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"Just whose moral guidance do you prefer - that of the Pope, or Stephen Fry?"
Kevin Myers: Just whose moral guidance would you prefer? That of the Pope, or Stephen Fry? - Kevin Myers, Columnists - Independent.ie
It's usually gratifying to see Stephen Fry take a public stance on anything, because then that serves as a pointer to where I should stand: in the opposite corner. In that regard, he is like Bono, or Bob Geldof, or Richard Gere, or Emma Thompson, or Sean Penn, or Susan Sarandon, et alia.
These people seem to move in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, somewhere between the ozone layer (yes, what happened to the scare over that?) and the ionosphere: what we might call the methanosphere, where their alimentary gases form a permanent and impermeable layer of self-regarding sanctimony.
Stephen Fry is one of the 50 well-known people in British life who signed a letter to 'The Guardian' denouncing the state visit of the Pope to Britain: though the regard these secularists have for Catholic feelings was made evident in how they referred to him: as "Pope Ratzinger".
It's the done thing these days to declare that the Catholic Church is "responsible for. . . the spread of AIDS". But I could equally declare that the legislators who removed the legal ban on sexual relations between men in the USA brought about 400,000 deaths by AIDS.
You might not like it, but that is the indisputable truth: after liberalisation, homosexual men began to behave largely as conservative opponents of that liberalisation had warned they would, to much liberal derision (mine included). As it turned out, the consequences were far worse than predicted.
Of course, no letter-writer to 'The Guardian' would ever dream of declaring what was actually true -- that sexual liberalisation helped bring about a human catastrophe. Why? Because liberal laws on sexuality are deemed to be 'good' laws, no matter their consequences, whereas Catholic laws on human sexuality are necessarily 'bad' laws, even if their consequences are largely identical.
As it happens, the Pope said many extraordinarily wise and relevant things during his British visit, and the most potent concerned the sort of intolerant secularism that, combined with obsessive consumerism, is creating an entirely new moral order across the Western world. This is the ethos in which ubiquitous celebrities-of-the-hour could easily become the moral arbiters for developing teenage minds.
Since dogmatic secularists have no agreed moral order, then in its absence, someone is going to have to supply what all humans want -- namely, a compass. And whose moral guidance would you prefer for any society? That of Pope Benedict? Or of Stephen Fry?
Kevin Myers: Just whose moral guidance would you prefer? That of the Pope, or Stephen Fry? - Kevin Myers, Columnists - Independent.ie