New efforts within the UK’s government anti-extremism strategy could resemble the FBI’s reported targeting of traditional Catholics in the U.S. last year, Catholic British analyst Gavin Ashenden indicated in an August 29 article in The Catholic Herald.
Ashenden recalled a 2023 Herald article by Simon Caldwell that detailed how the FBI reportedly “focused in particular on Catholics who were interested in the Traditional Latin Mass as the group within the Church allegedly the most likely to be sympathetic to violent extremist activities.”
“What begins in America often swiftly finds its way to the UK,” Ashenden wrote.
His concerns center around UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s recently launched commission, which is within the government’s strategy against extremism and purports to review “extremist ideologies.”
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Ashenden argued that the word “extremist” has become a euphemism for “views that an authoritarian left-wing government disapproves of.” However, he added that there are issues with Cooper’s announced efforts against people who push “harmful or hateful beliefs,” namely, how the words “harm” and “hate” are defined.
“In the Left’s new lexicon, anything that counters the authoritarian dogma of progressivism is harmful and hateful,” Ashenden continued.
He later reflected on why the Catholic Church holds that marriage is between one man and one woman – because of divine revelation, but also because children are essential for a society to exist. He highlighted the reflection of commentator Brendan O’Neill on how traditional Catholics have faced accusations of being homophobic because of their views on marriage.
Ashenden wrote, “It is not phobic to recognise that changing the definition of marriage changes the capacity to build and enable society.”
Further, choosing to belong to a specific religion over another, such as choosing Christianity over Islam, is not a phobia, he argued.
“It is an abdication of truth and reality to mask certain choices as a phobia,” he wrote. “By all means let there be choice, but to work against the possibility of informed choice – evangelisation – in order to prevent a fake phobia, that is the real extremism.”
LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
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