Andrew Brown in a recent blog for The Guardian argues that Catholic attitudes to gay sex fail to account for human beings. Though his conclusions are different, in terms of  argumentation Brown often seems to adopt an approach that is quite like that of Judeo-Christian moralists, so it is refreshing to discuss an issue while […]

The availability of pornography is nothing new, but reasons for prohibition need to be re-articulated, and sometimes re-discovered, as one generation succeeds another and re-evaluates what it has received of legislation and social mores from the past. There is no doubt that a certain public acceptance of pornography has grown significantly over the last twenty […]

In discussing the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) it is essential, given current wrangling over matters European, to emphasise that membership of the Council of Europe which drafted the ECHR, and assent to the treaty, are matters quite distinct from that of membership of the European Union. While David Cameron may want to present […]

As Labour’s poll ratings plummet following the Unite scandal we have a suitable occasion to ask how some integrity may be injected back into politics. After David Cameron’s evisceration of his own party’s grass-roots there is perhaps an element of balance in watching poor Ed do much the same to Labour’s political base though none […]

In order to maintain public order secularism in our time relies on well- established delineation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms. While attempting to play down divisions between social groups, secularism reinforces a distinction between public conduct and private life. In this way a moderate secularism can reduce public conflict by emphasising those aspects of public […]

You wait months for a whistleblower to say something genuinely newsworthy and then two come along in quick succession: Edward Snowden, a former NSA worker who let the world know about PRISM; and Peter Francis, a former police officer who reports that he was ordered to find out compromising information on family and friends of […]

News that the United States government ordered the largest US communications company Verizon to hand over details of communications of all of its customers on a daily basis is as regrettable as it is shocking. That is to say, insofar as it is regrettable it is also shocking but it is not a complete surprise. […]

From a Guest Blogger: In the midst of the ongoing gay marriage debate, the Government has faced calls to extend civil partnerships to heterosexual couples. After all, isn’t banning heterosexual couples from civil partnerships just as discriminatory as banning gay couples from marrying? The Guardian reports that one minister was confronted about the situation of […]