By Hilary White
LONDON, March 6, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of Britain and leader of the ruling Labour Party for ten years, has decried in an interview the “ludicrous” recent decisions by which the religious expression of Christians is being suppressed in Britain.
“I hope and believe that stories of people not being allowed to express their Christianity are exceptional or the result of individual ludicrous decisions. My view is that people should be proud of their Christianity and able to express it as they wish,” Blair told the Church of England Newspaper. He agreed with some who have said that religious belief is in danger of being pushed to the margins in British public life.
“The real test of a religion,” Blair said, “is whether in an age of aggressive secularism it has the confidence to go out and make its case by persuasion.” But he admitted that conflict is “inevitable” between religious belief and the new “human rights” doctrines.
At the same time, he admitted that during his time as head of state, he considered “equality and diversity” to be more important than religion. He referred in particular to the case of the Catholic adoption agencies that were forced to close under the pressure of his government’s Sexual Orientation Regulations.
“I happen to take the gay rights position,” he said. “But at the time of the Catholic adoption society dispute I was also concerned that these people who were doing a fantastic job were not put out of business. You have got to try to work your way through these issues.”
Blair, to the dismay of many faithful British Catholics, was received into the Catholic Church in December 2007 by Cormac Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, the archbishop of Westminster, without being required to recant his vehement and well-documented support for abortion, embryonic stem cell research and the homosexualist political movement.
Some in the homosexualist movement have called Blair’s premiership the best thing to have happened in British history for their heavily anti-Christian agenda. Under Blair’s leadership, Section 28 of the Local Government act, that had prevented homosexuality being promoted in British schools, was abolished. This has led to the ongoing work by the Labour government to suppress Christian and religious objections to the homosexualist doctrines in schools.
Under Blair’s rule, in 2005, it became unlawful to rule out homosexual partners for adoption of children. Since then, Christians have begun to be turned away as adopters by local councils as unsuitable because of their religious beliefs. In 2003 Tony Blair’s government banned “sexual orientation discrimination” in employment, a move that resulted in the suing of a Church of England diocese who had turned down an openly active homosexual man for a job as a youth worker.
After the passage of the Civil Partnership act in 2004, all the legal rights and privileges of natural marriage were extended to homosexual partners and many public authorities are erasing the word marriage from all official documents. As a result of the Civil Partnership, Christian registrars are being put under severe pressure to perform homosexual civil partnership ceremonies, contrary to their consciences.
But the crowning achievement of the Blair government on behalf of the homosexualist movement was the passage of the Sexual Orientation Regulations of the Equality act, which has resulted in the closing of many of Britain’s Catholic adoption agencies.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
British PM Blair Celebrates Passage of Sexual Orientation Regulations at Homosexual Activist Banquet
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07032609.html
Tony Blair Organizing World’s Faiths to Stump for Abortion Via UN Millenium Development Goals
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/dec/08121005.html
British Clergy Say Blair Must Renounce Anti-Life, Anti-Family Views Before Becoming Catholic
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/nov/07112907.html
More British Catholic Adoption Agencies to Close Doors instead of Bowing to Sexual Orientation Regulations
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/apr/08042306.html