Hitchens gunning for Cameron on the marriage issue

Sometime after David Cameron’s election as leader of the Conservative Party in Britain he began to make positive noises about the importance of the family – and of marriage as the institution which gave it stability in society. When the Tories won enough votes in the last general election to enable them to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats some thought things might improve.

The people to whom these things really matter were very hopeful that at last something might be done about the slippery slope on which they perceived both institutions were rapidly sliding into deep trouble. But not Peter Hitchens, London Daily Mail columnist and brother of the late-lamented Christopher. Hitchens says he saw through the real David Cameron from the word go. He pulls no punches in his reading of Mr. Cameron on the same-sex marriage issue.

Hitchens, whose pet name for the British PM is “Mr. Slippery”, in his column this weekend tells us a little smugly that “Hardly a day passes without someone ringing me up or writing to me to say that they now realise that our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, is a fraud.” Many tell him that they are now sorry they are that they refused to believe him when he told them this, over and over again, before the last Election.

“Well, as the Scottish pastor said to his wayward flock as they called up to him from the flames of Hell ‘We didn’t know!’” Hitchens replies ‘You know now’.

Citing u-turns by Mr. Carmeon on other issues, he has no sympathy for his correspondents. The evidence was there and they should have known.

“But people would keep telling me”, Hitchens complains, “that he somehow ‘really means it’ about his (rather feeble) scheme to recognise marriage in the tax system. They seem to have thought that one day he would rip off his suit and reveal himself to be ‘SuperTory’.

“Well, as for marriage, he now claims to be much more concerned about helping a few hundred homosexuals get married than about helping millions of heterosexuals to stay married.”

As far as Hitchens is concerned, Mr. Cameron doesn’t care tuppence for homosexuals and he is just playing to a gallery which he thinks is important because it makes him look more “with-it”. “This is, in fact, a wind-up. I shouldn’t think Mr Slippery cares even slightly about homosexuals, and I wonder what he used to say about them in private before he learned how to be cool.”

But he knows that driving homosexual marriage through Parliament will enrage the suburban voters he despises. He longs to be assailed by them, because it will make him look good among the Guardian-reading metropolitans he wants to win over.

Read more Peter Hitchens here.

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R.I.P. European democracy, 1945-2011

By Vox Day

Being for the most part historically illiterate, few intellectuals are prepared to admit that modern representative democracy and the basic concept of individual rights are 18th century phenomena that were the byproducts of a Christian society.

They prefer to attribute both institutions to the Enlightenment, despite the fact that it was the Enlightenment that led directly to the revolutionary horrors of the French revolution and it is the Enlightenment that presently serves as the inspiration for the anti-democratic authoritarian bureaucracy of the European Union.

It is written that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In like manner, an intellectual movement cannot reasonably be considered the cause of two diametrically opposed conceptual phenomena.

And it will become increasingly difficult for intellectuals to deny the connection between Christianity and democracy as the recognized, even celebrated, post-Christianity of Europe has been closely followed by European post-democracy.

The development of European post-democracy is much less recognized, is not at all celebrated, and yet it is in some ways further along than the more widely reported continental post-Christianity.

The fact of the matter is that the governments of Europe are no longer any more genuinely democratic than the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union were. In Imperial Rome, the Senate voted on behalf of the former Roman assemblies, but its votes were irrelevant and its authority was nonexistent. In the Soviet Union, the people were permitted to vote, but their preferences were ignored, even in the direct elections instituted in the Gorbachev era.

In a 1991 referendum, a majority of Soviet citizens voted to retain the Union, but in the long anti-democratic tradition of the Soviet Union, their wishes were ignored. This is deeply ironic, considering that a majority of European citizens in nearly every European country would now vote to leave the European Union if given the opportunity, but they are being denied the opportunity to do so by their treasonous national "representatives."

In the United Kingdom, all three major political parties are actively denying the English, Welsh and Scottish peoples the opportunity to vote on continued subjugation to the European Union, despite the fact that all three parties promised a referendum on the EU of one sort or another.

David Cameron, the Tory prime minister who makes the weasely Tony Blair look like an honorable man of his word, is presently facing a near-revolt from members of Parliament who are rightly outraged by his treacherous refusal to make good on the Conservative Party's promise to their increasingly euroskeptical constituents.

In the Eurozone, the state of democracy is even worse, thanks to the latest version of what is improbably described as the "Greek rescue deal." The "stability union," which was announced in Brussels last week, removes the power of national governments to make decisions concerning issues of taxing and public spending.

This means that the two central economic functions of national government, monetary and fiscal policy, are now completely out of government control. It also means that the people of Europe are now subject to taxation without representation, the very state that inspired the American revolution in the first place.

The Enlightenment Ourobos has now devoured its own tail. Christianity may be in decline across the continent, but European democracy is effectively dead. The European political elite is no longer even pretending to be representing the will of the European people in any way, hence the public hand-wringing over what is described as the "democratic deficit." But this is more than a mere deficit; it is the observable death of democracy.

But Americans should not take much satisfaction in the Old World's return to pre-18th century oligarchy. For the same processes that killed European democracy in only 66 years have been actively at work inside the United States for decades.

The false promises of the architects of the European Union are little different than the false promises of politicians like Sen. Edward Kennedy, who declared that the 1965 immigration act would not change the racial composition of America, even though that is exactly what it was designed to do.

And Americans are seeing more and more laws and popular referendums overturned by the will of judges and executive-branch bureaucrats; democracy is not yet dead in America, but it is clearly far from well.

In the Telegraph, Janet Daley conceded that the long battle against the inevitable resurgence of European oligarchy had failed. There is not much time left for Americans to learn that their political play-battles of Democrats and Republicans are not so much futile as beside the point.

Until both left and right unite and turn against the Washington-Wall Street axis of oligarchy, American democracy will continue to die.

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