21st century Britain has become obsessed with diversity, equity and inclusion.
Seems that just about everything nowadays amounts to protected characteristics.
Every week we hear of another reason why the left is outraged about the treatment of a religious, ethnic, or sexual minority.
There's one group to whom the most vile abuse is completely acceptable in the eyes of the British commentariat - Christians.
Jacob Rees-Mogg defends SNP hopeful Kate Forbes
GB News
Senior writer for The Times, Kenny Farquharson, has written a vicious and nasty piece about prospective SNP leader candidate Kate Forbes.
Farquharson opens, saying: "Kate Forbes is unfit to be First Minister of a 21st-century Scotland.
"A 1920s Scotland, maybe. A 1950s Scotland, perhaps. But not Scotland in 2024."
He goes on to say, revealing his ugly bigotry: "What message would a Kate Forbes's first ministership send? That single mothers are sinners? That sex outside marriage is wrong? That ghouls should be allowed to stand in the street outside abortion clinics muttering incantations? That most of us in secular Scotland are going to hell?"
Well, Forbes has never tried to enforce her religious views on others, and she is not aiming to turn Scotland into a theocracy. She is a devout Christian and puts her faith into practice in her private life.
Farquharson is clearly very ignorant about Christianity, which is a faith of forgiveness, not of condemnation. Christ, when asked by Saint Peter, how many times you should forgive, replied, I say not unto thee until seven times, but until 70 times seven, meaning basically an infinite number of times.
Kate Forbes will know as a Christian that we are all sinners. The only word said out loud in the canon of the old right mask Nobis Quoque Peccatoribus, but that God is ever merciful.
Her beliefs are not dissimilar from those of many devout Muslims, but for Farquharson, being a Muslim is worthy, while being a devout Christian is wrong. This is the bigotry of the New Left.
Freedom to agree with our fashionable nostrums, but not to hold fast to your own beliefs. The rottenness, the viciousness and sheer nastiness of his column is in his desire to root out people from public life, purge people from public life who do not share his sad secularist worldview.
He should be ashamed of himself and learn from his fellow Times columnist Matthew Parris, who was remarkably generous to Kate Forbes in his article also published in The Times today.
Fortunately for Farquharson, the loving and merciful Lord and the Christian Kate Forbes will probably forgive him, and we can all pray for him to become a nicer person.
