Liz Suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Send your comments on Clive's blog posts to clivecomments@aol.com

Whose morality?

Tuesday, 23rd October 2007

James has already hinted at his reservations about Jonathan Sacks's article on morality and multiculturalism, but I thought I'd read the Chief Rabbi's essay one more time to see if it made much more sense to me. It still doesn't. Perhaps I'm particularly slow-witted today (I still haven't shaken off the bug I picked up a week or more ago) but I really don't see how the decision to decriminalize suicide was "the beginning of the end of England as a Christian country". Would we be a more Christian country if we still had anti-gay laws on the books, as he seems to suggest?

I wasn't much more enlightened when I read the accompanying interview. That wasn't the thought of Alice Miles and Helen Rumbelow. They simply asked a straightforward question about whether faith schools are compatible with integration. No wonder they sounded frustrated:

Much of talking to Dr Sacks is like this: tantalisingly provocative ideas wrapped in layers of obfuscation, then swaddled in an erudite sweep of references.