I’ve lived through the greatest revolution in sexual mores in our history. The damage it’s done appals me

By A N WILSON

The Sexual Revolution started 50 years ago. At least, that was the view of the poet Philip Larkin, who wrote: ‘Sexual intercourse began ... In nineteen sixty-three ...(which was rather late for me) .... Between the end of the Chatterley ban .... And the Beatles’ first LP.’

Probably when today’s students read this poem, they understand the reference to the Beatles first LP, but need a bit of help with ‘the Chatterley ban’.

D.H.Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had been banned for obscenity, and all the liberal-minded ‘great and the good’ — novelists, professors of literature, an Anglican bishop and sociologists — trooped to the Old Bailey to explain to a learned judge why Penguin Books should be allowed to publish it.

To my mind, Lawrence’s account of how a sex-starved rich woman romps naked in the woods with her husband’s gamekeeper is risible.

It is hard to read the accounts of them cavorting in the rain, and sticking wild flowers in one another’s pubic hair, without laughing.

Yet the great English Literature professors of the Fifties and Sixties spoke of Lady C in the same breath as the most wonderful writings of the world, and the Chatterley trial in 1960 marked a major watershed.

The prosecuting counsel, Mr Mervyn Griffith-Jones, lost the case when he shot himself in the foot by asking the jury whether they considered Lawrence’s bizarre novel was something they would wish their wives or servants to read.

By putting the question in that way and referring to ‘servants’, he seemed to suggest that being loyal to one partner was as outmoded as having a butler and a parlour-maid.

With the ban lifted, Lawrence’s book became the best-selling novel of the early Sixties. And by the end of the decade, hippies with flowers in their hair, or would-be hippies, were practising free love Chatterley-style. Those who could not classify themselves as hippies looked on a bit wistfully.

Of course, Larkin — born in 1922 — was being ironical and humorous. But the 1960s were a turning-point, and the decade did undoubtedly herald the Sexual Revolution.

I was born in 1950, 28 years after Larkin. And far from being ‘rather late for me’, the revolutionary doctrines of the Sixties were all readily adopted by me and countless others.

From being schoolboys who read Lady Chatterley under the sheets, to teenagers and young men who had the Rolling Stones reverberating in our ears, we had no intention of being stuffy like our parents.

The arrival of a contraceptive pill for women in 1961 appeared to signal the beginning of guilt-free, pregnancy-free sex. We were saying goodbye to what Larkin (in that poem) called ‘A shame that started at sixteen ... And spread to everything.’

But if the propagators of the Sexual Revolution had been able to fast-forward 50 years, what would they have expected to see? Surely not the shocking statistics about today’s sexual habits in the UK which are available for all to study.

In 2011, there were 189,931 abortions carried out, a small rise on the previous year, and about seven per cent more than a decade ago. Ninety-six per cent of these abortions were funded by the NHS, i.e. by you and me, the taxpayer. One per cent of these were performed because the would-be parents feared the child would be born handicapped in some way. Forty-seven per cent were so-called medical abortions, carried out because the health of mother and child were at risk.

The term ‘medical abortion’ is very widely applied and covers the psychological ‘health’ of the patient.

But even if you concede that a little less than half the abortions had some medical justification, this still tells us that more than 90,000 foetuses are aborted every year in this country simply as a means of lazy ‘birth control’. Ninety thousand human lives are thrown away because their births are considered too expensive or in some other way inconvenient.

The Pill, far from reducing the numbers of unwanted pregnancies, actually led to more.

When women neglected to take the Pill, there seemed all the more reason to use abortion as a form of birth control.

Despite the fact that, in the wake of the Aids crisis, people were urged to use condoms and to indulge in safe-sex, the message did not appear to get through.

In the past few years, sexually transmitted diseases among young people have hugely increased, with more and more young people contracting chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and other diseases, many of them unaware they were infected until after they had been sexually active with a number of partners.

The divorce statistics tell another miserable story. About one third of marriages in Britain end in divorce. And because many couples do not marry at all before splitting up, the number of broken homes is even greater.

This time of year is when the painfulness of family break-up is felt most acutely. January 3 has been nicknamed ‘divorce day’ by lawyers. In a moving article in the Mail recently, Lowri Turner, a twice-divorced mother of three children, wrote about the pain of waking up on Christmas morning without her children. She looks at the presents under the tree, with no children to open them, and thinks: ‘This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.’

Every parent who has been through the often self-inflicted hell of divorce will know what she means.

So will the thousands of children this Christmas who spent the day with only one parent — and often with that parent’s new ‘partner’ whom they hate.

I hold up my hands. I have been divorced. Although I was labelled a Young Fogey in my youth, I imbibed all the liberationist sexual mores of the Sixties as far as sexual morality was concerned.

I made myself and dozens of people extremely unhappy — including, of course, my children and other people’s children. I am absolutely certain that my parents, by contrast, who married in 1939 and stayed together for more than 40 years until my father died, never strayed from the marriage bed.

There were long periods when they found marriage extremely tough, but having lived through years of aching irritation and frustration, they grew to be Darby and Joan, deeply dependent upon one another in old age, and in an imperfect but recognisable way, an object lesson in the meaning of the word ‘love’.

Back in the Fifties, GfK National Opinon Poll conducted a survey asking how happy people felt on a sliding scale — from very happy to very unhappy.

In 1957, 52 per cent said they were ‘very happy’. By 2005, the same set of questions found only 36 per cent were ‘very happy’, and the figures are falling.

More than half of those questioned in the GfK’s most recent survey said that it was a stable relationship which made them happy. Half those who were married said they were ‘very happy’, compared with only a quarter of singles.

The truth is that the Sexual Revolution had the power to alter our way of life, but it could not alter our essential nature; it could not alter the reality of who and what we are as human beings.

It made nearly everyone feel that they were free, or free-er, than their parents had been — free to smoke pot, free to sleep around, free to pursue the passing dream of what felt, at the time, like overwhelming love — an emotion which very seldom lasts, and a word which is meaningless unless its definition includes commitment.

How easy it was to dismiss old-fashioned sexual morality as ‘suburban’, as a prison for the human soul. How easy it was to laugh at the ‘prudes’ who questioned the wisdom of what was happening in the Sexual Revolution.

Yet, as the opinion poll shows, most of us feel at a very deep level that what will make us very happy is not romping with a succession of lovers.

In fact, it is having a long-lasting, stable relationship, having children, and maintaining, if possible, lifelong marriage.

An amusing Victorian historian, John Seeley, said the British Empire had been acquired in ‘a fit of absence of mind’. He meant that no one sat down and planned for the British to take over large parts of Asia and Africa: it was more a case of one thing leading to another. In many ways, the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies in Britain was a bit like this.

People became more prosperous. People were living longer. The old-fashioned concept of staying in the same marriage and the same job all your life suddenly seemed so, so boring.

But in the Forties and Fifties, divorce had not been an option for most people because it was so very expensive, in terms of economic as well as emotional cost. So people slogged through their unhappy phases and came out at the other end.

It is easy to see, then, if the tempting option of escaping a boring marriage was presented, that so many people were prone to take the adventurous chance of a new partner, a new way of life.

But the Sexual Revolution was not, of course, all accidental. Not a bit of it. Many of the most influential opinion-formers of the age were doing their best to undermine all traditional morality, and especially the traditional morality of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which has always taught that marriage is for life.

A decade on from the Chatterley trial, in 1971, an ‘alternative’ magazine called Oz, written by the Australian Richard Neville and his mates, was had up, not for obscenity, but for ‘conspiracy to debauch and corrupt the morals of children’.

What brought the authors into trouble was ‘The School Kids’ Issue’, which depicted Rupert Bear in a state of arousal, and which carried many obscene adverts.

The three perpetrators of the filth were sent to prison, but the sentence was quashed on appeal.

Their defender was none other than dear old Mr Rumpole of the Bailey, John Mortimer QC — warming to the role of the nation’s teddy bear.

He said that if you were a ‘writer’, you should be allowed to describe any activity, however depraved.

Obscenity could not be defined or identified. And it was positively good for us to be outraged from time to time. 

Even the Left-leaning liberal Noel Annan, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, suggested this was nonsense. He remarked that it was impossible to think of any civilisation in history that fitted Mortimer’s propositions.

But when the Oz Three were released from prison, the Chattering Classes all rejoiced.

Of course, this was the era when the BBC was turning a blind eye to the predatory activities of Jimmy Savile, and when the entire artistic and academic establishment was swayed by the ideas which John Mortimer presented to the Court of Appeal: namely that old-fashioned ideas of sexual morality were dead. Moribund. Over.   From now on, anything goes — and it was ‘repressive’ to teach children otherwise.

The wackier clerics of the Church of England, the pundits of the BBC, the groovier representatives of the educational establishment, the liberal Press, have all, since the Sexual Revolution began, gone along with the notion that a relaxation of sexual morality will lead to a more enlightened and happy society.

This was despite the fact that all the evidence around us demonstrates that the exact opposite is the case.

In the Fifties, the era when people were supposedly ‘repressed’, we were actually much happier than we have been more recently — in an era when confused young people have been invited to make up their own sexual morals as they went along.

The old American cliche is that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube; and it is usually a metaphor used to suggest that it is impossible to turn the clock back in matters of public behaviour and morality. Actually, you know, I think that is wrong.

One of the brilliantly funny things about the TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous was that the drunken, chain-smoking, sexually promiscuous old harridans Edina Monsoon (played by Jennifer Saunders) and her friend Patsy (Joanna Lumley) are despised by the puritanical Saffy — Eddie’s daughter.

A small backlash has already definitely occurred against that generation.   I have not conducted a scientific survey, but my impression, based on anecdotal evidence and the lives of the children of my contemporaries, is that they are far less badly behaved, and far more sensible, than we were.

My guess is that the backlash will be even greater in the wake of the whole Jimmy Savile affair, and in reaction against the miserable world which my generation has handed on to our children — with our confused sexual morality, and our broken homes.

Our generation, who started to grow up ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP’ got it all so horribly wrong.

We ignored the obvious fact that moral conventions develop in human societies for a reason.

We may have thought it was ‘hypocritical’ to condemn any form of sexual behaviour, and we may have dismissed the undoubted happiness felt by married people as stuffy, repressed and old hat.

But we were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Two generations have grown up — comprising children of selfish grown-ups who put their own momentary emotional needs and impulses before family stability and the needs of their children.

However, I don’t think this behaviour can last much longer. The price we all pay for the fragmentation of society, caused by the break-up of so many homes, will surely lead to a massive rethink.

At least, let’s hope so.

SOURCE






Should We Trust Official British Crime Figures?

You would have to be gullible

What are we to make of the following facts?  The week began with leaked figures apparently showing that ‘Recorded crime fell by at least 10% in 19 out of 43 force areas in England and Wales while budgets were cut by an average of just under 10%.’

Later came the revelation that the Prison population in England and Wales actually fell during last year – dropping by 2,869 to 83,909. Don’t get too excited The prison population is still very, very high( in 1950-51 it was 20,474, in 1960-61 it was 27,099, in 1970 it was 39,028, in 1980 it was 42,300, in 1990 it was 45,636 and in 1999 it was 64,770, passing 70,000 for the first time only in 2002).

But under Kenneth Clarke there is no doubt that, by some means or other, a way has been found to halt and even reverse the rise. The least likely explanation for this, especially under Mr Clarke, must be a tougher and more punitive justice system scaring wrongdoers back on to the path of righteousness.  So either crime really is falling (a comically unlikely solution to the riddle) or a way has been found of a) ignoring more crimes b) not sending people to prison for offences which would formerly have merited prison sentences and c) letting more people out of prison more quickly.

One hint came when, this morning (Thursday 3rd January)the ‘Sun’ newspaper revealed on page 2 (where important stories are put, which editors do not regard as exciting) that one in nine murderers is freed from prison after serving fewer than ten years of a life sentence. The figures, obtained by the genuinely conservative MP Philip Davies , showed that 275 convicted murderers were released during 2010 and 2011. Of these, 32 served fewer than ten years. Four served fewer than eight years, seven served fewer than nine. It is also the case that 35 people,  who had been convicted of homicide, killed again after being released, surely the indefensible deaths of innocents caused by deliberate state action.

My main argument is that the crime figures are fiddled for political reasons, and cannot be trusted. And , thanks to the dedicated work of Dr Rodger Patrick, a former Chief Inspector in the West Midlands Police turned academic, I can tell you how it is done.  Dr Patrick got in touch with me after I wrote about the astonishing increase of ‘Out of Court Disposals’ (OCDs) of crimes – including the use of ‘cautions’ to dispose of rape cases, in return for an admission of guilt.

He has been researching the manipulation of crime data for many years. During this time, police performance has been politically important – so bringing into operation what (unless anyone else wants to claim ownership) I shall term Hitchens’s Law   ‘Any politically sensitive statistic will be manipulated’. This sits alongside the well-known ‘Bikini Effect’, noted by Sovietologists in the 1960s, under which  the official interest in deception is so great that ‘What the figures conceal is more interesting than what they reveal’.

For example, in a period when the police are trying to obtain more money and resources, and the party in power is keen to oblige, police and state might co-operate to give the impression that crime is rising. When the government of the day is anxious to show that its ‘crackdowns’ are working, then the figures will be massaged to show that crime is falling. But the police, with other objectives, may not co-operate. Cue conflicts between different sorts of statistics. Similar things are true of inflation figures, exam results, school performance. But we will stick to crime.

Often the attempts to manipulate statistics show up when one force or another seems to be doing particularly, exceptionally well. Detection rates, for instance, sometimes rise quite spectacularly. In the case of at least one force, large numbers of supposed detections were obtained through offences being ‘Taken Into Consideration’(TICs) *after* culprits had been convicted and sentenced. Or crimes were dealt with through ‘Penalty Notices for Disorder’ (PNDs), thus avoiding the expense of a trial, but also sparing the culprit form proper punishment .  You will have to get used to quite a lot of acronyms in this discussion, for there are more to come.

TICs are supposed to be offences which accused persons admit to when they plead guilty, so that they can be sentenced for them as well, and will not be prosecuted for them in future . You can easily see how a police force under pressure to show evidence of improved performance might persuade criminals to admit falsely to such offences, thus increasing their clear-up rate. There have been instances when this has been proven to happen. As for PNDs, once again it may be useful for criminals and police, in that the police can say the offence has been dealt with, while the offender avoids prosecution and a much more serious penalty.

Then there is what Dr Patrick refers to as ‘nodding’, when numbers of burglaries and vehicle thefts ‘detected’ through TICs suddenly rises. If malpractice is exposed, the numbers then fall.

Next there is what Dr Patrick calls ‘cuffing’ ( a term taken from the trade vocabulary of conjurors, who use it to describe the hiding of objects up one’s sleeve).

This, most crucially for our discussion, is used to deflate the  level of *reported crime*. You will note that it is *reported* or *recorded* crime that is said to have fallen in the figures leaked at the weekend. This is crime actually fed into the records by police forces, who have compiled the figures themselves. It is different from the levels of crime recorded by the British Crime Survey, an opinion poll of the over-16s which has considerable faults (not least that it leaves out so many young people, who are often victims of crime) . Older figures, of arrests and convictions, are simply not comparable with either of these measures, as police are often reluctant to make arrests for ‘minor’ crimes because of the appalling bureaucracy they must then suffer; because those arrested are often not charged by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), when they would have been in the days when police took such decisions arrests are; and because a lot of prosecutions fail or are dropped ; and because a growing number of offences are dealt with by OCDs ( see above) including (largely unpaid) fines, farcically feeble ‘restorative justice’  and non-punitive actions such as probation or community service orders. 

An attempt was made to avoid such ‘cuffing’ when in, 2002 a National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) was introduced. This was based on the idea that the victim decided whether he or she had been the object of a crime, and what that crime was.

But around 2004, this absolute standard was altered. Instead, the police were asked to classify notified crimes according to the ‘balance of probability’. This meant that individual forces were once again free to decide whether a crime really had taken place. Sometimes senior officers cancelled crimes that had been recorded, by ruling that ‘no crime’ had taken place. A BBC survey in 2011 found wild variations among forces in how many crimes had been ‘no crimed’ (2% in one force, 30% in another) . These decisions are recorded and so fiddling is fairly easily detected.

Since this method was  exposed, forces have tended to put pressure on officers not to record an event as a crime in the first place. Thus members of the public are asked to accept that that a theft is in fact no such thing, just ‘lost property’. Or a group of burglaries in one block of flats are classified as one crime.

One way in which these figures are influenced is in the police response to reports of (for instance) stolen mobile phones. There have been cases of youngsters (with no conceivable dishonest motive as they were not insured) threatened with prosecution for making false claims that their phones had been stolen. Could this be to help keep the figures down?

Some social scientists have in any case estimated that around half of all robberies and of theft from the person are never reported to the police at all, probably because the items are uninsured and the hope of detection is very small. The fact that many people do in fact have insurance on mobile phones may have increased the number of such cases, previously unrecorded, which began to be recorded.

In one of his papers, Dr Patrick shows how levels of certain crimes dropped abruptly when particular forces adopted new policies of challenging and discouraging the reporting of certain types of crime. This was a shift from a victim-centred approach, under which the police believe you unless there is evidence to the contrary, to a police-centred approach, under which the person who reports a crime is not believed until he can produce proof of the crime.

Dr Patrick quotes Hans de Bruijn, an expert on performance measurement, saying that any system of performance management can be threatened by the activity known as ‘gaming’ ‘generally accepted as one of the failings of the Soviet centrally planned economy’. What this means is that , seeking to meet targets, those involved will distort the figures to please their political or other masters.

As De Bruijn wrote: ‘ Once a system of performance measurement has been designed and introduced, the perverse effects will, in the long term, force out the beneficial effects’.

Another method mentioned by Dr Patrick is (apart from deliberate under-recording and the conversion of post-sentence admissions into TICs, dealt with above) is ‘the shifting of efforts towards easier-to-detect offences, and the systematic redeployment of specialist officers traditionally committed to combating serious and organised crime in inner city areas to affluent suburbs’. This is known as ‘skewing’.

One thing which Dr Patrick homes in on the use of cautions and informal warnings.  ‘This resulted in many individuals gaining a police record when the evidence was insufficient to secure a conviction at court. In some cases the suspect would be unaware they were being recorded as responsible for an offence, this included serious offences such as rape and kidnapping’.  This might mean they continue in their criminal behaviour, and do much more serious things later. They also escape justice, as their crimes are dealt with through minor fixed penalties or cautions, and cannot thereafter be brought to court.

We have dealt with ‘cuffing’ , ‘nodding’ ‘skewing’ and ‘gaming’. Another method available to police forces which want to give a false impression are ‘stitching’ under which offenders are charged with crimes when there is insufficient evidence. The police know perfectly well the CPS will not pursue the charge, but can still claim that the crime has been ‘solved’ in records.

You might think that the massaging of figures could be shown openly to clash with the British Crime Survey, which for all its faults cannot be manipulated in the same way. But Dr Patrick says the Home Office has in recent years stopped asking the specific questions in the BCS , on which such comparisons could be based.

I think those who ceaselessly maintain that the official crime figures should be believed without question have to re-examine their position in the light of Dr Patrick’s research (which I have here briefly summarised from voluminous papers).

SOURCE





Don't let hardened criminals out early, says Justice Secretary Chris Grayling

Hardened criminals should serve more time in prison and not be granted automatic early release because locking them up cuts crime, the Justice Secretary has said.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Chris Grayling says that he would “ultimately” like to introduce a system under which only prisoners who have behaved well are released early.

Casting aside the doubts of his predecessor, Kenneth Clarke, Mr Grayling insists that putting “people behind bars reduces crime”.

However, he warns that “there are financial constraints” and that such radical changes cannot be delivered “overnight”.

The vast majority of prisoners are automatically released after serving half their sentence under rules introduced by Labour, which removed discretion within the system to release only those who had behaved well.

As a result, thousands of dangerous criminals and rapists have been returned to the streets after serving just a few years in prison.

Mr Grayling is hoping to start a “rehabilitation revolution” which will lead to fewer prisoners returning to jail after release. The move should free up prison places that can be used to incarcerate those who have not “earned” early release.

The Justice Secretary will also use sophisticated tagging technology to curtail the movement and freedom of some prisoners released early.

He says: “What people don’t particularly understand is why sentencing works in the way it does. If you get [sentenced for] 10 years, you’re out after five automatically.

“It’s not something that can be changed overnight, there are constraints on the system, there are constraints on prison places.

“Ultimately, I’m attracted by an option that doesn’t simply automatically release you at a certain point, regardless of whether you’ve behaved well or not.”

The last Conservative election manifesto described the system of sentencing as “dishonest” and Mr Grayling says today that he wants to set out the “direction” of policy to tackle this problem.

“These are not areas where you can deliver radical reforms overnight, you have to work in a direction,” he says. “My message would be that I get and understand concerns the public have over aspects of the system at the moment and I will take whatever steps I can to develop and reform the system in a way that makes that possible.

“One of the areas where possibly we’ve got increased scope in the future in monitoring offenders is GPS tagging where new technologies mean actually it’s possible to watch an offender wherever they go.” The Justice Secretary says this would toughen the regime for offenders, tighten curfews, and restrict their movements. “I get the frustration and I want the system to evolve and develop but you can’t do everything overnight,” he adds

Mr Grayling was promoted in last autumn’s reshuffle to replace Mr Clarke and his comments signal a further toughening of the Government’s approach towards criminal justice. Although repeatedly stressing the need to improve the rehabilitation of prisoners, he also backs the greater use of prison for offenders.

He says he will not cut prison places and insists that one reason that crime is falling is because more people have been in prison. “Every police force will tell you when a serial burglar is behind bars their local burglary rate goes down.”

The Justice Secretary has proposed plans for a “payment by results system” to reward voluntary organisations and companies for mentoring and turning around the lives of former criminals.

He has also established a review of the conditions in prisons and describes the ability of some inmates to watch Sky television as “crazy”.

Mr Grayling warns that it is a “challenge” to make prisons seem off-putting to criminals from “dysfunctional backgrounds.” He says that “for some young people, prison is the first stable environment and so it is a challenge for us to make it an environment that they don’t want to come back to.”

In his interview, the Justice Secretary urges the Liberal Democrats to stop attacking their Coalition partners. He describes a letter sent by Nick Clegg to his MPs calling for more attacks on the Conservatives as a “silly political document”. He is also understood to believe that the Conservatives should consider pledging to leave the European Union but warns that supporting the UK Independence Party risks “gifting” the next election to Labour.

Separately, he is drawing up Conservative plans to overhaul human rights laws, which “at the very least” will involve “curtailing” the reach of the European Court of Human Rights in Britain.

SOURCE





The Principles of Evanjellyfish Christianity

By Mike Scruggs

Many people believe that Evanjellyfish Christianity is rapidly displacing Evangelical Christianity in the United States and Britain. A historical analysis of this increasingly popular and trendy adaptation of Christianity reveals surprisingly deep roots and a well-established set of principles.

The first principle of Evanjellyfish Christianity is TOLERANCE. Tolerance is their ultimate, unquestioned virtue. The underlying multiculturalist principle here is that all moral or theological truths are relative and equal no matter what their source. In this chaotic system of theology, one truth is as good as another, and nobody’s truth is ever questioned—unless they believe that there are absolute truths. Believing in absolute truths is intolerant because it implies that some people are in serious error. Having to defend serious error and all sorts of nonsense and to suppress even obvious absolute truths for the sake of tolerance tends to make Evanjellyfish Christians fact and logic averse. Thus emotion always trumps facts and logic in their discourse, usually accompanied by much rambling nonsense.

Evanjellyfish Christians can become visibly shaken by the suggestion that tolerance is not an unqualified virtue. Try as one may, it is almost impossible to get an Evanjellyfish Christian to consider that perhaps they should be intolerant of evil or of moral and intellectual nonsense. That usually gives them a migraine headache. They are generally very surprised to learn that Jesus would tell a church in Revelation 2:20, “Nevertheless, I have against you that you tolerate that woman Jezebel….” Evanjellyfish Christianity is primarily informed by a belief in the innate goodness of man and the ideals of democratic egalitarianism rather than Scripture.

The second principle of Evanjellyfish Christianity is UNTHINKING CONFORMITY to majority or popular opinion, especially if supported by the mainstream media, publishing, and educational institutions. Unthinking Conformity is the backbone of Evanjellyfish Christianity. For the Evanjellyfish Christian, acceptance and respectability are more important than truth.  Knowledge or analysis that does not conform to popular and respectable opinion is avoided.  Curiously, Evanjellyfish Christians have a furious intolerance for any facts or straight thinking that might jeopardize their respectability or acceptance.  The politically correct environment of the college campus has become the ultimate training ground for enforcing the Unthinking Conformity essential to Evanjellyfishism. The fact that the Evanjellyfish positively avoids serious analysis and thinking should not be confused with stupidity, although it is often difficult to make a distinction. They are constantly in a state of denial that their slavish popular conformity is really just a form of moral cowardice.

The third principle of Evanjellyfish Christianity is LIBERTY UNLIMITED, referring to liberty of conscience. But contrary to traditional Christianity, in which there is a place for liberty of conscience on questions not addressed or given any ethical preference in Scripture, the Evanjellyfish Christian has a remarkable tendency to claim liberty in everything. Scripture is not authoritative to them. They pick what verses they like and how to interpret them. Their private interpretation of Scripture is, in fact, remarkable in its devices. Each one has a personal ethical framework geared to their own success and enjoyment of life. They bristle at any Biblical contradiction of their private, self-centered morality. Their idea of liberty of conscience is a deification of their own idols and desires. As such, it will not submit to any threatening analysis.

A fourth Evanjellyfish principle is the notion that INEQUALITY IS EVIL. It helps to remember their second principle (Unthinking Conformity) to justify this as some sort of moral law. There are, of course, many areas where some kinds of equality are preferable, such as equal justice under the law. However, the Evanjellyfish Christian expands the concept of equality to areas that make no common sense and cannot be justified by Scripture or a study of nature. They presume against God and nature that psychological differences between men and women need to be corrected to conform to their egalitarian vision of society. They even presume to overturn the divinely ordained nature of marriage and family. Economic differences seem especially unfair to them even when the difference is clearly attributable to hard work, perseverance, accumulated knowledge, greater risk taking, and special abilities. They refuse to believe some obvious facts—that many abilities have high genetic inheritability and that these abilities often have a substantial correlation with economic success. A curious characteristic of Evanjellyfish Christians is their constant demand for government mandates to enforce all sorts of silly and unreachable equality. Their approach to correcting presumed social and economic injustices is generally totalitarian.

The fifth and final principle of Evanjellyfish Christianity is PERSONAL PEACE and PROSPERITY at any PRICE. There is hardly any truth they will not ignore or suppress to achieve this. They will go along with the silliest and most inane proposals by demagogues, charlatans, and crackpots, so long as their personal peace, and prosperity can remain intact. They are incredibly vulnerable to verbal bullying in that regard. They grease the wheel that squeaks loudest however unfair or unwise. They are thrown into panic and headlong flight on the mere utterance of certain accusing words—racist, sexist homophobic, and Islamophobic, to name a few. Hearing such an accusing utterance, though it might be far from the truth, they abandon all reason and principle. They will even turn on innocent people to demonstrate their innocence. Their vulnerability to this kind of verbal bullying is known by many and used to manipulate them outrageously. They seek the appearance of righteousness rather than its reality, especially if the reality has a personal cost.  Evanjellyfish Christians are not opposed to costs as long as they are borne by other people, most frequently taxpayers. Evanjellyfish Christians are generally very compassionate with other people’s and especially taxpayers’ money.  It makes them feel good.

Evanjellyfish Christianity is not about truth; it is about avoiding and suppressing truth. It is a disfiguring distortion of Christianity, which we must vigorously resist.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS,  DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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