Wilton Park Petition

A friend at North Preston Evangelical Church recently invited me to sign an online petition to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Boris Johnson. This Wilton Park Report is really quite scandalous.

Petition to: The Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP

In its recent report, Opportunities and Challenges: the Intersection of Faith and Human Rights of LGBTI+ Persons (9-09-16), Wilton Park (an executive agency of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office) branded religion an enemy of LGBTI rights, and called for state funding to reinterpret the Bible to make it compatible with LGBTI ideology.  It further called for the new belief system to be required teaching in all churches, Sunday schools and theological seminaries, highlighting Evangelical Christians as being especially prejudiced against homosexuality.  It accused them of disseminating hatred and intolerance, seen especially in the pernicious influence of missionaries working in the Global South.  (https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP1488-Report.pdf

This report is clearly based on a biased and, we maintain, deliberately misleading portrayal of Christian belief in order to promote particular minority interests. It is not just an open and blatant attack on the human rights of Christians worldwide, but a clear denial of the rights to freedom of belief and of speech, enshrined in UK law since Magna Carta. The report’s stated aim is the imposition of LGBTI and transgender ideology.

As an executive agency of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, unless repudiated, there is every danger this report will be interpreted as State endorsement of the suppression of religious belief, and support for the global enforcement and promotion of LGBTI ideology.

This is outrageous and a clear denial of Christians’ legislatively enshrined and protected right to freedom of belief. We therefore call on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office unequivocally to reject this report and to issue a statement declaring that it in no way represents Government policy. We further call on the FCO to promote and defend freedom of religion and belief around the world, with particular reference to the African countries identified by the Wilton Park Report as particular target for ideological reconfiguration.

We further ask that Wilton Park be made subject of an inquiry to investigate its open promulgation of LGBTI and transgender so-called rights, and clear hostility to Christian belief.

Sincerely,

Anyone else wishing to sign it may do so here:

http://www.citizengo.org/en/user-profile/90214071-594b-4f6c-be9a-71385392aa2e

For what it’s worth, I have also written to the Foreign Secretary. I shall await his response with interest.