Is Kate Forbes’ Christian Faith A Career Killer?
When the radical Nicola Sturgeon abruptly resigned as leader of the separatist Scottish National Party, a British friend texted me to say he was really worried about Kate Forbes (pictured above), the young government minister who was the favorite to replace her. Forbes is really talented, said my friend — meaning that she might well be able to lead Scotland to secession.
That looks unlikely to happen now. Why? Because Kate Forbes, 32, is a Presbyterian — and a real one, not one of the woke ones. Her views on trans matters — she opposes the idea that men can be women simply because they claim to be — were well known. She was asked her feelings about same-sex marriage, which is legal in Scotland. She said she opposed it for faith reasons, but said that as far as she’s concerned, it’s a settled issue, and if she became SNP leader, she would not seek to reverse it. She also said that thinks having children out of wedlock is a bad idea. Watch the whole video interview here.
That did it. She’s now History’s Greatest Monster. Surprisingly and wonderfully, Kathleen Stock, the distinguished academic and lesbian who was driven out of her college for being gender-critical, rises to Forbes’s defense in UnHerd. Excerpts:
Rather, Forbes’s words have been seized upon because they help prop up adherence to a different sort of modern dogma: the rainbow religion promulgated in the name of the amorphous “LGBTQI+” people. Like Christianity, this centres on the figure of a sacred, innocent outsider, beset on all sides by hatred but turning the other cheek, and freeing people from their traditional ways of life by lived example.
Alongside the idea that you can reinvent yourself at any time, it’s one of the fundamental tenets of this value system that LGBTQI+ people are still actively persecuted across the board in modern Britain, with no room for further nuance about who exactly, or under what circumstances, or what the hell some of those letters even stand for anyway. Hundreds of public and third-sector organisations and enterprises are invested in this exceptionally simple story. Indeed, some of them make a lot of money from it. Thousands of employee hours have been spent in HR training sessions, listening to ropey statistics that represent perceptions of persecution among gay and trans people as fact. At this stage, there is such collective national investment in thinking of LGBTQI+ people as severely oppressed that one obscurely fears a lightning strike even to raise a question about it.
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Of course, in practice, no-one criticising her has any idea whether Forbes is a genuine homophobe or not. Another facile equation made by those religiously invested in victimhood for LGBTQI+ people is that any objection to liberalisation must be rooted in some kind of “phobia”. In practice, like everyone else, Christians range from kind, tolerant, and generous people to bigoted nutcases, with many shades of grey in between.
But Forbes is unlikely to be given the benefit of the doubt. To do so would be to squander a rare chance to perpetuate the hysterical fantasy that LGBTQI+ people in Britain, generally, are permanently a hair’s breadth away from malicious destruction — even as the Equality Act explicitly protects both gay and trans people, the BBC hosts dozens of positive stories about trans youth, millions of pounds roll into charity coffers, gay men rule entertainment telly, lesbians rule women’s sport, and entire classrooms change their pronouns to the delight of their teachers.
As I say, what we have here is a clash of two religions. One of them is full of sanctimonious, swivel-eyed moral scolds, rooting out heresy and trying to indoctrinate everybody into their fantastic way of thinking. The other is a branch of Calvinism. One of them asks “what would Jesus do?” and the other “what would Owen Jones think?”. Faced with a choice between their representatives on earth, I know which kind I would prefer to see in high office.
Killer closing! I’m grateful to Prof. Stock for her strong words in defense of a Christian politician.
What’s happening to Kate Forbes is what I feared would eventually happen to all small-o orthodox Christians in public life (orthodox, I mean, on sexual matters): they would be demonized and marginalized, even if they pose no threat at all to what LGBT people want. It is sufficient that they think the Wrong Thoughts™ to drive them out. Remember the Law of Merited Impossibility? It says, “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” Back in 2006, people like me were called alarmists, and were asked, “How does my gay neighbors’ marriage hurt me?” by people who didn’t actually want an answer. Well, the fate of Kate Forbes is part of the answer. It was baked into the cake from the beginning. Why? Because if same-sex marriage (and transgenderism) are civil rights, and human rights, then to oppose them is to be guilty of the equivalent of racism. You can explain all day long how sexuality and gender are not like race, and it won’t matter. Nobody wants to hear it. And as Stock understands, the success of the LGBT lobby depends on keeping everybody believing the lie that LGBT people are on the verge of being sent to the camps by Christians in what is fast becoming one of the world’s most secular societies.
Back in 2015, a well-known Evangelical pastor friend told me that when he would be invited to guest-preach in churches, he would tell congregations that the day is fast coming in which they will all be seen as no better than Klansmen for believing what the Bible says about sexuality, and what most Americans believed until the day before yesterday. He said they could not bring themselves to believe him. They just couldn’t. I told him back then that I knew the feeling. He and I both spent a lot of time in our lives moving among liberal elites, and understood their mindset. Normie Christians found it impossible to accept that this was going to happen to our country.
What has happened to Kate Forbes is going to come to America. It already has to some extent. Ask yourself: would anybody who believes what Kate Forbes believes be able to rise to leadership in the Democratic Party, even if she was a staunch advocate of its economic policies, and even if she said she would not support political action to reverse same-sex marriage? Of course not. There might be some Olds in the Democratic Party at the senior level who believe that, but they say nothing, they downplay it. The real question twenty or thirty years from now will be whether it is possible to be Kate Forbes as a Republican.
This is a religious war. The other side does not want tolerance. They never did. Even those among them who advocate sincerely for tolerance are on the margins of the movement. It’s a movement that takes scalps. In the meantime, we on the conservative side are cursed by normie Republicans like Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and Larry Hogan, all of whom criticize Gov. Ron DeSantis for violating “small-government conservatism” in going after Woke Conservative behemoth Disney.
Kate Forbes refused to live by lies, and it might well cost her her political career. That’s what life is like in post-Christian Britain. In 2017, Evangelical Christian Tim Farron was forced out as leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, because he hesitated to say what his views on homosexuality were. He later said he didn’t think gay sex was sinful, but that wasn’t enough. The fact that he was silent when first asked was damning. No Christianity, please, we’re British…
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