Mary Kenny
A statue of Cardinal Basil Hume 
We are all aware of the phrase ‘climate change denier’ – Mary Robinson said this week it was “evil” to deny the reality of climate change. We know, too, about ‘Holocaust deniers’ – ignoramuses, or worse, who claim that the crimes of the Third Reich did not occur, or that the numbers murdered were exaggerated.
Now I would like to introduce another category of ‘denier’: the ‘biology denier’.
The biology denier is now ubiquitous: he and she – for they come in all genders – deny that there is any difference between men and women. Or that the only difference that exists is one that is ‘socially constructed’ – that is, invented by society, not ordered by biology.
Pregnancy
Biology deniers speak of ‘pregnant people’, rather than ‘pregnant women’, since they deny the fact that pregnancy is biologically female. When it comes to parenthood, biology deniers affirm that fathers and mothers are exactly the same, so each parent should have the same amount of parental leave, denying the fact that women need more physical recovery time from childbirth and more time, too, for breast-feeding.
In the British police service now, female police officers in an advanced state of pregnancy have won the right to do ‘front-line policing’ – i.e. tackling offenders carrying guns and knives – because biology denial is now official policy.
In the fire service, the same principle applies: no discrimination is allowed between a 15-stone, 6-foot male, and an 8 stone, 5-foot female, because biology is deemed irrelevant.
Some biology deniers have claimed that boys have menstrual periods, like girls, since there cannot be any difference between the genders, can there?
Equal pay is a just and fair principle we should all uphold, but the biological deniers omit any aspect of biological choice from the vocational equation.
Fewer women choose to be steeplejacks, oil-rig workers and deep-bore tunnel engineers largely because their brains and bodies seldom find these physically rougher callings attractive, but the biology deniers say this is pure gender discrimination.
Every neurological study that emerges showing that the brains of males and females are wired up differently – female infants, from birth, show more interest in people while male infants, from birth, show more interest in objects – is vociferously denied.
In sport, the biology deniers are working on the project to make sport and athletics gender-neutral.
What was once called ‘the natural law’ – or even the deliberations of science – make no impact on the biology deniers who continue, regardless of all nostrums, with their propaganda that biology is irrelevant. Watch their power and influence grow and grow.
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There was some comment on Pope Francis being disinclined to have his Papal ring kissed – it’s not a custom that he likes. Maybe this is a reaction against over-deferential practices of past time, when there was perhaps too much kissing of ecclesiastical rings.
But one must be sensitive to what the faithful wants. I remember Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster talking about visiting Ethiopia: he dressed in simple black and asked Ethiopians to call him “Fr Basil”, rather than “My Lord”. But the people he visited were deeply disappointed.
They wanted to see a proper Prince of the Church, and dressing in all his splendid canonicals would have pleased his hosts much more.
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The sad demise of hotel Bibles
Many Irish hotels that I have frequented still have a copy of the Bible in the bedroom drawer, placed there by those American distributors of scripture, the Gideons.
There is a helpful guide at the beginning of the book directing the reader to passages: “For Loneliness…For Sorrow…For Suffering…For Comfort.” (Suffering points to 2 Corinthians 12, where St Paul talks about his “thorn in the flesh”, which deterred him from getting above himself.)
Equality
Gideon Bibles are now disappearing from British hotels, presumably because they don’t meet criteria for ‘equality and diversity’: a Koran, a Hindu Vedas text, a Tibetan Book of the Dead and presumably some secularist text would have to be given equal positioning.
Sad.
