I've tried to put that idiotic religious hatred Bill out of mind but it keeps coming back to niggle. On Today this morning I heard a Minister of the Crown express the view that freedom of speech carried a duty to respect - her word - the beliefs of others.
Red alert. Enforcing respect is not the same thing as prevention of hate speech. Maybe she was just being careless with words at the end of a long interview, but to say that the day after a play has been forced off the stage by religiously-inspired bullying sends as bad a message as possible. Up till now I have been inclined to defend the Government, for all its faults, but the badness of this Bill could make the difference for me between voting Labour and spoiling the ballot. (I'll bet that's got Tony quaking in his boots...)
I could go off on an extended rant about the evils of multiculturalism (at least in its actually existing form) and PCness, but other bloggers do that much better than I could and besides it's late.
Why can't we just all get along?