Madam, - Prof William Reville (Science Today, August 25th) claims that dogmatic political correctness and militant secularism are now the all-pervasive power in today's society. He further decries the leftist liberals who have been at the vanguard of this movement.
Prof Reville is adopting a scatter-gun approach by lumping all these ideologies together and assuming an exclusivity among their adherents. One can inhabit the right of the political spectrum and still retain a firm belief in the basic tenets of secularism and political correctness.
One should not have to apologise for having the desire to live out one's life free from the witless dictates of mystics and spell-weavers. It is not fundamentalist to fight hard to protect oneself from legal constraints based on a redundant ethical system.
Prof Reville ascribes an ascendancy to liberalism, which is far from true. The last presidential election in the US saw the word "liberal" employed as a term of abuse. We live in a world where the Pope, a religious leader, is received with medieval pomp and ceremony. We live in a world where equality before the law for homosexuals is the exception, not the norm. We live in a world where secularism's hold on power is at best tenuous and but a few decades old.
Liberals must adopt a more strident approach if we ever hope to hold the line against the intolerant and the "god-botherers". We must make that most illiberal of decisions, that we are right and everyone else is wrong. We must decide that permissive individualism is worth fighting for. We must wage war against the fundamentalists who oppose us, in this country, in this continent and across the planet. - Yours, etc,
PAUL BOWLER, Sidbury Court, Bray, Co Wicklow.