Peter Hitchens Accuses Mathew Parris of Misrepresenting His Veiws, And then Does Just That to Bob Ainsworth.

Peter Hitchens has got into a bit of a right old ding dong with Matthew Parris over him apparently misrepresenting his views on homosexuality on some debate they had. He has used his blog and column to continually call on Parris to apologise to him in a very public manner. It has the ring of a bit of a creepy spurned lover [on Hitchens part] being a bit weird and obsessive to their former partner. I half expect Matthew Parris to write to Peter telling him to back off and get over it. Something like:

Dear Peter

I know you got hurt and all, nut please man get some perspective. I also know that you have been breaking into my house when I am at work at the Times, I know that you are upset and all but please stop rifling through my draws and trying on all my underpants. That's crossing the line old boy. Take a holiday, Fallaraki is cracking this time of year. Eric Pickles got so pissed last year he tried to have a fight with a fruit machine and then fell asleep on the main road, pissed himself as well, it was proper funny! You'd love it you old rum cove!

Kind Regards my old mucker

Matt.

To be fair having what you said being misrepresented is not nice. I could see how he would be put out by it. So I'm sure that Britain's most supreme arbitrator of right and wrong in the entire world would never misrepresent the views of someone else, after he was peeved that it may have happened to him?

Er no:

Hitchens is cheesed off at Bob Ainsworth for calling for the legalisation of drugs. Now on its own that isn't exactly a big shock, Hitchens is very anti drugs legalisation of any kind. Now that in itself isn't a crime. Drugs is a hot political potato, as a polemic columnist he has the right to proclaim his view on how drugs should be handled, indeed he wouldn't be dong his job otherwise. It is how he attacks Bob Ainsworth that I feel is unfair:

"But they will earn him the curses of parents whose children’s lives have been – or are yet to be – ruined by drugs, and of a society which will find out too late what it is like to live in a state where pleasure and self-stupefaction have driven out self-discipline and the work ethic.
What, you may wonder, leads a middle-aged white-collar trade unionist into the wacky world of drug legalisation?

(You're a fucking journalist, find out by reading what he said then.)

I have no idea. Was it something they discussed during those meetings of the International Marxist Group that Mr Ainsworth once attended? Or is the moustache a giveaway?

Like so many of his age group, did Mr Ainsworth see the 1967 release of Sergeant Pepper – and the druggies’ anthem A Day In The Life – as a seminal moment in the cultural revolution?
Does he imagine himself sitting among the Fab Four, suspended above reality atop a sweet-smelling cloud? It would explain a lot."

In light of what is said by this article, and that saying a mans moustache means he must be an evil communist usurper is the most stupid thing ever committed to a blog in history - this seems like an unfair assessment of Ainsworths comments and why he supports legalisation. When you hear about the appalling violence in Mexico that is down to fighting the war on drugs, and the successes in Portugal which has taken a much more liberal approach to policing drugs, then he is absolutely bang on to put the case for liberalising the drugs laws (aren't politicians accused of all sounding alike anyway?). Hitchens wants to portray the pro legalisation lobby as a bunch of selfish hedonists who want to legalise drugs so they can sit on a beach spliffed up at 4 in the morning, discovering the most profound existential answers by staring for a long time at a deck chair. Might some people actually come round to thinking that prohibition is actually causing more harm than the drugs they are supposed to stop? Saying that Ainsworth wants either a stupefied population, or wants to legalise them to smoke pot and pretend to smoking a spliff with the Beatles on cloud is dare I say it;- misrepresenting what he actually said. And we all know that is bad, especially if you are demanding an apology from someone you said did just that to you.

Peter is the Gift that keeps on Giving Part II

Peter Hitchens is rather surprisingly; not a bad writer. His foreign correspondant pieces tend to be pretty good for one thing, his book "The Broken Compass" isn't bad either, even though his beliefs are not my cup of tea, but then we do have freedom of speech so there ain't much I can do about that. As a columnist though he does seem to be increasingly lazy and cliched, his polemics are sometimes so silly, I actually suspect he is just Poe's lawing his own column in the Mail on Sunday. So it is perhaps why we end up with articles like this one.

Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot.

In one sense I can see why he may have indulged in this sort of thing. The Mails increasingly elderly and right wing readership often seem to have a bit of an axe to grind in regards to yoof. I don't think I am wide off the mark saying that a lot of this is down to a lot of these bitter and disappointed people trapped by the dreary hard right conservatism that they would like to impose on us all -being jealous of a more dynamic and opportunity laden younger generation. But that really doesn't excuse Peter asking the stupidest rhetorical question ever asked by a human in the opening part of his anti - university screed.

"What are universities for anyway?"

They're there to stop the clouds falling out of the sky Peter.

"I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotsky­ist troublemaker at the taxpayers’ expense, completely neglecting my course."

Just because he pissed around being a plazzy Lenin, doesn't mean everyone else will. Students are more likely to work harder now anyway, what with fees going up. Fees Hitchens never was landed with.

"I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remed­ial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way."

Oh, the "university of life" rant. I don't doubt real world experience is very important, but you don't become a brain surgeon, or an engineer, or learn about particle physics on the street, and many other important careers that make our world go round. You learn them at university, in academic disciplines.

"And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school."

Young people do all of the above outside of uni as well. Some of freshers week isn't pretty, but you don't have to take part if you don't want to.

"And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place"

Loosely translates into:- they teach stuff in a way Peter Hitchens doesn't like.

"Rather than putting an entire generation in debt, the time has come to close most of our universities and shrink the rest so they do what they are supposed to do – educating an elite in the best that has ever been written, thought and said, and undertaking real hard scientific research."

That would be a bit of a silly thing to do. We live in a knowledge based economy, we have little in the way of manufacturing jobs, not to mention competition from South East Asia in intellectual fields. I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to do this.

"Or do these places exist only to hide the terrible youth unemploy­ment that is a result of having a country run by graduates?"

Playing the anti intellectual card again. I'll let you into a secret Peter. Politicians who have few qualifications are just as likely to fuck stuff up as those that are highly qualified. For all I know, they'd probably be more likely. Running a country isn't easy. Why is there this ridiculous notion that highly educated people are somehow less qualified to seek office than some bloke off the street?

Peter is the Gift that keeps on Giving

Last post, I touched upon the findings of the possible genetic link to ADHD, and what that could mean for our societies outlook on behavioural problems, and indeed criminality and deviance. I said that religious people may have difficulty swallowing this, as columnists such as Peter Hitchens have shown when they have reacted in their columns on the issue. The Judeo Christian concept of sin and fallen man and free will explaining away theodacity are contradicted by genetic theories of behaviourism in humans, and we know which trumps which in the reasoning of the devout. It could go someway to explaining why someone like Hitchens who believes that evil, and souls and sin are physically manifest -is resistant to this sort of stuff, as well as his dislike for anti - depressant use. So it is no surprise that he gave his tuppenceworth this week in response to the findings. As it is quite short I'll reproduce it here:

"The latest propaganda for the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’ was torn to shreds on Radio 4’s Today programme by Oliver James, despite highly unhelpful interruptions by the presenter Justin Webb, who gave the pro-ADHD spokeswoman a free run. ‘Evidence’ of a genetic link is nothing of the sort.

(THAT TODAY DEBATE IS HERE AT 2:21:00 INTO THE PROGRAMME)

Even if it were, the fanatics who want to drug normal children and excuse our society’s selfish, horrible treatment of them, have to solve this problem. How can you have a ‘genetic link’ to a complaint for which there is no objective diagnosis? What is it linked to?"

"Evidence" he is very reticent to highlight in the article, and that James does not cite the sourse of in the interview. He is right it isn't "evidence" of a direct link between the gene studied and ADHD, just that there was a possible causal link discovered, which the researchers have admitted. Hitchens has only a rudimentary grasp of how science works, in his mind it must either be a direct link or not at all. All or nothing, which is pretty much counter to the way the incremental scientific method often operates.

"What is it linked to?" he asks, in regards to something that has no concrete objective diagnosis. Well the answer to his rhetorical question is the criteria put down by comparing case study notes of disorders like this, to come up with as close as a set of coherent symptoms to identify and provide diagnostic criteria for a disorder that has certain common similar behavioural patterns in different people. It's actually quite common that scientific terms may not have a cast iron objective definition that encompasses them all. For instance there is no fully objective criteria to identify something as a metal, and no rigid set of properties that define a celestial body as a planet, but we don't just say "fuck it, they don't exist then." Hitchens absolutist stance on everything shows how little he actually grasps what science is.

I just really get so hacked off with these pundits who play all these ad hominem, straw men - bum brained philosophical parlour games to make themselves look cleverer than they are, about stuff they know nothing about. It's purely because ADHD and genetic theories of behaviour don't fit into Hitchens world view, nothing more - that he opposes them and calls those who dent this view as "fanatics". Should stop trying to make out that his articles are something they aren't

Don't hold your breath!

Oh Peter Hitchens, when will you learn?

I want to start off by saying that I don't have a Peter Hitchens obsession. I don't hang around his house. I don't want to steal his clothes off his washing line to keep as little souvenirs. I have no intention of turning this blog into a line by line rebuttal of everything he ever commits to his word processor. However when he starts pulling these articles out of his arse. I feel honour bound to step in.

More sex education means more teenage pregnancies. Always.

A pretty bold statement of fact if ever there was one. He goes on to say.

"Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it"

He means in the context of these figures from the Office of National Statistics, that in 2007 the number of teen pregnancies in the UK has risen (albeit very slightly. 1 baby born per 1000 to mothers aged 15 to 17.). However the figures seem to contradict some of what Peter is saying, by showing that overall teen pregnancies have been dropping since 2002, with 2007 being a slight blip in the trend. (see the graph below, orange line.) His claim perhaps carries some validity if you take into account that the government wanted (but didn't reach) to halve teenage pregnancy by 2010. (from 1999 levels) An ambitious goal, but in all fairness, reducing teenage pregnancy requires concerted long term effort, and ground root social shifts. This will be a long time on going work in progress.

This has obviously been pounced on by elements of the press as concrete evidence of council estates brimming with a huge army of slaggy chavettes, popping out sproglets and being paid a million pounds in benefits, free fags and cider, and YOUR paying, do you hear middle England? In fact it only really shows that the numbers of conceptions, which are in a fairly stable declining trend since 2002, have fluctuated upwards for 2007, before regressing back to trend. But as we know statistical analysis will always take a back seat to Fleet Street sermonising about this issue. Sermonising like this.

"Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.
In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time."

I don't really need to paste much more. It's the same old straw man, slippery slope, their having abortions in assembly these days type of article that have been duly trotted out in the press, since as long as I can remember. The dogs comment is irrelevant anyway, all mammals produce the same sort of reproduction based hormones, so yeah they work pretty well across the spectrum. It seems there may be undertones that he thinks that teenage girls who get pregnant are somehow bestial and "improper". All this is beside the point of the article if we are really honest. The last two words are what it is really about.

"Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality."

I thought he directed "Howard the Duck". His opening statements are so falsifiably shoddy, and the reasoning in the rest of the article is so convoluted, I am pleased that he gets slammed in the comments to the article (and boy there can be some real mindfuckery on display there sometimes.)

"Mr. Hitchens is disingenuous when he argues that sex education in schools has failed to stop the national illegitimacy rate climbing to 46%. Classroom sex education is designed to stop childhood pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections, not to dissuade or stigmatise the many stable cohabiting adult couples whose families are presumably acceptable to Daily Mail readership in all but their lack of church and/or state approval.
As for sex education being advocated exclusively by "militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life", this could only be believed by someone who prefers manufactured simplification to reflecting on the real world. Most parents I know prefer schools to teach their offspring some of the biological basics. Sometimes this is due to haziness about some of the finer points of biology (the same reason why we are also sometimes happier about the teaching of first aid and cooking in schools). Sometimes it is sheer embarrassment. These reasons may well be deplorable on other grounds, but they are not evidence of militant leftism. A further reason, laudable from virtually all caring and responsible viewpoints, is that should parents' attempts to instill a sound sexual morality fail, they would rather deal with the emotional fallout without the added disaster of pregnancy.
Oversimplification is usually required to fuel the baser emotions of political reaction, but hopefully most readers will in this particular case have developed an immunity to it through contact with everyday life"

"This column on sex education contains so much misinformation, bias, and slanderous opinions stated as fact that I would hope that most readers would reject it, but I will comment anyway. Notice that he credits a nasty reign with dreaming up the idea and blames liberals for pushing the idea and offers only his own opinion, no references, that the programs always fail. In fact, here in Texas, we have no sex education (or actually are only allowed to teach "abstinence" if anything is taught and we have the highest teen pregnancy and highest second teen pregnancy rate in the country. This program was rammed through by people who believe Hitchen does (along with trying to get creationism into the biology books while already keeping evolution out.) States, such as Wisconsin, which have good well balanced sex education programs have much lower teen pregnancy rates (and lower abortion percentages in the population.) About the only statistic Hitchen actually offers is that the "illegitimacy rate" for one area rose from under 8% to over 40%, but he fails to define whether that applies only to teens or omits the likely fact that as time has passed an increasing number of people of all ages are living in an unmarried but permanent joining, so he may be reporting on a population 10 or 20 years ago that has now grown to adulthood (beyond teens) having children without "benefit" of marriage while those that thought "illegitimacy" was humiliating have grown beyond baby producing age and thus out of the statistics.
And like our abstinence-pushing, information-denying folk, it does not make it clear when young people who plan on holding off until marriage and then not having children immediately are going to learn that birth control is a possibility in arranging their family growth. Or is that a liberal "sin" also?"

"The annual number of teenage pregnancies in the UK has fallen by 13% since 1998, so more sex education clearly doesn’t “always” mean more teenage pregnancies.
The government has indeed failed to meet its own very ambitious target, but there has nevertheless been a significant move in the right direction.
The country with lowest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe is the Netherlands, which has plenty of sex education in its schools.
No doubt there are many reasons for the differences between the UK and the Netherlands, but sex education does not seem to be one of them.
Everyone learns about sex from a variety of sources, and a country’s attitudes to sex have many influences. Sex education in schools is just one aspect of this, and almost certainly not the most significant."

"Peter, sex education has indeed failed but not for the reasons that you state. In my view its failure can be seen in the number of men who die unnecessarily of bladder, prostate and testicular cancer because they are too embarrassed to see a doctor and so leave it to late. My brother works in a comprehensive school and recently they had to take a teenage boy to hospital; he was in agony with a strangulated testicle (caused by a sporting injury) and had done nothing for days because of embarrassment.
If sex education was working boys and girls, men and women would have no problems seeking medical help for problems "down there". I am a middle aged man who has to attend regular urology clinics and have done for 20 years. I know the frustration that staff feel when cancer is left untreatable because of late diagnosis. I believe that gynaecologists and obstetricians and constantly amazed at the ignorance of women and what has to be explained to them. Again a sign of the failure of sex education.
For those who say there should be no sex education and that it should be left to parents should look at the story of the Rev Chad Varah and why he set up the Samaritans. The main reason was that he and his clergy friends were fed up of carrying out the funerals of teenage girls who had committed suicide after menstruation; the girls wrongly thought that they had some terrible, shameful illness. The Samaritans started as a sex advice line; dealing with more general causes of suicide came much later.
So to be against sex education per se I can not agree with. Wanting it to be more about health, understanding medical issues and having a moral element I can agree with."

Now don't get me wrong. I not being flippant about teenage pregnancy. (nor do I condemn them all as sponging slags either.) Even the staunchest advocates of sexual libertarianism will agree that at the very least, 15 and 16 year old girls should go and live life for a while before faffing around with bottles and shitty nappies. Then there's the psychological burden of parenthood/pregnancy at a young age, and the disruption to studies and work that a baby brings. I have no problem with anyone highlighting these to teenagers. But that isn't what Hitchens is concerned with. (He doesn't seem concerned with evidence to back his claims up either. But what's new there?) He is hiding behind a legitimate (but smaller than many actually think) social issue, to promote his fundamentalist Christian philosophy. Attacking those who teach sex education as "educational smut" peddlers, and Marxists, is particularly objectionable. It has nothing to do with genuine concern for teenagers, and everything to do with his own evangelical baggage. We must remember that "sex education" is a broad term anyway. You could argue that teaching the Karma Sutra (I doubt very much this happens in the PSE lessons of secondary schools) is sex education, but then so is explaining the general biology of sex organs, and STD's (I'd think most 16 year old lads would flinch at what a male smear test entails.), and even womens rights. It's amazing how sex education is malleable enough a term to mean whatever a pundit wants it to mean. My own take is that in the real world, teenagers are going to get their info either from unsolicited playground gossip, pornos, or from sex education lessons by professionals. I know which I think is the best source.

The only thing Intelligent Design expels is oh yeah - Science.

I write this short post with a sense of unease. Peter Hitchens has written an article on Intelligent Design on his blog page. Firstly this has made Peter Hitchens, a repeat offender which is a pretty impressive achievement for only 10 postings on quite varied topics, and I'd hate to think I was seen to be singling him out. Secondly Peter seems not to understand (or possibly he's deliberately distorting the issue to be contrarian. I don't know.) either what evolution is, and how science works, which is a bit of a bummer if you writing about both of these. So you have to give him credit for the sheer brass ballsed chutzpah of going ahead with it anyway.

The article concerns the DVD release in the UK of a 2008 documentary Expelled, a "documentary" about how proponents of Intelligent Design are being hounded out of the scientific establishment, by a shadowy cabal of the high priests of the orthodox Darwinians, and yes the Nazi's were all influenced by Darwins theories as well. It's pretty much the usual charges put out by the ID lobby against Richard Dawkins and other well known evolutionary biologists. The film has been pretty much panned across the board (a lousy 10 % positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) as dishonest and mincing facts. There is a great story on the Pharyngula blog by PZ Myers, the author, on what happened when he went to see it. My stance on the ID lobby, is get some facts to back up your claims, and a your first ever scientifically peer reviewed paper published, before you start wanting acceptance in the greater scientific community. (Though I just cannot see how I.D can be called science at all! How (without saying God did it) do you terminate infinite regression, by explaining who designed the designer of stuff that by your own theory needed a designer to design? re-produce the designer in experimental conditions, and how can you objectively and analytically explain irreducibly complex things, if they are blooming irreducibly complex to begin with! You know the little things!)

Intelligent Design is silly and distracts from real science. (which is the primary issue I have with it.) It's simply semantic mischief, repackaging creationism, by being more coy about Gods role in the whole affair, with a fancy new name to try (it failed) and dodge the 1987 ruling in the US Supreme court that creationism violated the separation of church and state. It is primarily an American issue, which explains (not an attempt to shut off pro I.D literature as he claims) why Hitchens article complains about the lack of publicity (and published books by I.D proponents) of I.D in the UK. These local science "disputes" are nothing new, MMR scares are primarily confined to the U.K, and anti-retroviral treatment for AIDS is common in South Africa. I.D will probably largely remain on the fringes of the consciousness of most UK residents. (largely those educated in faith schools.)

I could if I wanted too, do a point to point rebuttal of what Hitchens has written in the article (there's tons of stuff on the web debunking the core arguments of I.D), but that would not be the point of what I think is my gripe about articles like this. I think this kind of article stems from a misunderstanding of how modern science operates. In common with many similar articles by journalists and layman climate change deniers, and anti-MMR supporters, they like to see themselves as brave dissenters, who are standing up to a cold an unaccountable scientific elite. A distant and orthodox agency who are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain their control over the brainwashed masses. They seem to think that "Scientific Consensus" is the same as "Conventional Wisdom" . Conventional wisdom occurs through anecdote and subjective analysis. Gut feeling and "commonsense approach". It can be right and indeed wise, but often wrong, misguided and a bad way to evaluate something. I have no complaint against those who tackle the wisdom of crowds head on, and know it doesn't always win you friends. Healthy skepticism is a great thing, and should be encouraged. But Scientific Consensus is something quite different. It is formed by peer reviewing, some of the most intense cross examination, and objective analysis there is out there. Challenging established knowledge and building on it. It also has the benefit of publishing its findings, you can be a part of it, if you want. I just don't see that happening in this article. When I read, this sort of thing:

"But it's plainly true that ID is an attempt to smuggle religion into the classroom - or at least the religious world view. Though it might more fairly be seen as an attempt to prevent the science curriculum from making metaphysical claims which it is not actually qualified to make. For the heart of this is the claim by 'science' that by explaining the operation of the universe it has explained its origin, and that there is and can be no explanation beyond the materialist one. ID casts doubt on that rather dubious claim, and so is Theistic by implication, just as modern science teaching is Atheistic by implication."

So there we are, Intelligent Design by his own admission - is to put religion back into science. I could point out the contradiction of saying science is dabbling in metaphysics, by teaching Darwinian evolution (which it isn't), and then saying science says nothing immaterial (by extension metaphysical) exists, but what would be the point? And that is what pisses me off about this stuff. This kind of thing distorts the public consciousness on science issues, when science is struggling to even get into the consciousness. This article has less to do with promoting debate, than trying to promote theology by the back door.

Peter Hitchens posts some pap about the Pope.

I'm convinced Peter Hitchens has to be some elaborate parody, mocking the very set of values he supposedly believes in, through the sheer silliness of his reasoning. Or an ultra devious fifth columnist designed to infiltrate right wing opinion from within and begin a campaign designed to undermine their beliefs through the sheer weight of the wackiness of his Mail on Sunday column. He doesn't just try and shoehorn logic and reason to try and support his beliefs, he actively dispenses with them completely if they have that damned inconvenient problem of negating everything he is trying to say. He does; and this is putting it mildly, have a liberal attitude to rational discourse (It's about the only liberal attitude towards something he holds!) And this is why we ended up getting this weeks freshly laid turd.

Actually, I am uneasy about the Pope telling us what to
do. This is part of being British, or was when I was growing up. I can still
recite great chunks of Tennyson’s wonderful Ballad Of The Fleet, all about Sir
Richard Grenville and the little ship Revenge, with her valiant Protestant crew,
fighting her unequal battle against the great sea-castles of King Philip, ‘the
Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain’

I doubt British Catholics see it that way. About the Tennyson poem. Yeah it's good at getting the action across. But it's loaded with anti-Catholic sentiment. The line quoted is one of the nicer "compliments" paid to RC's. Does he think Anti-Rome sentiment was/is a good thing?

I had relatives who viewed the Vatican as
Babylon. I was taught at school about Bloody Mary, 400 years later still a
loathed figure.

Yeah it's hard to like someone who burnt people alive for having the "wrong" belief. But does he think his ancestors hating Rome is a good thing?

Even now, I like to roll over my tongue the
defiant 37th of the English
Church’s 39 articles: ‘The Bishop of Rome hath
no jurisdiction in this Realm of
England.’

I bet Englands Catholics were pissing their
sides when that doctrine was put in.

Those who are outraged – or claim to be – about the
Pontiff’s warning from Rome
are trying to use a force they don’t really
sympathise with. My anti-Catholic
forebears were Cromwellian Puritans, and
would have loathed the sexual
revolution even more than they disliked the RC
Church

No I think you'll find they're a bit annoyed that the Pope is trying to use his office to give his church carte blanche to discriminate against gay people. People is the key word here. The anti-gay stance of some parts of Christianity is an idea. Yes I'm sure some folk are going to be put out that they may not be able to implement anti -gay policies because it's going against their beliefs. But for my money the welfare of people goes ahead of respecting to the letter peoples "beliefs". Not every idea or belief automatically has some entitlement to be respected or upheld. We must weigh up the cost of upholding a belief (which is a tiny tiny part of the Christian doctrine in the New testament) against the cost of the welfare of gay people, or any other group of people who may be threatened by an ideology. It really is for my money a one - way contest.

No what I really find offensive (not so offensive I would say he shouldn't write it. I'm not that much of a hypocrite as to undermine the point I'm making!) about this article, is that Hitchens probably wanked himself senseless over the self appointed cleverness of his article. He uses all the big words, name drops obscure poems, and religious laws. I'm sure he sees himself as a self styled fogeyish contrarian, sticking two fingers up at modern liberal society. He's the enlightened bible buff looking down on all of us godless, unenlightened proles. He might want to remember that when Europe really took this kind of thing seriously, lots of people on the "wrong" side ended up as human torches. It is actually insulting to the victims of this kind of mentality, to claim that religious intolerance is somehow admirable.