Just astounding:

London, Feb 26, 2008 (CNA).- A committee in the British House of Commons will investigate Catholic schools following the Bishop of Lancaster's instructions to schools to place crucifixes in every classroom and stop "safe sex" education, the Independent reports.

Patrick O'Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster, had circulated a 66-page booklet instructing Catholic schools to stop "safe sex" education. Bishop O'Donoghue wrote, "The secular view on sex outside marriage, artificial contraception, sexually transmitted disease, including HIV and AIDS, and abortion, may not be presented as neutral information."

Additionally, he told the schools not to support charities that support abortion. He singled out Amnesty International, which recently renounced its neutrality on abortion and now favors the abortion of children whose mothers were raped in war zones.

The government's investigating committee is chaired by Labour Party member Barry Sheerman, who is reportedly concerned the Church is adopting a "fundamentalist" line.

"A lot of taxpayers' money is going into church schools and I think we should tease out what is happening here," he added. "We seem to have a shift in emphasis on the ground despite what the reasonable voices of the leadership are saying," Sheerman said.

Why does Sheerman get to decide who is reasonable? This is the thing which is really bothersome about this - a politician is going to bring pressure on a religious body to toe the government line because the politician has arrogated to himself the right to decide what is reasonable, and what isn't. Now, if Mr. Sheerman thinks the Church wrong; that is fine. If Mr. Sheerman thinks that the Church is so wrong that it should not receive any government funding in Britain, then he may move a bill in Parlaiment to do just that. But to use a government committee as an attempt to browbeat the Church into doing the secularists' will, that is an abominable infringement upon the rights of the people.

Chesterton said a very long time ago that, in the end, there is the Church, and her enemies - and Mr. Sheerman is demonstrating this to us in very stark terms. It isn't enough for the Sheermans of the world to have all sorts of taxpayer funded programs to promote the leftist agenda - arrogantly self assured about their moral superiority, lefists insist that no one be allowed to dissent from their worldview. Britain, like the rest of Europe, is far gone down the road to socialist slavery - but this is the sort of world that the left wants to bring to the United States; a government controlled world of enforced political correctness. You want it, you can have it - all you have to do is "hope for change" in 2008, rather than learn and think.

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