Kevin Myers: Just whose moral guidance would you prefer? That of the Pope, or Stephen Fry?
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".
And no surprise to see Stephen Fry on the list: he is the luvvie of choice these days, no, these years. One can hardly see a British newspaper or TV programme without being assailed by his wryly quizzical, modestly self-effacing, anglicised version of the old Hollywood humbug: ah-gee-shucks, I'm such a regular kinda guy.
In fact, he has become the epitome of overweening conceit and politically correct toxicity.
It wasn't so long ago that he nearly brought about the ruination of a 'Daily Mail' columnist, Jan Moir, with his tweets and his twitters, via the mob of idiots who follow such digital twitchings, rather like condors smell imminent death.
One of the letter-writers' complaints about the Pope was that he had been responsible for "opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of AIDS". (Well, at least you can be sure that Stephen Fry could never have written a sentence as terrible as that).
Yet oddly enough, the letter-writers were silent when dear old polygamous Jacob Zuma arrived in London, President of the conjoined Republics of South Africa and of AIDS-land.
This was the fine fellow who, during a trial on a charge of raping a HIV-positive young woman, told the court that he had protected himself against AIDS after sex by washing his penis. Quite the little immunologist, Jake, aren't you?
Was HE not worth an epistolary denunciation by the 'Guardian' letter-writers? Or was he immune to such criticism because of his colour?
(I take pleasure in exempting one signatory Peter Thatchell from this final query. I don't agree with an awful lot of what he says, but I greatly admire his dogged perseverance, and his gallant attempt to arrest the murdering beast Mugabe was truly a thing of beauty).
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.
Moreover, I'd love to know how it is that the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception is apparently able to achieve such loyal and devoted adherence in Africa, a continent wherein the Ten Commandments not to do things seem usually to generate the opposite effect.
Other recent guests of the British state (but who have been spared the deep Fry treatment) include the heads of state of China, the home of Tibet; Brazil, which destroys an area of rainforest the size of Ulster, plus its inhabitants, every year; Poland, which still excludes two million German refugees driven from their homelands in 1945; Russia which is, as always, Russia, God help us all; and dear old Saudi Arabia, where Stephen Fry, being an active homosexual and a Jew, would probably be castrated, have his eyelids sliced off and be staked out in the desert for the Bedouin to finish off.
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?
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
