The United Kingdom's chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, recently spoke at length to the Sunday Telegraph about religion in modern British society. The results were unfortunate. Some of Phillips's answers showed, at best, a tenuous grasp of reality.
The conversation was wide ranging, covering several controversial topics including what Phillips called "fashionable" anti-religious fervor in the UK, the appropriate reach of anti-discrimination law, and the political ambitions of religious institutions. The interview centered on Phillips's warnings against religious extremism.
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A clarion call against religious fundamentalism is perhaps most needed in London. Londoners have become veterans in their experience of religious, particularly Islamic, violence. Jihadists have ratcheted up the political pressure. Their violence has become increasingly brutal, and well documented, especially in the Tower Hamlets borough.
Reports of attacks on homosexuals have gripped public attention and a cursory review of the Daily Mail or the Telegraph will reveal this to be glaringly true. Victims often turn to Phillips' Commission for support because law enforcement seems dangerously timid in investigating Muslims for fear of racism and intolerance accusations.
What sort of reception they get is the question of the hour. Of late, the Commission has been accused of two sins: of shrinking from defending these victims and of inappropriately reaching into the private theological affairs of Churches, effectively abridging their speech.
Phillips responds to these concerns by agreeing that Britain has many real victims of discrimination, though not the ones you'd expect. "I think the most likely victim of actual religious discrimination in British society," Phillips said, "is a Muslim." What's more, he said, sounding quite mad, homosexual Christians are "mo[re] likely to feel slighted because of their religion" than gay Muslims.
Phillips called Christianity an "old time religion" incompatible with "a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society." He said of Christians' understanding of homosexuality, "they are undiluted, they are nasty and in some cases homicidal."
In contrast, for Phillips, British Muslims are harmless teddy bears "doing their damnedest to try to come to terms with their neighbors to try to integrate." These Muslims are simply "trying to find ways of being good Muslims in a way that is consistent with the society they're living in."
The truth, if Phillips would bother to pay any attention, is that jihadists have absolutely no interest in integration. They have no interest in religious freedom. They have no interest in respecting intellectual diversity. And they especially have no interest in tolerating cultural differences. They overtly reject the ideas of the Enlightenment and those who claim the opposite, as the chairman of one of Britain's top human rights watchdogs does, are doing the bad guys an enormous favor.
For if Christianity can have a bumpy time adjusting to modern society, Islam is especially ill equipped to do so. In Islamic tradition, Lot is a prophet Allah sent to Sodom and Gomorrah to stop them from their lustful, famously homosexual, acts. Lot's preaching was ignored and ultimately Sodom and Gomorrah burned.
The solution to this problem was deadly violence. Muhammad instructed Muslims, "If you find anyone doing as Lot's people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done," (Sunan Abu-Dawud, Book 38, Number 4447). In majority Muslim nations, homosexuals are routinely jailed, publicly scourged, and stoned. In nations such as the UK with small but growing Muslim populations, we have increasingly seen mob attacks on gays -- sharia through vigilantism, you might call it.
Phillips, however, won't be having any of that. He brushed off the notion that Islamic law is encroaching on civil law thus: "Nobody is going to say that its OK for a Muslim community to apply in isolation and override the view of the civil courts." Instead, he complained of Christians who are more "militant" than Muslims in using claims of discrimination to advance political influence.
Phillips might benefit by consulting Bruce Bawer, a homosexual who was awakened to who the real militants are. He fled the United States to escape what, at the time, he considered gross religious intolerance towards gays. He moved to what he believed would be a more tolerant society in the Netherlands.
Instead of finding a sort of "gay mecca," Bawer found Mecca itself. Much like the rest of Europe, Arab immigration made Muslim communities increasingly popular and influential. In succinctly and powerfully describing his relocation to Dutch society, Bawer found that "Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me." If Phillips wants to insist that televangelists are to be more greatly feared than the imams, he has clearly lost his marbles.
Nicholas G. Hahn III is an Assistant Editor for RealClearPolitics and a graduate of Political Science and Catholic Studies from DePaul University. He can be contacted here and on Twitter.
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