12.9% to its lowest level since the mid-1980s. But last year it began to edge up again. New figures will be announced this week. Read more
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Jade Goody, Archbishop Blake and the strange phenomenon of 'wandering bishops'

Jade Goody's marriage to Jack Tweed today will be blessed by the Archbishop of London. What do you mean, you've didn't know there was an Archbishop of London? There is indeed. He is the Most Rev Jonathan Blake, Primus of the Open Episcopal Church in Great Britain.

Let's get one thing straight. Archbishop Blake is not a "self-styled bishop": he once successfully sued a newspaper that used this dismissive term. You may have heard of him the other day, when he was in trouble for photographing his sons as they sat on the chimney of his modest archiepiscopal residence. He is the British head of one of hundreds of tiny denominations which have broken away from the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox Churches, but - because the line of consecration from one bishop to the next is unbroken - claim to possess valid orers. Read more
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