The event was organised by the Richmond Coalition Against The State Visit, and it was supported by the Protest the Pope Campaign.

The static protest was staged in Twickenham, outside St Mary’s University College, in south west London, where the Pope talked about his views on education, which include support for separate faith schools and the right of these schools to discriminate in their admissions policy and their recruitment of staff.

The speakers in Twickenham were the following:

- Peter Tatchell, Human Rights Campaigner
- Josh Kutchinsky, Central London Humanist Group
- Derek Lennard, Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association
- Andrea Berardicurti, Circolo di Cultura Omosessuale Mario Mieli (Rome, Italy)

Josh, with balanced words, commented on Ratzinger’s attack against aggressive secularists explaining how secularists are in fact staunch human rights defenders.

At the rally, opposite Downing Street, protesting against the State Visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom,  Geoffrey Robertson QC gave the following speech:

I stand here on behalf of SBS in solidarity with all those who have been horrifically sexually and physically abused by religious leaders of the Catholic Church headed by the reactionary, homophobic and misogynist Pope, Benedict XV1

Should we be surprised by the Pope’s abject failure to carry out robust and transparent investigations into the staggering incidence of clerical sexual abuse across the Catholic world? Should we be surprised at policies which seek to condemn women to death and deny them their fundamental right to freedom from Aids, from poverty and from ignorance? By the denial to the right to sexual autonomy? By the Pope’s rehabilitation of a Nazi holocaust denier? By the racism that emanates from the Vatican which regards Islam as ‘evil’ and the secular and plural fabric of public life in the UK as something akin to a third world country?

The answer is No. None of this comes as any surprise because the Pope represents a particularly abhorrent and resurgent form of religiosity that is characterised by intolerance, dogma and inhumanity.

Nor am I surprised to learn that the Muslim Council of Britain will be taking part in the papal visit. Contrary to the view that religious movements work against each other, they actually collude with each other on key issues such as homosexuality and the control of women’s reproductive rights, as women and gay people around the world are only too aware. The MCB has blood on its hands too. It shelters its own war criminals – those responsible for the murder and rape of thousands of Bangladeshi civilians during the Bangladesh War of independence in 1971. It also remains silent on the sexual and physical abuse of children in madrassas as pointed out by the Muslim Parliament of GB in a courageous report in 2006. In the bid for absolute power and control, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalists have also developed their own rabidly authoritarian, anti-human rights dogmas and are also in the business of prohibiting divorce and abortion and fomenting hatred of other religious minorities which can spill into mass murder , rape and genocide.

The vulnerable women and children on whose behalf SBS advocates, who come from all minority religious and ethnic backgrounds, are also not surprised by the illiberal values of the Pope. They have their own illiberal religious leaderships to contend with. On a daily basis they have their hopes and aspirations quashed by religious leaders who legitimise their oppression and abuse in the name of upholding ‘authentic’ family and religious values. On a daily basis they feel the impact of reactionary religious authority on their right to life, on their right to live free from torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, on their right to equal treatment, on their right to choice in marriage, on their right to a private life, on their right to freedom of expression, on their right to education and on their right to a fair trial.

They regard their religious institutions as political entities, unrepresentative and undemocratic. They demand the separation of religion from political power. They demand secular spaces like that of SBS so that as believers and non-believers from all backgrounds they can co-exist and thrive side by side with dignity and freedom.

As one woman so eloquently put it:

The main principle is to live by humanity. That they should not look at colour. The Poet Iqbal – our greatest poet said.’ Black or white, chota (small), bada (big) , budha (old) and jawan (young) obey Allah. If there is no difference for Allah, why do we bring about difference? I like his (Iqbal’s) idea of unity for all humans.” (Shah)

SBS stands in solidarity with all the men, women and children who have suffered at the hands of religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism. We say to the Pope go back to your despotic home in the Vatican. You have nothing useful to contribute to the progress of humanity. The money that the State has spent on you would have been better spent on shelters and services for abused women and children which are closing or under threat of closure. And to all religious leaders who choose intolerance, intimidation and fear above humanity and compassion, we say: You do not speak in our name. Fear is your weapon but courage is ours.

Women against Fundamentalism protests the Pope’s state visit not because we are anti Catholic but because we are anti fundamentalist. Our founding moment 21 years ago was to defend Salman Rushdie against Muslim fundamentalism and the Ayatollah Khomeini – another very dangerous old man.

WAF fights for a secular state in Britain – not because we are anti religious but because only a secular state can begin to guarantee genuine equality between people regardless of religion. Religious leaders should be as welcome as any other visitor subject to the law – but not given special privileges or state visits. If responsible for serious human rights abuses (and anyone who doubts this of the Pope should read Geoffrey Robertson’s excellent book :The case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuses ) he should be subject to arrest under international law , like Pinochet.

WAF are supporters of the Protest the Pope campaign because fundamentalist leaders abuse power – state power and power over their own religious communities – and this is always at the expense of women. The Pope does not consider himself bound by any manmade law – national or international – he recognises only the law of God and what he calls the natural law .To revive Catholicism in the 21^{st ,} he has rediscovered Thomas Aquinas a 13^th century Italian monk. The pope promotes with a straight face these medieval views on sex: to live and to procreate are counted by Aquinas among those basic (natural) human values on which all human values are based. Aquinas was vehemently opposed to non-procreative sexual activity. This led him to view masturbation, oral sex, and even coitus interruptus, as being worse than incest and rape. He also objected to sexual positions other than the missionary position, on the assumption that they made conception more difficult.

If sex is for procreation only , it follows that contraception and abortion, as well as same sex relationships, interfere with the natural order. There is no recognition of the social world and of human progress in this bleak world. He presents a criminally skewed view of how we should behave – eg don’t wear condoms to protect against aids – he protects procreation at the expense of actual human lives. This pope harms people – and especially he harms women, who carry the burden of procreation and care.

So how is the visit going? Its as carefully managed as any state visit: say the visit of Bush 2 years ago. If ordinary Catholics want to attend any of the Papal events they have to be vetted by the parish – to gain entry to Hyde Park this evening you will need a pilgrim pass distributed by your pilgrim leader, and your passport or other ID. You can travel only as part of your pilgrim group, ie on your parish coach. Every single individual will be checked and searched by the police. To attend is a privilege you will have to pay for with a ticket costing up to £25, and by a lifetime of obedient worship. Even the police were forbidden access to St Marys College yesterday cos they didn’t have their pilgrim passes! (Evening Standard 15/9/10). Its not North African street cleaners the Pope is afraid of; the security arrangements were put in place against his own flock. The splendid TV spectacle – the Mass, the singing – cannot be disrupted by a whisper of dissent. He has refused to meet the organisations of clerical abuse survivors who have asked to present him with a dossier of their stories; instead he has met 5 individuals in private in a carefully controlled act of penitence.

The culmination of his visit is tomorrow – the promotion of an English saint, a convert from the C of E – what a triumph!

But Pope be careful whom you beatify! Cardinal Newman, with his doubts about papal infallibility, was once described by the Vatican as ‘ the most dangerous man in England’. Of course he is now being mispresented by you as the scourge of dissenters. But he famously wrote : ‘ I shall drink first to conscience, and afterwards to the Pope’; and today’s Catholics seem to be following his example. They are listening to their conscience and staying away. It was reported earlier this week that only a fifth of the pilgrims passes for Glasgow’s papal mass were taken up. The 2,500 tickets offered to Catholics from Ireland, who were expected to travel in planeloads, were not sold. It is clear from the blanket TV coverage since his arrival that Catholic school children have been wheeled out last minute to fill the empty spaces. I recall the same thing when I was teaching in a Catholic girls school in the early eighties – it was the schools which were targeted by the parish priest to bring the crowds out on the big anti abortion marches.

This morning the Pope received official visits from state leaders, even Harriet Harman whose equality bill he attacked as against the natural order. Yesterday he was kissed by the Archbishop of Canterbury – despite the ordination of women priests , which he has described as a ‘grave crime’. The cravenness of state and religious leaders in this country to someone whose views are so repugnant and provocative beggars belief. Welcoming and tolerant is nice – but this is going too far!

So with all this help from the state, and blanket TV coverage from the media who love a spectacle, however empty, you can probably carry off this visit, Benedict, despite its hiccups, but I dare you to go to Ireland sometime soon. There your faithful flock are all raging!

I’ll finish by saying one good thing about the Pope – he has a genius for provocation, and his visit has helped to bring us all together – from the ~Gaydar Angels in Twickenham to the women demanding ordination outside Lambeth palace – and here on this platform the breadth of protest will hopefully give rise to a broad based secular movement in Britain . This is badly needed: the trend to promote and fund religious and charitable organisations at the expense of the public sector – already clear under Labour but set to intensify under Cameron’s Big Society – will have terrible consequences for all of us but particularly for the poorest women in society. A secular campaign will be essential to save the public sector and the welfare state – something that we in Britain can really be proud of but which is now mortally threatened.

Clara Connolly

Women Against Fundamentalism.

At the rally, opposite Downing Street, protesting against the State Visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom, Dr Ben Goldacre gave the following speech:

After having closed also the northbound of Whitehall because of the huge number of protesters, the Police had no choice but pestering us for terminating the Rally as soon as possible (after the planned end time of 5.30pm) trying to minimise the disruption to the traffic in central London.

We insisted to have at least one minute for each of the remaining speakers, which was obviously not enough.

THANKS FOR THE HUGE SUPPORT. THIS MARCH HAS MADE HISTORY.

The National Catholic Register states: “Even though the pope’s supporters clearly outnumbered his critics, this was nevertheless easily the largest public protest Benedict XVI has ever faced on one of his foreign trips, and one of the largest protests against a pope  in modern history.”

At the rally, opposite Downing Street, protesting against the State Visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom, Human Rights Campaigner Peter Tatchell gave the following speech:

At the rally, opposite Downing Street, protesting against the State Visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom, Johann Hari gave the following speech:

Sue Cox is a sex abuse survivor who was raped by a Catholic priest when she was a child.

She received a lifetime achievement award this year for her contribution to the treatment of addiction, and used that occasion to highlight her background and the Church’s appalling attitude.

After fifty years of fear, she has found the courage to face the Church and their empty obsequious apologies.

A champion of the Protest the Pope Campaign, Sue Cox gave the following speech at the start of the March & Rally on Saturday 18th September 2010:

Its been a really tough week for all of us here. Its been a roller coaster of emotions, frustrations, where our jaws have bounced of our laps, aghast at the things that we are witnessing,the things we are hearing said about our country. We have felt vulnerable and bared our souls in dignified and graceful ways that show the true manner of exposing secrets, assured in the knowledge that the Catholic hierarchy will not follow our example. We have been called soulless, spiritually-barren, compared revoltingly even to nazi’s because we choose not to believe in the man-made dogma’s of a dark and closed society that ensures that its secrets are buried deep by using fear, threats and cynicism. We have listened to obsequious, cynical apologies, even been asked to pray for this man. We have had to shell out for this great carnival a week after hearing that our own tax system made mistakes that we are having to pay for, at the height of a global economic crisis. How utterly egotistical, arrogant and selfish is this, an act by a so-called state, a so-called force for good?

Benedict suggests that “…as we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism, let us knot forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue leads to a truncated vision of society”. He is not sobered at all by the experiences that we have tried to share, tried to have heard.

Yet again what we see is another subtle, cynical attempt to suggest that if we don’t believe its all hopeless. And how dare he suggest that secularism does not accept or tolerate traditional values. If his traditional values include child abuse and lying about it, homophobia and calling gay and lesbian people inclined to moral evil, reaping in as much money as possible, despite a large percentage of his following scavenging for scraps on rubbish tips, ruling with fear of hell and excommunication, showing more intolerance than any other religion I have ever experienced, showing more hate, more disdain, more narcissism – then I am proud to stand up and say that I do not accept his traditional values!!

In fact, I am proud to stand here alongside these wonderful people and have this honour to say that I have experienced nothing but love, compassion, support, warmth, strength of spirit, honesty, encouragement, grace and dignity from every single one of them. The only think I have every experienced from the Catholic church is pain, anger, fear, terror, disgust, lies, shame, violence, sneering disdain, disempowerment, despised for being human and using my enquiring, curious mind to question some eye-wateringly inept man-made tenets and rules that do little to further the human cause.

If someone had told that little 13 year old girl left in that room,broken and devastated 50 years ago that one day she would be able to stand up and say what happened to her, that she would have the opportunity to be part of a sea of change, that her story would have to be heard in order for other people to find the courage to speak, she would not have believed it. She was all alone back there.

Now when my nightmares take me back there, I shall be able to take this image in front of me back with me of you all knowing that you would want this to have stopped for this little girl, I shall be able to take my experience of everyone who has been with me this week supporting me through this back in there too and I shall be able to take the strength of spirit that I have experienced to help me get out of that room once and for all and never go back.I want that for ALL children who have been damaged in the worst betrayal imaginable.

So I stand in front of you today with a choice – I can either touch my hand to my forelock and cower down to Il Papa,(or kiss his ring!!) begging for forgiveness for speaking out and getting them all into trouble and being such a bad little catholic – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, which will hopefully if I work really hard at penance mean that I can aspire to a short haul in purgatory and then salvation in heaven?

Or I can stay with what I believe that I have been as close to “God” for me in speaking and working with Peter, Marco, Andrew, Margaret, Barbara, Peter and with everyone here that has rallied to say enough is enough!!

I imagine myself as that little girl being given the choice of what route to take in order to get out of the room – do I take the Pope’s hand which asks me to pray for the man who hurt me and who was allowed to get away with it, where all I every experienced was fear, terror, pain or do I choose to take the hand of the people here today who say, to “You are stardust. You are unique, special, awesome, you are the result of the rarest of possibilities. Isn’t that amazing in its own right? Doesn’t that reach to a part of you that you know is the deepest, spiritual well that you have. Some may call that God and I fully respect their right to experience this and validate it in their own way.

But this is a private place in all of us and is NOT the property of as extreme a religion as I know currently represented by a man who has systematically enabled and lied about his role in all of this. I think that this week has shown me that I was right all along, that the Churches current attempts to show a ‘bella figura’ are working against them.

I hear the plight of newly ordained priests – there was a time, I know only too well, where a priest was considered the pinnacle of society yet these days the first question that pops into many peoples mind is “Did you? Do you? How safe are you?” This is a crying shame, but it is NOT because of us, it is because of their own Church.

How can the Catholic Heirarchy change this for their people and the World?

ADMIT IT!!

Open up those secret files, and start to MAKE AMENDS!!

Recognise that you have a disease in your midst and in the sam way I had to in the early days of my recovery,start working to stop the rot and get the infection out!

Work to find some humility! keep thyat ego in check!

if you were ablke to be real and true, you may get clean! But I won’t hold my breath.

Many of you are walking today for a whole vsariety of reasons,but could you just close your eyes for a moment and imagine the reality that somewhere in this world, there is a child that has been through all of this, and is brokjen and devasted and has no hope.They just might get chance to see a television,and a shot of what is happening here today.

Show that child a warm face,show them that trhey WILL be believed,show them that it is possibloe to speak out and someone will be there for them.

As for the Pope and his heirarchy, You will no longer be able to get away with your crimes.

BECAUSE WE ARE WATCHING YOU!

You will go ack to Rome,all puffed up and patting yourself on the back for a great PR stunt, with your sycophants dancing around you, but know this!

WE ARE WATCHING YOU, and we will continue to watch and shout out, and fight for change!

THIS IS NOT OVER!!

At the rally, opposite Downing Street, protesting against the State Visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom,  Professor Richard Dawkins gave the following speech:

This is the full text of the speech that Professor Richard Dawkins planned to give at the London rally against the Pope, 18th Sept 2010. The speech as actually delivered in Whitehall was much shorter, mostly because the rally was so huge (an estimated 15,000) that the speeches started late and had to be curtailed.

Should Joseph Ratzinger have been welcomed with all the pomp and ceremony due to a Head of State? No. As Geoffrey Robertson has shown in The Case of the Pope, the Holy See’s claim to statehood is founded on a Faustian deal in which Mussolini handed over 1.2 square miles of central Rome in exchange for Church support of his fascist regime. Our government chose the occasion of the pope’s visit to announce their intention to “do God”. As a friend has remarked to me, presumably we should expect the imminent hand-over of Hyde Park to the Vatican, to clinch the deal?

Should Ratzinger, then, be welcomed as the head of a church? By all means, if individual Catholics wish to overlook his many transgressions and lay out the red carpet for his designer red shoes, let them do so. But don’t ask the rest of us to pay. Don’t ask the British taxpayer to subsidize the propaganda mission of an institution whose wealth is measured in the tens of billions: wealth for which the phrase ‘ill-gotten’ might have been specifically coined. And spare us the nauseating spectacle of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and assorted Lord Lieutenants and other dignitaries cringing and fawning sycophantically all over him as though he were somebody we should respect.

Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, was respected by some as a saintly man. But nobody could call Benedict XVI saintly and keep a straight face. Whatever this leering old fixer may be, he is not saintly. Is he intellectual? Scholarly? That is often claimed, although it is far from clear what there is in theology to be scholarly about. Surely nothing to respect.

The unfortunate little fact that Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth has been the subject of a widely observed moratorium. I’ve respected it myself, hitherto. But after the Pope’s outrageous speech in Edinburgh, blaming atheism for Hitler, one can’t help feeling that the gloves are off. Did you hear what he said?

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews . . . As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century . . .

You have to wonder about the PR skills of the advisors who let that paragraph through. Oh but of course, I was forgetting, his senior advisor is that Cardinal who takes one look at the immigration officials at Heathrow and concludes that he must have landed in the Third World. The poor man was no doubt prescribed a bushel of Hail Marys, on top of his swift attack of diplomatic gout – and one can’t help wondering whether the afflicted foot was the one he puts in his mouth.

At first I was annoyed by the Pope’s disgraceful attack on atheists and secularists, but then I saw it as reassuring. It suggests that we have rattled them so much that they have to resort to insulting us, in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the child rape scandal.

It probably is too harsh to expect the 15-year-old Ratzinger to have seen through the Nazis. As a devout Catholic, he would have had dinned into him, along with the Catechism, the obnoxious idea that all Jews are to be held responsible for killing Jesus – the ‘Christ-killer’ libel – not repudiated until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The German Roman Catholic psyche of the time was still shot through with the anti-Semitism of centuries.

Adolf Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Or at least he was as much a Roman Catholic as the 5 million so-called Roman Catholics in this country today. For Hitler never renounced his baptismal Catholicism, which was doubtless the criterion for counting the 5 million alleged British Catholics today. You cannot have it both ways. Either you have 5 million British Catholics, in which case you have to have Hitler too. Or Hitler was not a Catholic, in which case you have to give us an honest figure for the number of genuine Catholics in Britain today – the number who really believe Jesus turns himself into a wafer, as the former Professor Ratzinger presumably does.

In any case, Hitler certainly was not an atheist. In 1933 he claimed to have “stamped atheism out”, having banned most of Germany’s atheist organizations, including the German Freethinkers League whose building was then turned into an information bureau for church affairs.

At very least, Hitler believed in a personified ‘Providence’, presumably akin to the Divine Providence invoked by the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich in 1939, when Hitler escaped assassination and the Cardinal ordered a special Te Deum in Munich Cathedral,

To thank Divine Providence in the name of the Archdiocese for the Führer’s fortunate escape.

We may never know whether Hitler identified his ‘Providence’ with the Cardinal’s God. But he certainly knew his overwhelmingly Christian constituency, the millions of good Christian Germans with Gott mit uns on their belt buckles, who actually did his dirty work for him. He knew his support base. Hitler most certainly did “do God”. Here’s part of a speech he made in Munich, the heart of Catholic Bavaria, in 1922: -

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who – God’s truth! – was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

That is just one of numerous speeches, and passages in Mein Kampf, where Hitler invoked his Christianity. No wonder he received such warm support from within the Catholic hierarchy of Germany. And Benedict’s predecessor, Pius XII, is not guiltless, as the Catholic writer John Cornwell devastatingly showed, in his book Hitler’s Pope.

It would be unkind to prolong this point, but Ratzinger’s speech in Edinburgh on Thursday was so disgraceful, so hypocritical, so redolent of the sound of stones hurled from within a glass house, I felt that I had to reply.

Even if Hitler had been an atheist – as Stalin more surely was – how dare Ratzinger suggest that atheism has any connection whatsoever with their horrific deeds? Any more than Hitler and Stalin’s non-belief in leprechauns or unicorns. Any more than their sporting of a moustache – along with Franco and Saddam Hussein. There is no logical pathway from atheism to wickedness. Unless, that is, you are steeped in the vile obscenity at the heart of Catholic theology. I refer (and I am indebted to Paula Kirby for the point) to the doctrine of Original Sin. These people believe – and they teach this to tiny children, at the same time as they teach them the terrifying falsehood of hell – that every baby is “born in sin”. That would be Adam’s sin, by the way: Adam who, as they themselves now admit, never existed. Original sin means that, from the moment we are born, we are wicked, corrupt, damned. Unless we believe in their God. Or unless we fall for the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. That, ladies and gentleman, is the disgusting theory that leads them to presume that it was godlessness that made Hitler and Stalin the monsters that they were. We are all monsters unless redeemed by Jesus. What a vile, depraved, inhuman theory to base your life on.

Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.

He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell: and most concerned with saving the long-term reputation of the church itself.

He is an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews.

He is an enemy of women – barring them from the priesthood as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties. What other employer is allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex, when filling a job that manifestly doesn’t require physical strength or some other quality that only males might be thought to have?

He is an enemy of truth, promoting barefaced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.

He is an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty. A poverty that sits ill with the obscene riches of the Vatican.

He is an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research, on grounds not of morality but of pre-scientific superstition.

Less seriously from my point of view, Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly endorsing a predecessor’s dissing of Anglican Orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, while shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to shore up his own pitifully declining priesthood.

Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, he is an enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong psychological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made catholic education infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation and authority – his authority.

We don’t want the ‘corrective supplied by religion’

Maryam Namazie’s speech at the Protest the Pope Rally

18 September 2010

We are gathered here today to show our opposition to the pope’s visit – for being state-funded but also to show our opposition to his views and the adverse role religion plays in the private and particularly the public spheres.

The pope says we need the ‘corrective supplied by religion.’

That’s exactly what we don’t need.

Look around. Everywhere we see the murder and mayhem ‘supplied by religion.’ We are not speaking of another planet or centuries past where one can get away with saying such things.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, we see the ‘corrective supplied by religion’ – on stem cell research, family planning, exemptions to discriminate, the segregation of our children in faith schools and the demand for parallel legal systems – including Sharia law and the Beth Dinn…

What’s even worse is Islam.

Not because Islam is worse than Christianity or other religions – fundamentally they are all the same – but because Islam has state power in many places.

Sharia law is now the most widely implemented religious law worldwide. And under Sharia law, child rape and sexual abuse is legal – what with child marriages allowed from age 9 and even younger if permitted by the girl’s male guardian. Gays are executed. Apostates and freethinkers are hung. Protestors like Neda Agha-Soltan are shot dead in broad daylight and women are sentenced to death by stoning for sex outside of marriage – like Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.

Today’s Islam is the like Christianity during the inquisition.

We are living today under an Islamic inquisition – one that needs another enlightenment to push it back.

A significant part of the battle against the pope and religion’s role has to be against Islamism.

But suddenly, it is deemed racism!

Isn’t it actually racist to say that ‘different’ people have ‘different’ rights and freedoms?

Suddenly it is deemed ‘moral imperialism.’

As if stoning is people’s culture. As if Sharia courts are people’s culture. Whose culture are we speaking of. The culture of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani who is fighting to live or the culture of the Islamic regime in Iran that wants to stone her? The culture of the Sharia court that gives women no choices or the women who wants to live free from violence?
This is not people’s culture; it is the pope’s culture, the Islamic regime of Iran’s culture, Islamism’s culture.

It’s not yours or mine.

It’s not moral imperialism but a moral imperative to intervene on humanity’s behalf.

The pope speaks of ‘secular intolerance.’ Nothing is more intolerant than religion. It is intolerant of gays, of women, of love, of sex, of music, of your choice of clothing…

It is a crime to be a human being under Sharia law in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and even parts of Britain where many have been handed over lock stock and barrel to the Islamic movement.

As I’ve said before, it is a question of choice.

We choose humanity whilst the pope, Ahmadinejad and Islamists choose religious dogma at the expense of humanity.

The pope complains of ‘aggressive secularists.’ Well they haven’t seen anything yet.

We’re going to push them back.

We want to – demand to – live in the 21^st century.

Thank you.