Alfie pays the price writes Gavin Ashenden
The state refused to release little Alfie as he died, into the hands of his parents.
The medical issues are ones that many of us have to take on trust. Alfie is dying. The judge who presided over the parents’ last minute appeal was a Justice Anthony Hayden.
He did two things. He refused to release Alfie from the hospital where the State was holding Alfie against the parents’ wishes, and he invited the media in to watch him attack the Christian Legal Centre who were helping Alfies’ parents.
He was scathingly rude about the Christian Legal Centre. He made remarks that in any other context would have been considered as motivated by personal animus.
But then it may have been. For Sir Anthony Hayden is an LGBT campaigner who has written in favour of the rights of LGBT couples commissioning children from surrogates to make them feel like real families.
He wouldn’t like they values of Christian Concern or the Christian Legal Centre, and it showed.
Not only was baby Alfie kept as a prisoner of the state, and the rights of the parents set aside in favour of the state, and this accompanied by personal vitriol directed at the parents’ Christian advisors, but this morning, the Times put its weight behind the learned gay judicial campaigner’s personal disgust with Christian orthodoxy. The Times has adopted a ruthless pro-gay position, not unconnected with the personal values of its editor,
They ran a hatchet job against the Christian Legal Centre’s team. As part of their report on the issues, in preference to looking at the conflict between the claims of the state and those of the child’s parents, they chose to examine at a book that one the CLC’s advisors had written. It had nothing to do with the issues of their case. This was journalistic character assassination. The book was called “Behind the Desert Storm” and the Times reported relished explains how little critical acclaim it was given. The aim was clearly to rubbish CLC and its members in whatever was it could.
The Christian Legal Centre was mis-described as “a fundamentalist Christian group which has stoked up controversy over its hard line views on abortion an homosexuality.”
What does this highly personalised, mischaracterisation mean?
Slowly but surely the judiciary, the media and the state are tightening the noose around the neck of those who follow Jesus, take his words seriously and practice orthodox, biblical Christianity.
They can expect, as Jesus warned, to have their reputations trashed, misrepresented and moved aggressively against.
What began as ridicule has morphed into the accusation of hate crime. No longer are either the police or the courts to be trusted to deal even-handedly with the interests of citizens.
The Church, and those who belong to it, will have to decide whether it slips into quiet, supine acquiescence as the state moves harder and faster against the biological family and those who support it, the unborn child and those who support them, (as the Church of England has) ,or follow what the LGBT activists describe as the ‘hard line’ teaching of Jesus and the values of the Scriptures and the millennia of Christian tradition.
St Paul warned that as a culture increasingly turned its back on God and practiced idolatrous of different kinds, it would result in greater disordered sexual identity and action, and a deeper anger against those who kept faith with Christ.
Increasingly as the persecution ratchets up, Christians are going to have to decide where their allegiances lie.
It is more than tragic that a dying child should be used as an ideological football in a court presided over by a gay activist judge whose impartiality was not publicly evident, and that the critical issues of the rights of parents v the state should be lost in what appears to be a residual antipathy to Christian teaching and values. But there will be more of this.
