Thursday February 4, 2010
Chief British Rabbi: “Pope is Right” on Equality Bill – Pro-Abort Catholic MEP: Pope is Wrong
By Hilary White
ROME, February 4, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A British Catholic member of the European Parliament has slammed Pope Benedict’s comments on the Labour government’s Equality Bill, saying that the pontiff should apply EU anti-discrimination policies in the Vatican. At the same time, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community has praised Pope Benedict’s recent criticism of the bill, saying it is a direct threat to religious freedom.
Stephen Hughes, a Catholic and the MEP for the Labour Party for the North East England, joined homosexualist activists and media pundits on the left accusing Pope Benedict of perpetuating unjust discrimination. “As a Catholic,” Hughes said, “I am appalled by the attitude of the Pope.”
“Religious leaders should be trying to eradicate inequality, not perpetuate it. Inequality is at the root of many social problems,” he added. Hughes made his comments in Rome where he is in town as part of a meeting of senior MEPs from the EU Parliament’s Socialists and Democrats group.
Instead of attacking Labour’s Equality Bill, Hughes said, “the Pope should ensure that existing EU legislation is properly applied in the Vatican.”
Hughes was responding to the pope’s speech to the English Catholic bishops in Rome earlier this week in which he praised Britain’s historic devotion to equality, but warned that “the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.”
“In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed,” the pope said.
In contrast to the Catholic Hughes, Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, praised Pope Benedict for what he identified as a robust defense of democratic principles of freedom of speech and religion.
Human rights, Sacks wrote in an op-ed in the Times yesterday, “become human wrongs” when those rights “become more than a defence of human dignity, which is their proper sphere, and become instead a political ideology, relentlessly trampling down everything in their path.”
“This is happening increasingly in Britain, and it is why the Pope’s protest against the Equality Bill, whether we agree with it or not, should be taken seriously.”
Sacks panned Labour’s bill for “using the ideology of human rights to assault religion risks undermining the very foundation of human rights themselves.”
Sacks cited the cases of the Christian airport worker who was prohibited from wearing a cross, a nurse who was sacked after suggesting that patients would benefit from prayer, and the closure and secularization of most of Britain’s Catholic adoption agencies.
“When a Jewish school is told that its religious admissions policy is, not in intent but in effect, racist, we are in dangerous territory indeed,” he said.
MEP Hughes, however, is known for his selectiveness in defending human rights, supporting with his vote human rights abuses against women in China. As an MEP, Hughes was among the twenty British MEPs who in 2008 voted down an amendment that proposed to withhold EU funding to countries practicing coercive abortion and sterilization.
Amendment 134 to the EU budget that refused funds to “any government or organization or program which supports or participates in the management of a program which involves human rights abuses such as coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization or infanticide” was defeated 335 to 222.
Read related LSN coverage:
Pope Drops Strong Hint to English Bishops: Get with the Program
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10020202.html