> But hey – there are three anti-Catholic threads running on LC at the moment, and only one antisemitic one!

And I’,m pretty sure that there has NEVER on LC been an anti-muslim, anti-hindu, anti-Buddhist thread.

Can’t even recall an anti-Iran one, or anti-Taliban…. but maybe I missed those

you are right, apologies. But the problem remains that the thinking behind this legislation is that government auhorities can second guess the decisions of employers (sometimes without the presumption of innocence). This could lead to employers taking a protocol and compliance driven approach to recruitment in order to avoid potential suits.

That’s before we even get onto the “this society cannot tolerate” stuff. I wrote over on my own blog about this, that a liberal who says “there is no right to be reactionary” is a liberal with no sense of irony. I think we’ve had a demonstration of that here.

Evidently your definition of a “hate fuelled rant” is somewhat different from mine.

Didn’t the:

just makes me want to stub out a fag in your face, Simon

strike you as even the teensiest bit ….well….psychotic?

I was following on from #55, obviously.

And what the frig would you know about reasoned critique troll? Nothing, if most of your crayon written ramblings are anything to go by.

Another idiot troll who thinks he is important.

So “anti-Catholicism” has come to mean “any criticism of Catholicism, Catholic doctrine, or anything said by a Catholic ..

No. Just look at the post:

The poor Catholic Church, one of the biggest enforcers of punitive ideology and state-level persecution of anyone who happens to be a little bit different.

That isn’t reasoned critique. It’s hate-fuelled rant. As is the vile antisemitic outpourings on the Aaaronovitch thread.

I thought the majority of cases brought to trial under equality of employment laws were actually by white males?

I think I’m going to start whining about anti-Atheism every time anybody disagrees with me in future.

To which I have always replied: ” No, antisemitism is the antisemitism of the English Left.

But hey – there are three anti-Catholic threads running on LC at the moment, and only one antisemitic one!

Charlie 2/48: Why does that make her approach lack credibility? One can accept that the Catholic church does good work in some areas while criticising it in others – indeed, one of its most vocal critics on this topic has been Stephen Hughes MEP (Labour, North East England), who is himself Catholic.

If Harman wants to reduce inequality, making sure everyone has decent standard of maths and english would probably be of greater benefit. Harman is more afffectation than effect.

Yes, but they would so love to have that position back ,and spend a lot of time both here, and in the US trying to push laws that will give them back the kind of power they once enjoyed. Keeping religious bronshirts down is a constant battle. It never ends. Decades will pass but the brownshirt hiding behind a religious fig leaf never goes away. There is no difference from the Islamic nut to the Catholic nut to the Jewish nut to the Protestant nut.

It amuses that all you have to do is claim to be a religion and then you can do what the fuck you like. I think I will start a religion that says I hate brownshirt religious bastards who should be denied any for of health care seeing has they hate govt.

Speaking as someone who doesn’t believe in the infallibility of Harriet Harman, and who has actually taken the effort to read what Benny said rather than what the papers reckon he said… well, there’s rather a lot of projection here, isn’t there? I was half expecting to see references to the Spanish Armada or Popish Plots, or a call to deport the Catholics to France (again).

I’d love to see a campaign called something like Atheists For Religious Freedom, or maybe Secularists Who Aren’t Worried About What Other People Believe. We may have to wait a while for that one.

Jenkins column is silly, but it appears that Laurie hasn’t quite managed to take it down. For instance, she says “suggest that forbidding gay people to work in one’s institutions”, as if that’s what the Equality bill will prevent. If the government got its way, the bill would properly end discrimination in jobs for religious institutions that are not “wholly or mainly” religious. But they could still only have heterosexuals for (say) the job of a priest, if that’s what they want. That’s the right balance of freedom of association for me. But Laurie seems to be attacking Jenkins using a position beyond that of the Equality bill. Maybe that was unintentional. If not, well I’m a secularist, so I’d oppose that.

Or he thinks there’s something special about gay people meaning it’s ok to discriminate against them specifically. In which case he’s a homophobe.”

Alternatively, maybe he upholds the libertarian view of freedom of association? One doesn’t have to be a racist or a homophobe to believe that private organisations and businesses should not be told who they can or cannot hire.

He’s in the fine tradition of Guardian columnists like the late Hugh Young; all very de haut en bas, very private school and Oxford giving instruction to us plebs.

He’s the sort of ‘polemicist’ who will now have a go at Murdoch now, after having accepted the Murdoch shilling for 20 years. He is frequently wrong about subjects he writes about, but it’s all water off a duck’s back to him. He’s got his arse in the butter, thank you very much.

I don’t know why anyone takes this pontifical, smug, right-wing toady seriously.

Or he thinks there’s something special about gay people meaning it’s ok to discriminate against them specifically. In which case he’s a homophobe.

I think it’s the latter. Indeed, apart from a hatred of Hariet Harman so extreme it anhilates one’s ability to reason, what else but homophobia could motivate such a piece?

Which isn’t to even begin on Jenkins’ epic fail to understand the concepts of rights, freedom or equality…

SJ is constructing an argument over paragraphs, and sometimes the qualifier to an argument appears later down the page. SJ does not deliver a series of mathematical equations, where the input to one is determined by the output of its predecessor. Analysis by paragraph or line is thus silly.

And the argument itself is classical liberalism: the state should stand aside from religion. Read the argument, not the paragraphs.