A Young-Earth Creationist Loon to Lead Northern Ireland Assembly!

Edwin Poots, Democratic Unionist Party leader and Young-Earth Creationist
"Earth was created in about 4 BCE!"

Edwin Poots: Who is the new leader of the DUP? - BBC News

The Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley, has elected Edwin Poots, a fundamentalist Presbyterian Creationist, as its leader. As the leader of the largest party in the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, he could, subject to formal approval by the Legislative Assembly, become First Minister in the power-sharing Executive in which, in line with the Good Friday Agreement, the leader of the second largest party, currently Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill, is Deputy First Minister.

However, in what would be a break with tradition, Poots has indicated that he wishes to separate the roles of First Minister and leader of the DUP, so may nominate a First Minister from amongst his colleagues. If so, as leader of the DUP, he will retain considerable political power and influence in the Province.

As so often in Irish politics, religion is set to poison the political process in Northern Ireland and threaten the Good Friday agreement and the peace and stability of the province, hastened in that process by the idiotic vote in 2016 to leave the European Union.

Poots, despite being an educated adult, is on record as saying he believes Earth is a little over 6,000 years old. He believes this because this date was once calculated by Bishop Ussher of Armagh, from his reading of the Bible. It is not based on any scientific data, all of which shows Earth to be about 3.8 billion years old. Presumably, on the same basis, Poots believes in a literal 6-day creation, Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark. He gets this from a book which endores slavery and second-class status for women, the authors of which thought Earth was small and flat, had a dome over it, and was at the centre of a Universe which ran on magic!

He first became prominent in Northern Ireland politics when, as the DUP member of the Stormont Parliament for Lagan Valley, he opposed the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, but accepted a ministerial post as Minister for Culture and Arts, in the newly-formed power-sharing Executive under Ian Paisley with Martin McGuiness for Sinn Féin as Deputy First Minister. He also opposed reform of the then highly politicised Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), to form the officially politically non-aligned Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) - regarded as a key reform to allow policing in the province to be with the consent of both communities.

As a proud socially-conservative fundamentalist Christian, he opposes a woman's right to choose, gay couples adopting children and, as Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safety he banned gay men from donating blood. He also expressed a desire to ban blood donations from anyone who had had sex with an African.

He is also strongly opposed to coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions and, without presenting any evidence, claimed transmission rates were six times higher in Nationalist (predominantly Catholic) areas of Northern Ireland than in Unionist (predominantly Protestant) areas. There is in fact no evidence to support that claim since data in infections is not collated on the basis of religion or political persuasion.

He is also strongly opposed to the Brexit arrangements under which there is a de facto customs border down the Irish Sea, with different customs rules for Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, keeping NI in a de facto customs union with the Republic and the rest of the EU. This was the issue that prompted Arlene Foster's resignation when she lost the confidence of DUP MLA colleagues who felt she had been too compliant over the Brexit arrangements Boris Johnson had signed up to. In February this year, as Minister for Agriculture and the Environment, Poots withdrew the staff carrying out the Brexit checks at the port of Larne as part of these customs arrangements. The alternative to the border down the Irish Sea is border posts and checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic - a breach of international law under the Anglo-Irish Treaty as part of the Good Friday Agreement, under which goods, capital and people can move freely across the border.

In the 2016 referendum, Northern Ireland voted by a large majority to remain within the European Union while the DUP was in favour of leaving.

Poots is no stranger to the charge of corruption, of which his predecessor, Arlene Foster was also no stranger. Foster famously arranged a Renewable Energy Scheme when Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Investment, with minimal cost controls, under which anyone could install a wood-burning heater in, for example, an out-house or barn, and claim huge sums of money to buy fuel for it - far in excess of the actual cost of the wood-pellet fuel - a generous facility under the guise of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, from which very many Unionist-supporting land-owners made small fortunes at NI taxpayers' expense.

This was the issue, and Foster's refusal to allow an enquiry into the scandal, that cause the previous Executive to collapse when Martin McGuiness resigned as Deputy First minister after an election had put the DUP within one seat of losing their majority in the Legislative Assembly. Under the Good Friday Agreement, Foster was also required to resign and the Power-Sharing executive collapsed. Fearful of an election they they could well have lost, Foster refused to call another election and Westminster re-imposed direct rule on the province.

Poots had been lobbying Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council, on which his son, Luke, was a councillor, in support of planning applications by friends and associates. Luke Poots voted on these applications without declaring an interest, when he should have absented himself from any votes related to the applications. In effect, Poots Snr. was acting as a conduit for paid-for favours with Poots Jnr. delivering the favours. Luke Poots did not seek re-election to the council in 2019. Both he and Edwin Poots, like Foster before them, deny any breach of the rules or abuses of power.

Together with the Brexit debacle and the dwindling of support for the old sectarian and casually corrupt politics of the DUP, there is now a distinct possibility that the regressive Protestant majority in the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly could fall to a progressive Sinn Féin-led coalition in a future election, followed by a referendum on re-union with the Republic, for which there is growing popular support.

Come that day, the 1920's creation of the British Conservative and Unionist Party and the Protestant Orange Lodges under Carson of "A Protestant State for a Protestant People", for long the slogan of Ulster Unionism, will finally be laid to rest. The selection as DUP leader of someone who apparently find it difficult to assimilate scientific evidence and base his policies on that evidence, can only hasten that day, especially as the Republic simultaneously turns its back on religion and becomes increasingly secular and progressive, and where Sinn Féin now has the same number of seats in the Dáil (37) as Fianna Fáil and is the leading party in the governing coalition.

Hopefully, Poots, or whoever he nominates to be First Minister on his behalf, will be the last Protestant leader of Carson's Protestant State and the island of Ireland will become a Secular State for a Secular People.

Are We Finally Slipping The Religious Leash?

During my lifetime, and mostly since the end of WWI, Britain and the rest of Europe and the USA, indeed all of the developed world and a great deal of the under-developed world, has become increasingly liberal and egalitarian.

Annie Kenny & Sylvia Pankhurst
Womens' Social And Political Union

Although we still have a long way to go we have seen a lessening of the class system in Britain so that we no longer send our spare daughters into the service of the middle and upper classes there to be at the disposal of the men of the house, as in my grandparents day. The once outrageously radical idea of women voting is now taken for granted, even in Switzerland where the last Canton granted women the right to vote and stand for election in February 1971.

1963 Civil Rights March
Lincoln Memorial

Following the Civil Rights Campaign of the Early 1960s and the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, Black people in USA have made major advances in civil rights. Discrimination on grounds of race, religion, gender and ethnicity is now outlawed in the EU and USA. In the EU working people have employment rights far in excess of anything dreamed of by even the most radical socialists of the 1950s and to the intense annoyance of the political right.

Capital punishment has been abolished in much of the civilised world. Women, with access to contraception, now have the same sexual freedom that men always enjoyed, and the right to planned pregnancies and to limit their family size. In the UK, women now have full property rights and can make contracts in their own name where previously they were regarded more as a possession of their husband or father, at least in the eyes of the law as they were in my grandparents day.

Recently the right to civil partnerships between homosexual couples has been established in many countries and the Christian churches are fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent this being extended to full marriage rights. Yet only two generations ago homosexual activity was a criminal offence which meant imprisonment and shame for those convicted of loving the wrong person. And it still is in those countries where religious clerics still wield power, even carrying the death penalty.

There is still a great deal to be done in terms of freedom from discrimination but few people nowadays question the basic principle. When I was a teenager many of the rights we now take for granted were considered radical, extremist, even dangerous and well worth the security services paying them special attention. Some people even advocated that boys with long hair should be arrested and forced to have it cut!

So what's the cause of this? Why have we in many different countries, speaking many different languages and with quite different histories, all arrived at the collective opinion that the right to be treated as the equal of any another person is a basic human right?

Of course, correlation does not establish causality, though it certainly makes it worthy of consideration, but one major social change simultaneously with the changes I have mentioned above, has been the decline in support for religions partly because better education in the sciences has rendered so much of it laughably absurd.

No doubt religionists would dismiss this as a cause unless they are portraying them as showing a loss of morals; a breakdown in society. Then they would undoubtedly point to the same correlation as 'proof' of their claim whilst demanding that they be reversed.

However, I think the hypothesis of a causal link is supported by a number of things, the first being that almost all of these advances has been opposed either directly by the churches or by the political parties and classes which are themselves supported by the church.

In the 1960s we had the Protestant-backed KKK killing civil rights workers and black activists. In 1973 we had the grotesque spectacle of the 'conscience of America', Billy Graham, advising Richard Nixon that Jews should not be regarded as American citizens. The term WASP is still synonymous with right-wing Christian white supremacist male chauvinism, which is almost a definition of political conservatism in America and not far off that of Conservatism in the UK and Christian Democracy in most of Europe.

In the UK, the Anglican church opposed universal adult suffrage and especially votes for for women. In Europe, the Vatican had supported Fascism; in Serbia, the Orthodox Christian church supported genocidal nationalists. Almost universally, the Christian Churches opposed easier divorce, easier access to contraception, better sex education for teenagers. The churches in Britain, Holland, Belgium, Spain, France and Italy all supported colonialism and resisted independence for the colonies. In Northern Ireland the Presbyterian Churches were steadfast in their opposition to equal rights for Catholics and universal adult suffrage and had been directly responsible for setting up an apartheid system there in the first place. In the Irish Republic the Catholic Church effectively killed off tentative moves towards a health service.

In short, almost every piece of social progress towards a more egalitarian, less discriminatory, less chauvinistic, better educated, more liberal and more inclusive society has been opposed by the conservative right supported by the main stream Christian churches. Only now that they are losing their grip and have almost lost it altogether in some countries, have we made any real social progress.

I think the correlation is more than a coincidence. I think we are finally slipping the leash of religion, gaining our freedom and building a better society based on Humanist principles.

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