- Jules Gomes
SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY CAN’T STOP SOCIAL WORKERS FROM USING THE “S” WORD
If you were living under communism in Poland you couldn’t say the “S” word. One man defied the ban by uttering the verboten word “Solidarity” six times in his Angelus address on December 13, 1981, just a few hours after the communist dictatorship imposed martial law on Poland.
Two years later, Karol Wojtyła went to Poznań and explicitly voiced the word “Solidarity.” At Jasna Góra, he defiantly used other seditious words in his homily: “dignity” four times, “independence” four times, “free” or “freedom” twenty times and “nation” or “national” twenty times.
If you are living under the new despotism of homofascism in England you can’t say the “S” word in relation to homosexuality. A Cameroonian immigrant defied the ban and dared to utter the verboten word “Sin” when posting comments on Facebook.
Felix Ngole, a postgraduate social work student at the University of Sheffield was responding to the jailing of American registrar, Kim Davies, who conscientiously objected to issuing gay couples with marriage licences because of her Christian beliefs on marriage.
If you are living under the despotism of homofascism you can’t say the “S” word in relation to homosexuality.
In Kim’s defence, Ngole used the proscribed “S” word and associated sin with gay sex. Wielding his digital pen like a Samurai sword, the 38-year-old father of four, wrote with passionate intensity:
“Same sex marriage is a sin whether we accept it or not.”
“Homosexuality is a sin, no matter how you want to dress it up.”
“[Homosexuality] is a wicked act and God hates the act.”
“God hates sin and not man.”
Ngole supported his statements with three biblical texts. He quoted Leviticus, which uses the Jewish cultic term “abomination” to proscribe homosexuality; he referred to Sodom and Gomorrah from Jude; and he pasted three verses from St Paul’s letter to the Romans—censuring homosexual acts as “contrary to nature.”
A faceless student from Felix’s university, cloaking her cowardice under the apparel of anonymity, snitched on the social worker to the University’s Gaystapo. For the next four years (from November 2015), Felix was forced to face the Sheffield Witch Trials, hauled before an ascending hierarchy of the University’s Unholy Inquisition like a heretic and excommunicated from his MA course.
Felix’s inquisitors in Pinkshirts invariably kept parroting the same pedestrian reasons for their despotic decision. Here’s how the Office of the Independent Adjudicator put it: “the posts amounted not just to Mr Ngole quoting passages from the Bible, but also to him expressing his own personal views, for instance saying that ‘homosexuality is a sin, no matter how you want to dress it up....’”
Nein! Nein! Es ist verboten! Dummkopf, repeat after me ze first commandment of ze Rainbow Reich: “Thou shalt not use the ‘S’ word for homosexuality in public!” After four years of psychological waterboarding by the “all you need is love” brigade, Felix remained as immovable as the pillars that prop the universe.
Last week, the Court of Appeals came crashing down like the ice of a polar sea on the university’s kangaroo courts and monkey trials. In a landmark judgement it even overturned the High Court decision against Felix Ngole.
The judges identified the key issue with laser-sharp precision: “namely, that the University told the Claimant that whilst he was entitled to hold his views about homosexuality being a sin, he was never entitled to express such views on social media or in any public forum.”
Irony of ironies! Progressives want gays to come out of the closet and parade their pleasures with “Pride,” but at the same time seek to shove Christians into the closet, slam the door tightly shut on biblical views of sin, and let free speech suffocate to death.
“I don’t think you would behave in a discriminatory way, however, you could inadvertently discriminate.”
“If social workers and social work students must not express such views, then what of art therapists, occupational therapists, paramedics, psychologists, radiographers, speech and language therapists: all professions whose students and practitioners work under the rubric of the same general regulations?” the three judges asked in a surprising spurt of torrential eloquence.
You don’t need to be a Christian or have a view on sin or sexuality to see through the pygmy intellects and logical fallacies of Sheffield University’s Inquisitors. Their entire case against Mr Ngole is as bare as an ape’s rump—a jabber-fest of inanity, inarticulacy, obfuscation and pseudo-legal arguments raked up from the night-soil tray.
Ngole’s posts breached the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) code and guidelines, the Inquisitors alleged. On the contrary, the HCPC “Guidance on Social Media” encourages its practitioners to “be honest and trustworthy” and only not “post inappropriate or offensive material,” for example, “racist or sexually explicit” remarks. Even the court admits Felix was as polite as a pigeon.
The most fatuous leap of faith the university made was to assume that because Ngole believed that homosexual acts to be sinful, he would discriminate against homosexual people.
When it became clear as a cube of solid sunshine that Ngole had never discriminated even against a bed bug and would never discriminate against gays because, as he explained, the Bible prohibited him from discriminating against anybody,” he was told by Inquisitor Bosworth: “I don’t think you would behave in a discriminatory way, however, you could inadvertently discriminate.”
So, Mr Bosworth, punishing someone for a crime they’ve never committed, they say they will never commit, but which you (after gazing into your crystal ball) predict they “might inadvertently” commit, is justice, eh?
Let’s take this argumentum ad ignorantiam to its logical conclusion. Felix, like most Christians, also believes that lying, cheating, stealing, gambling, gossiping, fornicating, cohabiting, hating and hitting others are sins. He could hang posts on Facebook with biblical lists of all these sins strung together like sausages.
Ergo, Felix and his fellow-Christians, cannot be social workers (or work in any of the health and caring professions) because they might inadvertently discriminate against liars, cheaters, thieves, gamblers, gossipers, fornicators, and cohabiters—a list which essentially covers the human race, including Felix himself, since as St Paul writes in the same letter to the Romans (which Felix quoted on gay sex) “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God … none is righteous, no, not one.”
How can you argue with ideologically driven academics who run Britain’s first Department of Artificial Stupidity?
In reality, I can discriminate against people even if I don’t find their behaviour sinful. A white supremacist will discriminate against blacks simply because of skin colour—not because he thinks black people are indulging in sinful acts like homosexuality.
But how can you argue with ideologically driven academics who run Britain’s first Department of Artificial Stupidity? When enlightened arguments fizzled out, they told Felix that he “could be perceived as expressing views which albeit based on his religious beliefs, were discriminatory towards single sex couples.”
Even the high court judge took the view that what troubled the University was how some readers might “perceive” his posts “as judgmental, incompatible with service ethos, or suggestive of discriminatory intent.”
So now we don’t punish people for crimes they commit but for a postmodern reader-response of other people’s perception of how they subjectively might interpret a person’s views expressed in public!
Paul Diamond, barrister extraordinaire, who represented Felix Ngole on behalf of the Christian Legal Centre, showed the judge she is a few light bulbs short of a chandelier and demonstrated that this charge amounted to little more than a “heckler’s veto.”
If the Court of Appeals had not vindicated Mr Ngole, we could be punished for anything we say because of how a reader perceived what was said.
This would create a new legal category of subjectively offensive speech—speech that offends some people. Of course, other people might approve of this speech and so banning such speech would mean privileging one group above the other and flushing justice down the toilet.
The Tower of Babel in Eastern Europe came tumbling down in less than a decade because a Polish pontiff refused to submit to the new fascism militating against freedom of speech.
One very big wall propping up the totalitarian Tower of Babel in Western Europe has now come tumbling down because a Christian Cameroonian immigrant refused to stop repeating the “S” word on social media.
(Originally published in Church Militant. To comment on this piece, click here)
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