Civitas Blog

Ms Kelly's suitability for the first office has been challenged on the grounds that her recent pronouncement that, in this new capacity, she will prioritise construction of new affordable housing does not square well with her previous fierce opposition to all new housing construction projects in her Bolton West constituency.

Her suitability for the second office has been challenged on the grounds that, as a committed Roman Catholic, she must regard homosexuality to be a sin, so cannot be relied on to be an enthusiastic champion of full civil equality for homosexuals which this new ministerial office requires its holder to be.

Steven Glover frames the latter charge well in an article in today’s Daily Mail entitled, ‘You can’t separate politics and morals':

‘Whether she is right or wrong about homosexuality is not the issue. Ms Kelly believes that homosexual acts are wrong. She therefore presumably believes that homosexuals cannot enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals. And yet she is required in her new office to ensure that they do so.

‘This suggests … either that Ruth Kelly is rather stupid, which … seem[s] unlikely…[o]r , more plausibl[y], she is a potentially dangerous, and characteristically Blairite hypocrite, holding to one set of beliefs while she gaily … contradicts them in the pursuit of power.’

I must say that I don’t see the force of either argument which is not to say I do not accept the truth of their common conclusion which is that, to be acting in good faith, she should not be occupying a seat in this administration.

My reasons are as follows.

So far as the first charge of hypocrisy is concerned, it is clear there is need for additional new housing to accommodate all the additional newcomers the present government has encouraged to settle in the country. Since they have largely congregated in the south-east, this is where the new housing needs to be built, not in the north where her constituency is located. Hence, her past opposition to new housing there is perfectly consistent with her present enthusiasm for additional new housing to be built in the south east where she intends to press(cott!) for its construction.

The government may have been wrong to have allowed so many newcomers in. But having done so, she cannot be accused of hypocrisy for supporting the corollaries of that decision. Maybe the depressed house-prices to which it will lead will encourage voters who see their value of their major capital asset decline as a result to reconsider their previous voting patterns which has sustained for three successive terms a government which has brought about their loss.

So far as concerns the second charge of hypocrisy, it has, I believe, been well answered in a letter written on her behalf that appears in today’s Times from the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor. In it, he points out that, even if she does regard homosexuality to be a sin, there is nothing in their Church’s teachings to require such activity be considered a crime or those who engage in it as not deserving of full civil and political equality. He writes:

‘The Catholic Church teaches that some actions are sinful, sexual acts outside [heterosexual] marriage among them. St Thomas Aquinas taught that not every sin is necessarily a crime, and not every crime is necessarily a sin. From this stems the Church’s defence of human rights. Homosexual persons are first of all persons, and have the same legal entitlement to legal rights as anyone else. The Church has consistently spoken out against any discrimination against homosexual persons, and will continue to do so.’

So far so innocent of hypocrisy, therefore.

However, having said that, I do have reservations about Ms Kelly’s integrity in going along as a minister with all the policies of the present government, given her faith.

While some acts which the Catholic Church teaches to be sins neither are nor should be crimes – masturbation and adultery, for example – others -- such as murder, theft, and bearing false witness -- surely, both are and should be crimes. It is in relation to the first of such aforementioned latter sins within this latter category that questions can be raised about Ms Kelly’s integrity or intelligence given her blithe compliance with government policy. For the Catholic Church has consistently defined muder as the deliberate and wilful termination of innocent human life and has construed such life as beginning, if not from the very moment of conception, as soon after as makes no practical difference.

Where I would argue that, as a supposed devout Catholic, Ms Kelly should have serious qualms in complying with this government’s policies is in her going along with its apparent acquiescence in stem cell research, the legislation currently going through parliament to legalise voluntary euthanasia, and proposed new forms of reproductive medicine designed to detect and then terminate the pregnancies of embryos with genes that might lead to cancer in the adults whom the embryos would eventually in time become if allowed to reach full term.

Doubtless, Ms Kelly could square her religious conscience with the legalisation of these and other forms of medical intervention, though it is difficult to see how she could do so while seeking to remain the devout Roman Catholic she purports to wish to be.

Frankly, one does not have to be a devout Catholic or even a religious believer at all to be concerned about these developments. However, as one who does aspire to be, would that Ms Kelly had the moral courage to respond to Tony Blair’s invitation to assume her new ministerial posts by adapting the famous reply of her biblical namesake and saying to him:

‘Entreat me not to stay with you or not to return to the back-benches; for where you go I will no longer go; your people will no longer be my people, and your professed God shall truly once again be mine.'

Who knows, if she had the guts to speak and act thus, she could become the nucleus of a new political party from which would spring a new leader to halt country's current descent into perdition and anarchy, just as, from her biblical name-sake, who had the moral courage to make a similar leap in the dark, there sprang the line from which King David was said to be descended and through him the promised messiah.