In the News

Practitioners of reparative therapy suffered another defeat today as Nevada governor Brian Sandoval signed a ban on the discredited practice into law. The new law, passed this week by the state Senate, makes it illegal for licensed therapists, physicians and counselors to attempt to change the sexual orientation or gender expression of minors.

The news comes a week after Connecticut passed a similar ban, joining California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico and the District of Columbia have similar laws on the books. (Several other cities and municipalities also ban the therapy, which has been discredited by almost every major medical group.)

"Nevada has a long record of passing progressive legislation to protect the LGBTQ community with bipartisan support, and I want to thank Governor Sandoval for signing this critical legislation to protect LGBTQ youth," said State Senator David Parks (D-Las Vegas), who sponsored SB 201.

Read more.

The Church Society, through its Director Dr Gatiss, has offered an enthusiastic case for staying in the Church of England as opposed to leaving it. But the choices before us are less binary than that. Some have left already, but for those who stay, the terms on which they stay need to be altered.

It has become the practice of the C of E to subjugate the authority of the Bible to the prevailing culture and zeitgeist. Dr Gatiss begins his argument by expressing reservations about the lack of confidence his constituency has in the structures of the Church of England.

But the structures are not the issue. When he writes 'the structures' I think he means, or ought to mean something else. The problem is not caused by General Synod, as a malfunctioning Synod, or appointments committees mismanaging their agendas. It difficulty is caused by the scale of the way in which the C of E has been taken over by a majority of people in senior and other positions who hold secular, socialist and egalitarian ideologies.

Read more.

Are there any matters of principle, do you reckon, that Tim Farron isn't prepared to give up on under pressure from a television journalist? After caving under repeated questioning from Channel 4's Cathy Newman (how brave, Cathy!) to declare that he does not, in fact, consider homosexual acts to be sinful, he's now had to conform again, this time on abortion. In an interview with ITV, he said he strongly believed that 'when procedures takes place, it should be safe and it should be legal,' and supported the law as it stands. Pressed on his personal view, he said: 'Again, what one believes in one's personal private faith is just that.' A spokesman has also made clear that Farron supports a woman's right to abortion.

What's monstrous of course is that he's being subjected to this kind of interrogation; it's a kind of field sport for interviewers to torment Tim Farron about faith and morals, a bit like grilling Labour frontbenchers about the cost of their manifesto commitments. What fun to watch him squirm, and get a paid-up working-class Christian to conform to the standard secularist take on these things. But he doesn't put up much of a fight, does he? He wouldn't do terribly well, I reckon, if he was one of those Middle Eastern Christians being tormented by IS, or a sixteenth-century Catholic being asked to declare that Henry VIII is in fact head of the church.

Read more.

George Grant is the Conservative Party's parliamentary candidate in Bradford West. He also happens to be a Christian, and is thereby excluded from Bradford's Muslim Women's Council General Election hustings, which appears to be restricted to Muslim candidates (or is it female and Muslim candidates?)

Labour has held Bradford West for the past four decades, save for a momentary intervention in 2012 by George Galloway's Respect Party with grateful assistance from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAK UK). "God KNOWS who is a Muslim and he KNOWS who is not. I, George Galloway, do not drink and never have," wrote Mr Galloway on his election literature. "I'm a better Pakistani than (Labour's Imran Hussain) will ever be," he declared at his campaign launch. "God knows who's a Muslim and who is not. And a man that's never out of the pub shouldn't be going around telling people you should vote for him because he's a Muslim."

Read more.