The Sexual Orientation Regulations and the logic of liberalism

In late January, Prime Minister Blair announced that there would no exceptions to the pending Sexual Orientation Regulations for Catholic adoption services. “There is no place in our society for discrimination,” he said. “That’s why I support the right of gay couples to apply to adopt like any other couple.” As I said at the time, Blair’s statement proved my point that non-discrimination is the ruling idea of modern society. I then added that the “furor” of conservatives at the prime minister’s stand was a pathetic example of the Unprincipled Exception in action: having accepted non-discrimination as the ruling idea of society at every step along the way, how could the conservatives expect it not to be applied in the case of Catholic adoption services? A British VFR reader wrote that this story made him finally see the real nature of liberalism.

Two months prior to Blair’s announcement, another cabinet member, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly, a Catholic, signed on to full implementation of the Sexual Orientation laws. As was reported in the Daily Mail of November 28, 2006:

[Y]esterday Miss Kelly gave a confirmation that the new laws will go ahead. She told a conference run by the Commission for Racial Equality: “Anger about people not being able to fulfil their potential brought me into politics.

“Whether the barrier is their background, their race, religion or sexual orientation the Labour Party has always been prepared to take the decisions to open up opportunity for all.”

It is a wonderfully revealing statement. What, for Ruth Kelly, is the highest political value and the very purpose of politics? It is to “to open up opportunity for all,” i.e., it is to eliminate discrimination. Which is, of course, my very definition of modern liberalism. Though Kelly as a Catholic may have had qualms about the reach and scope of the Sexual Orientation Regulations, the liberal command to remove discrimination overruled all other considerations.

The only bright side of the picture is that in being so consistent to its own extreme principles, liberalism is finally waking up opposition from unexpected quarters. In the same article, it was reported that the Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols had “threatened to withdraw Catholic co-operation with the Government over schools, charity programmes and adoption agencies if the new sexual orientation regulations go ahead.” In a sermon in St. Chad’s Cathedral, Nichols said:

The Government must realise that it is not possible to seek co-operation with us while at the same time trying to impose upon us conditions which contradict our moral values.

It is simply unacceptable to suggest that the resources of faith communities, whether in schools, adoption agencies, welfare programmes, halls and shelters can work in co-operation with public authorities only if the faith communities accept not simply a legal framework but also the moral standards at present being touted by the Government.

Nichols’s stand was all the more striking, said the Mail, because the Catholic Church has traditionally supported the Labor Party’s social agenda.

The readers’ comments following the article were divided evenly between those supporting and those opposing the archbishop. Among those supporting him, there was not a single principled argument. It all came down to the complaint that this goes too far! None of those who opposed the government questioned the liberal principle of non-discrimination on which the Sexual Orientation Regulations are based. There was, however, one reader, Les from Southport, England, who, while not taking a stand one way or the other on the issue at hand, pointed out that this new law is of a piece with the entire fabric of British equality laws:

The government has introduced all sorts of laws which take away our freedom of choice whether your decision is based on moral, religious or other grounds. The fact is if the government are forced to abandon this ‘gay’ law, then surely all laws which prohibit positive discrimination must also be forfeit. You cannot say one discrimination is wrong and the other is right. If I can put a sign up saying ‘No Homosexuals served’, then surely I also have the right to display one saying for instance ‘No Women served’. You either have to have equal rights for everyone or discard equality laws and let the person who owns/runs the company or institution decide what their policey for employment etc. will be.

Although Les does not say whether he would favor such an elimination of equality laws, I suspect he would. In any case, my hat’s off to him for showing a degree of conceptual clarity that is virtually non-existent among today’s English.

One final point. It appears that the Sexual Orientation Regulations were not initiated in Britain, but in the EU. In passing the SOR, Britain is merely putting into effect its own national version of a Europe-wide mandate. That is all that remains of British sovereignty.

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An Indian living in the West writes:

It has recently dawned upon me that freedom as we know it is essentially finished in the West. The iron fist of the left now rules—if you break a single code from their holy book, you go to hell. Who an orphanage chooses to give a child for adoption is a private matter. As is whether I wish to hire members of social group A or B or C in a company that I own and run. As is whether I choose to make friends with members of social group D or E.

The consequence of this is that freedom is now finished. There is already is an “anti-discrimination” police in existence. It will soon have search and arrest powers that will destroy the very last vestiges of freedom people hold dear. Draconian police state powers will soon be introduced to fight “homophobia” or “racism” or some other phantom which is in vogue. Such powers already exist in Belgium, France, Germany, Norway and Austria, to name a few.

The important point is this: laws against private owners “discriminating” on grounds of race were introduced in Britain in 1976 (and at about the same time in other parts of Europe). I am certain that the then Conservative party probably opposed it. But they soon accepted it. Soon other laws were introduced which they opposed but now accept unquestioningly. The result of these three decades of “evolution” is Cameron, who is by all accounts indistinguishable from Blair. That is modern conservatism in action. Reminds me of a phrase coined by a critic of the NRO crowd: We stand athwart history yelling “We surrender!”

LA replies:

There is no point in regretting that this has happened. It had to happen. It is the working out of the logic of liberalism to its inevitable fulfillment. It also had to happen because real opposition to liberalism could only appear AFTER it has reached this end point, because it is only now that its “conservative” critics can start to grasp it true, extreme nature. Prior to this, conservatives could dismiss the things they didn’t like about liberalism as “silly PC,” “an obsession with diversity,” “taking a good idea too far,” and so on, which would enable them to go on subscribing to the underlying liberal principles of equality and non-discrimination even as they imagined themselves as opponents of liberalism. But now that liberalism has begun to manifest itself as undisguised tyranny, and, moreover, is doing so on the explicit basis of the liberal principles of non-discrimination and equality (see Blair’s and Kelly’s statements again), it becomes harder for conservatives to continue disguising the nature of liberalism from themselves. Now for the first time a real awakening to the evil of liberalism, and real opposition to it, becomes possible.

There are so many parallels between liberalism and Islam, and here is another. Just as conservatives must grasp that the problem with Islam is not some “extreme” offshoot of Islam, but Islam itself, they must also grasp that the problem with liberalism is not some “extreme” offshoot of liberalism, but liberalism itself.

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Dimitri K. writes:

Re “taking a good idea too far”: I dont’ know if you heard about this, but that is EXACTLY what many intellectuals and simple people think about Communism in Russia.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 03, 2007 05:40 PM | Send