New Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb is being bigged up by the corporate media – including the Mail, Guardian, Times and Telegraph – as a future Tory leader because, we are told, he is in touch with working class culture. That is true only if you identify working class culture with Alf Garnett.
Crabb is in fact an extreme religious nutter and an anti-gay bigot who has consistently voted against gay marriage and against gay adoption. That is hardly surprising because Crabb entered politics as an intern provided by a fringe evangelical group called CARE – Christian Action Research Education. Despite ghosting around the extreme fringes of British religious life, CARE manages to exercise an entirely disproportionate influence on British politics by providing shiny eyed fanatics free to MPs as interns. Crabb was one such intern, and after becoming an MP himself took CARE interns into his office.
In 2010 CARE organised a London conference called “Sex and the City: Redeeming Sex Today” which focused on the need to “cure” homosexuality. Warning this links to offensive material. Keynote speaker was a religious quack named Joseph Nicolosi. I shall let his own website speak for him.
Crabb’s appointment is a wake-up call to anyone who believes that the kind of influence the religious right exercises in the United States cannot be echoed here. Following Duncan Smith’s admission that the British government supports only sectional interest, the emergence of a figure like Crabb from the nutty evangelical fringes is a major worry.
I did of course last month provide photograph evidence that some evangelical Christians may be having subliminal thoughts about sexuality 🙂
