Ann Widdecombe is vying for Most Outrageous this week. I think she has a shot at it.
It is “very difficult” to be an active Christian in modern Britain, former government minister Ann Widdecombe, who lives in Dartmoor, has claimed.
The ex-MP blamed “quite militant secularism” and equality legislation for people feeling they could not express their faith.
She claimed that respect for people’s personal views meant people could have been a fascist in post-1945 Britain or a Communist during the Cold War but Christians now had started “suppressing the expression of conscience”.
And yet, there the Archbishop still is, archbishoping away.
Ms Widdecombe, who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1993, said: “Christians now have quite a lot of problems, whether it’s that you can’t display even very discreet small symbols of your faith at work, that you can’t say ‘God bless you’, you can’t offer to pray for somebody, if it’s an even bigger stance on conscience that you’re taking, some of the equality laws can actually bring you to the attention of the police themselves.
“So I think it is a very difficult country now, unlike when I was growing up, in which to be a Christian, an active Christian at any rate.”
Ah, look what she did there. She’s not talking about “conscience,” she’s talking about people shoving their religion on everyone else.
When we were engaged in the height of the Cold War, when there were all those weapons lined up on the borders of the Warsaw Pact countries pointing straight at us, you could still, in this country, proclaim yourself as a Communist, you could still stand for Parliament for that matter as a Communist.
You wouldn’t get in but you could stand. You could sell the Morning Star on street corners.
Is she claiming that now you can’t stand for Parliament as a Christian? To the best of my knowledge, you can not only stand for Parliament as a Christian, you can even get in. So…her comparison doesn’t do what she wants it to do, does it.