Britain Plans to Require All Clerics to Register with the Government

Britain has an obvious problem with radical Islam, leading to a drastic spike in terror attacks over recent years. To combat this problem, the British Home Office has released a plan in which they will require all clerics – including Christian and Jewish ones – to register with the Home Office and receive government “training” and security clearances:

Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures in Britain will have to enrol in a “national register of faith leaders” and be subject to government-specified training and security checks in the Home Office’s latest action on extremism.

The highly controversial proposal appears in a leaked draft of the Government’s new counter-extremism strategy, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, which goes substantially further than previous versions of the document.

The strategy, due to be published this fall, says that Whitehall will “require all faiths to maintain a national register of faith leaders” and the Government will “set out the minimum level of training and checks” faith leaders must have to join the new register.

Look, I get that the government probably doesn’t want to single a given religion out, but the Anglicans and Orthodox Jews are not blowing up buildings or shooting people for their religious beliefs. Let’s be honest here; there’s one and exactly one religion that needs to register, if we even grant that such a registry is necessary or a good idea at all (it isn’t and it isn’t).

But because all religions will be required to register in the name of religious sensitivity run rampant, this will doubtless be used exclusively as a means to oppress the few conservative Christians remaining in Britain. I have literally no belief whatsoever that the British government will use this tool as a means to crack down on radical Islam at all; however, I can predict with total certainty that it will be used to crack down on British clerics who are, say, opposed to gay marriage.

This is where Britain is heading and America is not far behind. It’s not even that the Brits are requiring clerics to perform gay marriage, it’s that you can literally get arrested in Britain for saying that “homsexuality is a sin.” And now, to save the government the trouble of having to actually catch you in the act of saying it, they will doubtless require clergy to come to them and register, and to declare as a condition of receiving the clearance necessary to do their jobs that they don’t hold illiberal views.

Religious oppression is real in the West, and will become increasingly common, at least where that religion is Christianity. Meanwhile radical Islam will be allowed to rampage unchecked because of the West’s pathological fear of causing offense. It isn’t difficult to predict where this road will ultimately lead.

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