David Quinn: The self-righteous Greens get away with blue murder
John Gormley is a nice man but he alarms me because he is full of the moral certitude of the true believer -- the sort of moral certitude traditionally associated with, well, Catholics like me.
In fact, it goes way beyond moral certitude. It's more a sort of moral arrogance, a self-righteousness that has him wagging the finger in an An Taisce kind of way at anyone who disagrees with him and the Green Party.
He was at it the other week in the Dail. He was being pressed on his planning legislation and the party's animal welfare legislation. He defended these and the Civil Partnership Bill as well.
He said: "Legislation on these issues is necessary and forms part of a progressive agenda."
"Progressive" is a favourite word of Gormley's, and it's intended to demonise all his critics as knuckle-dragging enemies of "progress". By a "progressive" agenda he meant, of course, a left-wing agenda.
Then he rounded on Fine Gael. He said: "Sometimes I believe the Fine Gael party -- and in particular some of its newer members -- is much more comfortable with the politics of Sarah Palin than those of President Barack Obama."
In the mind of the left, Sarah Palin is the ultimate knuckle-dragger and Barack Obama a veritable saint, the living incarnation of "progress".
Last week, Gormley decided it was the turn of the church after it had -- predictably -- come out against the Civil Partnership Bill.
He told Sean O'Rourke on RTE's 'News at One' that he was "taken aback" by the intervention. Note again the prissy tone. Maybe Sean should have had the smelling salts at hand for a man of Gormley's oh-so-refined moral sensibilities.
He accused the church of "interference" in politics. He told it to stick to "the spiritual needs of its flock", and not to "intrude on temporal or state matters".
In other words, the church, and by extension all who belong to it, must get out of the public arena. They have no place there and their values have no place there unless, one presumes, they suit John Gormley. I doubt if Gormley minded too much the bishops' recent, pro-green pronouncement on the environment.
Gormley is seeking to reduce Catholics and other religious believers to second-class citizenship. They must keep their values out of the public arena, but environmentalists like himself are perfectly entitled to bring their values into public life no matter how divisive or irrational they might seem to the rest of us.
By the way, when the Irish Farmers' Association critiqued aspects of the Civil Partnership Bill a few weeks ago he didn't tell it to stick to farming.
The Greens get away with blue murder. The only real charged levelled at them in the media is that they have "sold their soul" to stay in power. But no one ever seems to apply a cost-benefit analysis to their agenda. How much are their various supposedly planet-saving schemes costing the economy, for example? And are they really that planet-saving?
As for their social agenda, it could hardly be more extreme. It is so far to the left it has vanished over the horizon. The truth is that it's Fianna Fail who pander to the Greens in order to stay in power, rather than the other way around.
Just this week, for example, the Government announced that it has withdrawn a challenge to a High Court ruling ordering it to change the birth cert of transsexual, Lydia Foy. This was undoubtedly at the instigation of the Greens who have made a 'Gender Recognition Act' part of the Programme for Government.
WE look set to copy the UK's Gender Recognition Act, which, along with Spain's, is the most radical in Europe. Under the UK law, a person can have their birth cert altered to reflect their "new" or "true" sex without even having to have an operation or undergo hormone treatment.
In other words, a person with a penis can be officially recognised as a woman. This is insane and should be recognised as such. Gender identity disorder is a personal tragedy but it cannot be cured by falsifying birth certs and other official documentation.
The Greens care so deeply about the environment that their ideology has the character of a religious belief system and they fight almost every attempt to artificially change nature.
For example, they are dead-set against the genetic modification of crops which is why they demonise corporations like Monsanto.
On the other hand, the Greens are perfectly happy to socially engineer society; to reach down into its DNA in order to radically alter, among other things, the family. Hence their support for gay marriage and gay adoption. Who cares if a child needs a mother and father when we can show instead how "progressive" we are instead?
It's time the Greens were more closely marked by the media and by their political opponents.
The Greens are now well to the left of Labour. There is nothing cuddly about them at all and people need to start realising that -- starting with Fianna Fail voters.
dquinn@independent.ie
- David Quinn
Irish Independent
