Shahbaz Bhatti, martyr

I've just watched and now  recommend watching the video here on the life and death of Shahbaz Bhatti here - melodramatic, but why shouldn't it be?

Yesterday Mass at a church in Jos, Nigeria, was interrupted by a suicide bomber. At least ten are dead.

Not killing people - it's just so twentieth century

"It's no longer acceptable for 21st Century medicine to be governed by 20th Century attitudes to death."

I don't want to get at the speaker of these words, Mrs Jane Nicklinson, whose situation is certainly not easy. But they will be echoed by lobbiests and applauded by commentators and commenters. For in post-Christian Britain this is where we are at in the matter of ethics. It's just a little unusual to see ethical progressivism summed up in such a lapidary manner.

Globally speaking, the twentieth century was not actually marked by a great aversion to killing people, but let that pass. The real point is that a morality with a sell-by date is no morality at all. This is Why I Am A Catholic in a nutshell. Ethical progressivism abounds in the Church of England, all the way up to the top. Beware particularly of those who announce that they have the support of the Holy Spirit. It has plenty of devotees in the Catholic church too, but they don't get to vote on the Magisterium - and the Pope is an impassioned enemy of relativism.

This morning the link from the BBC home page referred, give or take a word or two, to Mr Nicklinson as "a man who is so paralysed that he wants a doctor to be able to lawfully end his life". There's the measure of how far down the slippery slope we've gone. If A, then B. If you're sufficiently incapacitated, naturally you'll want your life ended. These things are never just private lifestyle choices. Once we have accepted it as a valid choice, imperceptibly we slip into the expectation that others in the same situation will make the same choice, and we become a little less interested in finding ways in which such a life can be made more bearable.

Unsung heroes

So much to blog about, so little time. Yesterday we saw "after-birth abortion" endorsed in a mainstream medical journal. Elsewhere a committee of experts told us that it's a good thing if nurses care about their patients. I'm sure we're all glad to have that point cleared up. And linking those two themes together, a Glasgow maternity hospital is leading the way in teaching compassion to its staff - by forcing then to attend abortions.

Leaving all that aside, I thought this story ought not to pass without comment. It's quite remarkable that there are any journalists in Somalia, let alone enough to form a National Union. 29 have been murdered since 2007. Tributes have deservedly been paid to Marie Colvin; may Abukar Hassan Kadaf not be forgotten.

Requiescat in pace Davy Jones

A little to my surprise, I find I can't watch this today with dry eyes.

"O what a tangled web we weave..."

It didn't take many webby tangles to entrap this lady. Conversing with the dead on Facebook is likely to get you noticed - and particularly by people who have seen you orating about their tragic deaths on the telly.

Don't underestimate her, though.

Ms Gordon is now working on a campaign calling for the government to give more money to community activists who tackle gun and knife crime.

You bet she is. Lacking as her grasp of social media security may be, she seems to have an excellent understanding of the role of moral blackmail in the relationship between what we laughingly call the voluntary sector and the state. There is no problem - what are you thinking of, wash your mouth out, Grumpy, issue - so appalling that a bit of overwrought exaggeration won't help you get your snout ahead in the rush to the trough.

Naturally Big Charity is much more sophisticated than Ms Gordon and woudn't dream of telling porkies; who needs lies when you have statistics? So she has some learning to do, but she is young and will go far.

Afterthought: insofar as her conference speech portrayed "a British city with a death toll of Saving Private Ryan" (to quote the Dumb One), you could pretty much paraphrase it as "Enoch was right". And for this she got a standing ovation from Labour's brightest and best. Funny old world, isn't it?

Wondering what's happening in Libya?

In view of this, was I so very wrong here?

The sanctimonious Mr Summerskill

"I hope Mr and Mrs Bull will now feel content to go home to do God's good work as Easter approaches, instead of relentlessly pursuing a happy couple through the courts."

- said Ben Summerskill of Stonewall.

The winning combination of oily sanctimoniousness with a barefaced untruth. The Bulls have plainly not pursued anybody. They were taken to court by the happy couple, who are apparently not quite happy enough unless they can get their pound of flesh and make an example of someone.

As I've noted before, if you're a UK taxpayer you make a contribution to Ben Summerskill's salary. Eighty-something thousand in 2010 (see page 21), which is I believe, notwithstanding his total dedication to equality, some way above the average wage.