The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is stoking up indefensible views

Traditionally Easter used to be the time when hellfire and stoppage was preached from the platforms of competing teachers' conferences. These days, regrettably, the Churches are getting in on the act. Over the weekend the fabulous Norman pile at Durham surrendered its calm to the far-from-pacific message delivered by its bishop, Tom Wright. Sermonising about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently before Parliament, the bishop criticised the Government for “pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby”.

Stop the sermon right there. My NUT/religion comparison is an even better fit than I realised. The legislation emanates from a “militantly atheist and secularist lobby”? Oh yes, that would be it. Haven't you seen them on the streets and on your screens, all got up in their God Is Dead, Christians Should be Deader atheist headbands and red robes, burning Bibles, insisting on the teaching of Dawkins and Hitchens in school RS lessons, smashing icons and creeping up behind bishops and lifting their cassocks?

Sermon continues: “This secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people...” Now, this is as close to a lie as makes no difference. Dr Wright may reply directly to the Times letters page, which, even in this fallen age, generally prints the words of high clergymen, to tell me which significant secularist body, or scientific group, or gaggle of atheists is it that believes “we” have the right “to kill surplus old people”? Or is he referring here to voluntary euthanasia, the idea that people may have a right to end their own lives? I challenge him.

This almost wanton disregard of fairness was being deployed for the specific purpose of attacking the proposals to allow the creation and use of hybrid embryo tissue in scientific and medical research. Or, as the Bishop put it, with what was intended to be withering irony: “Gender-bending was so last century; we now do species-bending.” Now, the eminent theologian has confused Boy George with sex-change operations (a big mistake, one gathers from the singer's memoirs), so let me note instead that it was this kind of verbal looseness that so upset Lord Winston, when he heard about the Easter sermon delivered by the leader of a rival Church union, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.