By C. A. Chandraprema Courtesy The Island

September 27, 2018, 9:00 pm

The comments made by Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith last Sunday at the Ekala St Matthew’s church have made waves with Minister Mangala Samaraweera and Saliya Peiris criticising the Cardinal’s words and the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa and several Catholic MPs in the Joint Opposition condemning Samaraweera and Peiris for taking on the Cardinal. What the Cardinal said last Sunday during a sermon delivered in Sinhala was roughly as follows.

“The latest religion in the West is the religion called human rights. Human rights were discovered only recently. It is being regarded as a wonderful new discovery which is being held aloft and we are being relentlessly lectured about it. However our people began adhering to religions centuries ago. Some people in our country talk of a secular society. Human life is not just food and drink and the pursuit of comfort. Many people in the West now regard religion as an outer garment. They use religion when it suits them but if they are required to make sacrifices, theல put religion aside. Our lives are short and if we limit it to the pursuit of pleasure we will come to an unfortunate end. If we adhere to a religion we don’t need human rights. Those who are dependent on human rights are those who have no religion. We must not be misled by these chimeras. We must look at this intelligently.”

This elicited an immediate Tweet from Mangala who said rudely “the need for human rights was an outcome of the marauding religious zealots of the Inquisition and the crusades where non-believers were massacred en bloc. Pity the Cardinal always seems to get things wrong in trying to be a populist.” Saliya Peiris, who is now the head of the Office of Missing Persons, also responded by Tweeting “If this report is accurate, it’s a shame the way the Cardinal downplays the importance of human rights. He seems to be absolutely ignorant of the concept of human rights. He also fails to realize that there are many people who don’t believe in religion and that religion cannot be forced on people. What a contrast to the progressive thinking of Pope Francis …”

The Cardinal was referring to an ideology

It appears that both Minister Samaraweera and Peiris have understood the human rights referred to by the Cardinal as that involving people being assaulted and tortured while in police custody and that sort of thing. Going by the pronouncements made by the Cardinal over a period of time, it is clear that his Eminence was referring to something wider and in the sphere of ideology – the neo liberal ‘rights’ mania sweeping the West which has come to Sri Lanka as well through various NGOs.

If we take Minister Samaraweera’s comment about the human rights violations committed by the Catholic Church in the past during the Inquisition and the Crusades, Pope John Paul II made a blanket apology for all these transgressions committed in the name of God in March 2000. Pope John Paul II also admitted that church followers had ”violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples and shown contempt for their cultures and religious traditions” And that there is ”an objective collective responsibility” for past errors that modern Catholics should acknowledge and repent. Hence there is little point in flogging the Catholic Church for their past. The apology that Pope John Paul II made even at the risk of putting the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church and the faith of its followers at risk should be appreciated.

However what Cardinal Ranjith was referring to was not human rights related to physical violence. Nobody in his right mind would say that the Cardinal was advocating torture in police stations and that kind of thing. It was the whole ideology of neo liberal human rights and its use as a weapon of domination that he was obviously referring to. Recently, the Cardinal referred to the fact that a child could not be disciplined in school and that a new generation was growing up with no sense of discipline. He is the first VVIP in this country to refer publicly to a cancer that is eating into the very fabric of our society. It has already half destroyed the West and is now destroying countries like Sri Lanka which are not intellectually equipped to be able to resist these destructive ideological fads comings from the West. The easiest way to explain this is through the reference made by the Cardinal on an earlier occasion to the inability of school authorities to discipline students in schools.

The Cardinal heads an institution that is still on the frontlines as far as education is concerned because there are many assisted schools with Catholic priests heading them. Today, if a teacher in a school canes a student, he will be remanded and he will end up spending his life savings fighting criminal charges. This was due to changes introduced to the law during the Chandrika Kumaratunga years. This results in a situation where teachers lose the ability to control the teaching process in classrooms. Usually, this gives rise to a deterioration in educational standards within a few years. Even though it is now some time since these new ‘child rights’ laws were introduced in Sri Lanka, the reason why educational standards have not gone down as they should, is due to the private tuition culture in our country. Real learning takes place not in the schools but in the tuition classes and the latter have control over the kind of students they take into their classes, so the teaching process is not impaired. No tuition master is going to risk his reputation and a lucrative income by accommodating incorrigibles. But ordinary classroom teachers don’t have choice as to who they have in their classrooms.

In the West, thanks to ‘child rights’ the white Caucasian population are falling back and the educated professions are being taken over by migrants. There are white majority nations where in some hospitals it is difficult to find a single white skinned doctor even though there may be plenty of white skinned janitors. The educated professions are being taken over increasingly by immigrants from Asian countries like China, India and Sri Lanka. In the schools and as well as the universities the best performers are generally migrants. The white populations have been destroyed by this rights mania that they themselves unleashed on the world and are too far gone to be able to take remedial action. We can see the extent to which the white populations of Europe have lost control of their countries and their minds when they are unable to resist a migrant invasion from the Middle East and Africa. The US has temporarily escaped the slide thanks to Donald trump but Europe does not have a Trump. Britain too may escape the worst because they are leaving the European Union.

Why do homosexuals need to ape heterosexuals?

The human rights mania that Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith was referring to is really the attitude of mind of the neo-liberal/globalist camp. In the 1980s, neo-liberalism meant only an economic theory. But after the end of the cold war and with the dawn of the decade of the 1990s, when this economic theory won the ideological battle against Communism and socialism, neo liberalism began to be associated with much more than just an economic theory and assuming the proportions of a religion with a certain way of thinking about human rights, child rights, gay and lesbian rights, animal rights, the environment, and every aspect of life that one can think of. Its most salient feature is a complete loss of commonsense and the lack of a grip on reality. After winning the cold war, much like many wealthy public figures who have earned both money and fame, the West lot its senses and have been trying to promote their psychedelic imaginings and eccentricities in the rest of the world as the way forward for mankind.

After the dawn of the modern era, whatever various archaic laws may have said about ‘sodomy’, homosexuality was tolerated. People did what they liked with their same sex partners and nobody minded. Those homosexuals who stood out by trying to don women’s clothing in public may have been heckled and subject to harassment sometimes, but even that was due to hooliganism on the part of individuals and not a generalized trait in most societies. In many cultures like Sri Lanka even cross dressing homosexuals are not necessarily harassed or discriminated against except for certain natural limitations their appearance would cause. For example, no airline will employ a man in a skirt and lipstick as an air hostess.

The late Lalith Athulathmudali had a cross dresser as his personal valet. The first time I saw a bald man in a skirt and blouse offering me beer, I forgot what I was saying in mid-sentence. Unfazed, Mr. Athulathmudali waited patiently for me to resume what I was saying. Every passive homosexual in Colombo was in love with Vijaya Kumaratunga and they would attend Vijaya’s political events in groups. Nobody chased them away.

Thus on both sides of the political divide in Sri Lanka, there was no active policy of shunning or discriminating against these people. There was the tacit understanding that no man would wear women’s clothing unless there was some compelling reason to do so. Politicians in particular would not shun these cross dressing homosexuals because they are quite useful in their own way. They seem to know everybody and can get many things done in the communities they live.

While all homosexuals should be left alone to do whatever they like, one has to pose the question whether they need to marry like heterosexual couples? Heterosexual couples marry because they have children and raising the children and bequeathing property to them needs the legal framework of a family. However homosexual’s do not produce children and if one partner wants to convey property to his partner after his death, a simple last will can do the trick without a homosexual partner needing to have matrimonial property rights like heterosexual couples. This obsession with homosexual marriage with the whole panoply of dressing up as bride and groom and a priest declaring them as husband and wife with an organ playing ‘here comes the bride’ in the background is a loss of commonsense. This is obviously the kind of ‘rights’ mania that the Cardinal was referring to.

These are not harmless eccentricities either. When all those of a similar bent of mind get together in the neo-liberal camp, it becomes a totalitarian ideology that brooks no opposition. When Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith spoke of human rights as the new religion of the West, he was not far off the mark. To see what a perversion this advocacy of human rights can become, one has only to look at the various war crimes tribunals that were set up in the world starting with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The jurisprudence of all the international war crimes tribunals that were set up subsequently have been influenced and modeled on that of the ICTY. All rules of jurisprudence and evidence that have evolved over several centuries within the criminal courts systems in today’s modern democracies have been thrown overboard. The prevailing philosophy in all these war crimes tribunals is that anyone brought before them should be declared guilty at any cost.

The reason why the goings on in these war crimes tribunals have not gained much publicity is because those coming before them are hapless wretches who have fallen from grace and are from underdeveloped nations. These are the torture chambers and gulags of the neo-liberal human rights mafia. The Roman Catholic Church has realised that heinous crimes have been committed in the name of God in the past and they have tendered an unconditional apology. But the neo-liberal human rights Nazis who still wield power in the world despite their defeat in the US and partial defeat in Britain are far from repenting for the crimes they have committed in the name of human rights. Just take the case of so many Middle Eastern countries like Libya, which were laid waste in the name of democracy and human rights. Today Libya has no democracy, no human rights, and no State and nobody seems to be bothered. Beyond doubt the global neo-liberal human rights mafia is the biggest threat to mankind in this modern era. The Cardinal is absolutely right!