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As liberalism reveals its true evil, reader sees that “conservatives” have no real opposition to it
Luke P. writes:
I am a British reader who has been following VFR almost daily for quite some time, but it is only now, with the present controversy over the new gay rights legislation and adoption agencies, that I feel that the scales have completely fallen from my eyes and I have seen the full extent of liberalism. From so-called conservatives I have seen not a single principled response, only a variety of appeals to what you would rightly call “unprincipled exceptions,” which is of course a losing strategy. The reason for this is clear—the assumptions of liberalism have been accepted even by its critics, so that they are unable to offer any rational and coherent response to its excesses. Your analysis of this issue, though brief, has been startlingly accurate. I want to thank you for your invaluable work on VFR. I hope that you will continue to be a “voice in the wilderness”: a voice of reason in the wilderness that is modern conservatism.I thank Luke very much for this, and especially for his seeing the truth about liberalism and conservatism. By the way, Melanie Phillips writing in the Daily Mail today sees the meaning of the government’s refusal to let the Catholic adoption agencies opt out of the Sexual Orienation Regulations. She says that Britain has “stopped being a liberal society…. [W]ith this decision, the country that first invented the concept of liberalism … is now set to destroy the concept at its very heart.” Of course she means liberalism in the older sense of basic individual liberties upon which the state cannot trespass, not liberalism in the modern sense of using state power to prohibit discrimination, which of course is antithetical to the original liberal rights of association and speech. I recall that it was Melanie Phillips in 2005 who revealed that those who were advocating the law against incitement of religious hatred intended the law to criminalize any statement criticizing Muslim terrorism, and she opposed that law. But did Phillips and other critics say, when the various anti-discrimination laws began to be passed, that this meant the end of Britain as a free society, and that these laws must be stopped at all costs? Were there mass demonstrations in London crying out that such infringements on the most basic rights of association were totally unacceptable? I’m not aware of that. I hopefully venture the thought that at least some mainstream conservative British writers must have said that the anti-discrimination laws were wrong, period, but if they did, they have not stressed the idea to the point where I have become aware of it. Even in her column today, Phillips does not challenge the underlying Equality Law or even the Sexual Orientation Regulations. She only objects to the fact that Christian adoption agencies were not allowed an exemption from the Regulations.
I am reminded of something that the conservative writer Nicholas Davidson wrote in Chronicles around 1990 in an article about a conservative anti-feminist group in Canada, that the day was quickly approaching when traditionalist views would simply be illegal. I laughed out loud when I read it, not because it was funny, but because it seemed so bitingly true. And now it is coming true. Email entry |