News that a Christian teacher in Britain has been suspended for expressing his objection to a programme he had to attend that promoted gay rights shouldn’t come as a surprise. Equality absolutism is now the official ideology in Britain and it brooks no opposition, not even of the mildest kind.

The treatment of a growing number of State employees in the UK calls to mind the treatment of Eileen Flynn, the teacher dismissed from her post in Ireland over 20 year ago because she was living with her boyfriend outside of marriage. However, it calls that incident to mind in an ironic way. 

What the Catholic school in that case was attempting to do, albeit clumsily, was protect its ethos. Secularists at the time mightily objected to this saying it was an unjustifiable attack on Flynn’s rights. 

What the State is doing in Britain to teachers such as the Kwabena Peat is protecting its ethos of ‘equality and diversity’. Anyone who opposes it is subject to sanction. The State, of course, is supposed to be neutral between competing views of morality (more or less), but increasingly it is in favour of the view that places equality above all other rights. 

The ironic aspect in this case is that the UK equivalents of those who rose to Eileen Flynn’s defence are not rising to the defence of Kwabena Peat. Obviously they think a school does have the right to defend its ethos after all, so long, course, as it is the right ethos. The problem with Catholic schools is that they have the ‘wrong’ ethos. 

Another aspect of the case is also worth noting. Peat wrote a letter objecting to the programme to the three staff who organised the event. They complained that they felt ‘harrassed and intimidated’ by the letter and it was this which led to his suspension. What a chilling effect this will have on the willingness of people to write to one another with their concerns. 

Maybe Peat should have played them at their own game and brought a complaint of harassment and intimidation against them because of their programme.