Is the UK to resist the tide of EU religious persecution?
An Outbreak of Common Sense in the UK?
The new British immigration minister, Damian Green, has stated that the British Parliament should not try to ban full-length Muslim veils in public after France’s lower house passed a Bill which could see Muslim women fined for wearing burkas.
‘It’s very unlikely, and it would be undesirable for the British Parliament to try and pass a law dictating what people wore’. Mr Green said. ‘I stand personally on the feeling that telling people what they can and can’t wear, if they’re just walking down the street, is a rather un-British thing to do. We’re a tolerant and mutually respectful society’.
After thirteen years of the most extraordinarily illiberal, almost Fascist, laws of the Labour regime, at last we have a little good news in the UK.
It is not that we as Orthodox Christians particularly support or like the wearing of what must be highly uncomfortable burkas, but the banning of them would simply have been the first step towards the banning of the wearing of the cross or Christian clerical dress, as is already the case in several EU countries, and as was already tending to happen under the old Labour regime.
The assertion by a minister of the new government of traditional British religious tolerance cannot be bad.
If anything were to be banned, surely it would be better to ban the semi-naked dress of so many young women in the streets, rather than the other extreme, as practised by a few Muslim women.
Is it possible that common sense is to reappear in the UK? If so, no doubt it will reappear in France, once French policeman are faced with the task and cost of imprisoning thousands of Muslim women in France because of their over-modest dress and the French government has to deal with trade boycotts by Muslim countries. Or perhaps anyway the notorious European Court of Human Rights will ban the new French law, if it is not first stopped by the upper house (the Senate) of the French Parliament?
If common sense is to reappear in the UK, after its virtual ban in recent years, perhaps also fox-hunting will be brought back, especially now that towns and cities are being overrun with foxes, which have attacked infants and are spreading disease. Who knows, perhaps the government may even put an end to the futile deaths of so many British soldiers in Afghanistan?
After all, anything is possible, once common sense is allowed.
