On dropping the ‘Nativity Play’ I remember once telling a British friend that I wished Britain was a slightly more Christian place, he was deeply puzzled; I told him it isn’t nice to be in country that feels without deep spiritual roots, and Christmas would be much better if some genuine adherence to the foundation of the faith is in place!
One interesting detail (that will make the proponents of multiculturalism super happy) is the fact that English common law is used as the reference point in Dubai’s financial authority (DIFC). Notwithstanding its Christian origins, this is happening in the UAE, a country that is formally governed by Shariah.
Which I think is lovely as it shed light on the fact that we humans, despite all of our differences, can innovatively borrow and steal ideas, practices, and recipes from each other!
that's interesting, I suppose expected being under former British dominance, and since it's a financial centre and NY and London both have a similar system.
I have often wondered what will happen as English law develops and departs further from the Common Law into Statue Law. Surely the odd modern accretions which are beginning to blight our domestic law will not be carried over to the UAE?
Perhaps the UAE and Hong Kong will be forced to fix a form of the Common Law frozen in time, from before the deluge. A sort of 'Semper Eadem' Justinian Code from around the time of Lord Denning.
I feel strongly that The Bible, as literature and history, should be taught K-12. You cannot understand Western Civilization without that knowledge. I compare it to studying Saudi Arabia while ignoring the Koran. Idiotic.
One certainly can't understand how "Western Civilization" became distinct from "Classical Civilization" without it. Even down to a reverence for "truth" as philosopher John N Gray noted almost two decades ago.
Really, harking back to the French revolution, one can see view the history of secular progressivism as an attack on Christianity and Christian morality, and an attempt to remove it from public life. In the works of Marx, there is often the sense that the author is motivated primarily by antipathy towards the supposedly hypocritical Christian morality represented by the bourgeois, as opposed to the economic concerns he uses as an ideological battering-ram. Bad people often cannot tolerate the idea that genuinely good people exist.
Yes, there were Christian socialists and Christian progressives -- and the Labour Party emerged out of this -- but ultimately the forces guiding left progressivism are secularising and centralising . Consequently the people leading left progressive movements have tended to have an antipathy towards Christianity, or a very twisted understanding of it.
Christianity represented a strong check on the power of the elite. The old aristocratic elite paid lip service to it at least, probably because the pro-social teachings of Christianity actually benefit a productive landed aristocracy in which political power is widely diffused.
But to the ascendent extractive managerial elite of an overmighty centralised state, strongly-held Christian beliefs act merely as an inconvenient roadblock. Which is probably why they have been so deprecated in recent decades.
Christianity is opposed *precisely because* it advocates a form of law which places itself above the state, and not at its whim. And it has been opposed for the same reason by the radical right, in countries where that gained force.
And we have now reached a stage where the Church of England looks for any way to bend the teachings of Christianity to the will of the state and managerial elite, when it outwardly celebrates the sacrifice of clerics who died to set the opposite example.
Re: Really, harking back to the French revolution, one can see view the history of secular progressivism as an attack on Christianity and Christian morality
Minor point, but the Jacobins, and later on the Bolsheviks were actually more puitanical than most Christian churches. It's capitalism which has spearheaded an attack on traditional morality on several fronts ("If it feels good do it- if you can pay the bill"; "Greed is good", etc.)
Well some of the Bolsheviks were puritanical, but many were essentially just modern day leftists in their views, eg on open marriages, feminism and free love, except those views were controversial and rare at the beginning of the 20th century but now are the mainstream. Bolshevik values won out in the end, not through military conquest but institutional subversion.
To help cement his power Stalin led a mild reaction against the socially liberal elements of early Bolshevism, eg banning abortion after it was legalised and anti-clericalism, but he was no Christian and very clearly saw the remnants of the Russian Orthodox Church as just a tool to be used.
Regardless of their moral beliefs, the Jacobins waged a war on the Catholic Church and arguably Christianity altogether, effectively paganising Christian places of worship.
Capitalism is an amoral force, not necessarily pro or against traditional morality but adapting itself to the status quo, although one could say the victory of the left in the cultural sphere ironically weakened the social bonds that once restrained capitalism. And in another irony, perhaps the high standard of living and surplus created by capitalism empowered the left, by creating a class of socially critical intellectuals (that is the economist Joseph Schumpeter's argument).
Bolshevik values? Lenin was a bit progressive on some things, probably owing to his wife's influence. But Stalin was more puritanucal (in his decrees) than the strictest priest. As a by reality, Communist societies have been quite unfriendly to the sexual revolution. The latter is an aspect of bourgeois decadence in their view.
We need to think about the times we are writing. In the time they were first formed, Communist societies were generally socially progressive relative to the West. However, by the late 1960s, the West had become more socially progressive, probably at least in part due to the influence of the Soviet Union and its fellow travellers.
There is a limit to how much social liberalism a fundamentally authoritarian system with little in the way of economic surplus can tolerate. The Soviet elite were not opposed to social liberalism on moral grounds so much as pragmatic ones. And many of Lenin's fellow revolutionaries (eg Trotsky) had unconventional lifestyles, even if he was comparatively conservative. Many had formed their personal values and habits growing up in socially conservative societies, whatever their theoretical beliefs about equality.
Stalin was not particularly puritanical, just a pragmatic opportunist (though he did seem to be a convinced Marxist of some kind). He allowed his teenage daughter to hang around with older men, even though he wasn't particularly happy about it.
Years ago the powers that be in Pittsburgh renamed the Christmas holiday "sparkle Season". I still enjoy wishing people a happy Sparkle Season just to remind them how insane it can get.
"Back in 1612, the Baptist lawyer and theologian Thomas Helwys wrote that the king’s power extended ‘to all the goods and bodies of their servants’ but not their spirits, and therefore all religions should be tolerated: ‘Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it appertynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.’
Two years later, Leonard Busher wrote a tract called Religious Peace; or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience in which he argued that king and Parliament ‘permit all sorts of Christians; yea, Jews, Turks, and pagans, so long as they are peaceable, and no malefactors’."
Interesting how "Turk" in the Early Modern Period was the generic, vernacular term for Muslim given how much Ottoman Turkey dominated the lands of that faith in Christians minds.
Those paragraphs are intriguing and I think need to be bracketed by some sort of explanation of how the current malaise may not caused so much by multicultural tolerance per-se but by actively abandoning founding principles. In other words we need to address how immigration and nationalism or patriotism intersect with culture and civilization.
Ed: I love your comment under the Wilton Diptych. Presumably a council of demons would pursue them asking then to take St George's flag down and be more inclusive.
I read Dominion recently, and while I agreed with Holland's thesis I think a number of his arguments lacked the rigorous historical evidence which seems to underpin Onrani's book, if this piece is any indication, so I look forward to reading that!
Speaking of which, I found the latest Canon Club episode fascinating, and I'm annoyed I missed it in person. I've been thinking of setting up a Western Canon book club in London in the same vein. There's clearly a gap in the market for that kind of thing, so to speak, but even a Lit degree these days often fails to supply you with the cultural grounding that was more or less universal a couple of generations ago.
Though you omit to mention that the disparagement and disavowal of Christianity, our collective heritage and the family unit are the objectives of the tribes of Marxist heathens who govern us.
This includes the senior members of the Church of England who constantly preach the fatuous creed of ‘climate change’…….how they can insist that man and not God makes the weather is beyond me.
A few years ago, I walked angrily out of the Remembrance Sunday service at Exeter Cathedral when the execrable prelate of said diocese commenced his sermon with a plea to remember the victims of ‘climate change’……..on fucking Remembrance Sunday!
They are self-absorbed morons, and they will not prevail.
p.s.
Incidentally, Donahue vs Stephenson is one of three civil cases that take me back to my degree course in the mid-1980s……
……the other two being Rylands vs Fletcher and Carlill vs Carbolic Smokeball Company.
Climate change may indeed be genuine…….but it has absolutely NOTHING at all to do with humanity’s existence and activities……..
……..consequently, it is absolutely pointless for humanity to intervene……indeed, it is positively counter-productive…….
…….the idea that we pay more taxes to change the weather is fundamentally ridiculous - particularly as green morons chop down rain-forests to facilitate discussion of the ‘protection of the environment’.
"When I was at primary school, my mother recalled, the ILEA types in charge decided that they would drop the Nativity Play because it was inappropriate in such a multicultural institution. They relented after parental protests, the strongest objections coming from Islamic families who were utterly baffled by the decision. Like many Muslim immigrants, they felt more comfortable as minorities in a Christian society than one without any religion; Christianity was an old rival and adversary, but also a brother-faith. They also, more simply, enjoyed the festivities."
I believe I have mentioned before that here in Canada, many Muslims prefer to send their children to the Catholic school system for precisely that reason.
It is funny how progressives often urge "Westerners" to try to see the world through "non-Western" eyes. Yet, Muslims clearly recognize that Western and Eastern Europeans are the heirs of "Franks" and "Romans"
When I was in grade school my class did a play, "How The Grinch Stole Christmas". We sang the Whos' hymn, "Jubilate deo". I wonder if a public school would allow that now.
The British have an ineradicable habit and tendency towards thinking that the most commonplace things in our culture extraordinary and the most ordinary ones commonplace.
When it comes to the truly inestimable, invaluable, unrepeatable treasures of our national inheritance we behave "Like the base Indian, who threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe;"
But when faced with phenomena which, in world historical terms, are pulverisingly trivial we pile Pelion on Ossa to see them preserved and transmitted.
The Parish Church system, for instance, is a treasure of incomparable international significance but it is in danger now of passing into desuetude and dereliction. As has already happened to the Scotch Church.
"Most major charities are now overtly progressive, the successor faith (or heresy) of Christianity which still proclaims that the last shall be first, or as they might phrase it, ‘the most vulnerable members of society’. "
I was curious if any readers have seen this article.
"In a similar vein, my son has recently been learning about human rights at school, and the classroom material explains about the 1998 Human Rights Act, and the background literature mentions Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights as origin stories. But where do they come from? Why should humans have ‘rights?’ We tend to assume that our laws came about through reason, or that this is just the obvious way to order society, or perhaps there is some force called ‘progress’ pushing us towards higher levels of personal freedom"
At the present, the concept of "human rights " is derided mainly in the far left and far right. In my view, the aspect of "human rights " that future generations of Homo Sapiens may mock as much as Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment figures mocked the real and supposed inconsistencies of medieval Catholic theology is that some "rights" inherently contradict or at least water down others.
The right to freedom from discrimination and the right to freedom of association are both considered human rights but as per Christopher Caldwell's book, anti-discrimination principles (particularly in "society" rather than formal rights by the state) must interfere with freedom of association to be meaningful. And without freedom of association, none of the others like freedom of expression or conscience can in my view be exercised meaningfully and certainly not effectively.
A year before Caldwell's book, John Gray made an article on this (though he never specified anti-discrimination rights):
Similarly, the right to self-determination of distinct nations, peoples, etc is a human right. But doesn't this principle give them the right to exclude others (such as for example with immigration restriction) and therefore "discriminate" in the eyes of others?
Re: The right to freedom from discrimination and the right to freedom of association are both considered human rights but as per Christopher Caldwell's book, anti-discrimination principles (particularly in "society" rather than formal rights by the state) must interfere with freedom of association to be meaningful.
Well, no one (as far as I know) demands you must marry or befriend people you do not want to associate with. Private life is sacrosanct from that sort of demand-- though some trans activists are mightily peeved when other people, gay or straight, will not date trans people as the sex they are presenting to be and instead want the real thing in their love (and sex) lives.
Once you are dealing with public matters however it's a very different situation: there you really do have to accept that everyone has the same value and rights as you yourself do. There are specific instances when you can refuse to have dealings with individuals (the individual has wronged you in the past; or lacks what you require, e.g., money for customers or skills for employees), but you do not have the same free rein in public dealings that you do in private.
“The Reformation helped to give us rights, while taking away our rites.” A succinct summary of this whole excellent article. Thankyou Ed. Your pithy 12 word sentence has a distinct Chestertonian ring to it. We first need ‘The Angel of the Lord’ to help us ‘Conceive’ the mysterious nature of our English flag’ and so ‘enflesh’ it’s reality in these Lands and bear fruit that will last. If that makes sense.
On dropping the ‘Nativity Play’ I remember once telling a British friend that I wished Britain was a slightly more Christian place, he was deeply puzzled; I told him it isn’t nice to be in country that feels without deep spiritual roots, and Christmas would be much better if some genuine adherence to the foundation of the faith is in place!
One interesting detail (that will make the proponents of multiculturalism super happy) is the fact that English common law is used as the reference point in Dubai’s financial authority (DIFC). Notwithstanding its Christian origins, this is happening in the UAE, a country that is formally governed by Shariah.
Which I think is lovely as it shed light on the fact that we humans, despite all of our differences, can innovatively borrow and steal ideas, practices, and recipes from each other!
that's interesting, I suppose expected being under former British dominance, and since it's a financial centre and NY and London both have a similar system.
I have often wondered what will happen as English law develops and departs further from the Common Law into Statue Law. Surely the odd modern accretions which are beginning to blight our domestic law will not be carried over to the UAE?
Perhaps the UAE and Hong Kong will be forced to fix a form of the Common Law frozen in time, from before the deluge. A sort of 'Semper Eadem' Justinian Code from around the time of Lord Denning.
I feel strongly that The Bible, as literature and history, should be taught K-12. You cannot understand Western Civilization without that knowledge. I compare it to studying Saudi Arabia while ignoring the Koran. Idiotic.
We had an elective course The Bible as Literature in my US high school
One certainly can't understand how "Western Civilization" became distinct from "Classical Civilization" without it. Even down to a reverence for "truth" as philosopher John N Gray noted almost two decades ago.
https://libquotes.com/john-gray/quote/lbe1r5n
Well, the Germanic invasions had a lot to do with the process too.
More great (and informative) analysis.
Really, harking back to the French revolution, one can see view the history of secular progressivism as an attack on Christianity and Christian morality, and an attempt to remove it from public life. In the works of Marx, there is often the sense that the author is motivated primarily by antipathy towards the supposedly hypocritical Christian morality represented by the bourgeois, as opposed to the economic concerns he uses as an ideological battering-ram. Bad people often cannot tolerate the idea that genuinely good people exist.
Yes, there were Christian socialists and Christian progressives -- and the Labour Party emerged out of this -- but ultimately the forces guiding left progressivism are secularising and centralising . Consequently the people leading left progressive movements have tended to have an antipathy towards Christianity, or a very twisted understanding of it.
Christianity represented a strong check on the power of the elite. The old aristocratic elite paid lip service to it at least, probably because the pro-social teachings of Christianity actually benefit a productive landed aristocracy in which political power is widely diffused.
But to the ascendent extractive managerial elite of an overmighty centralised state, strongly-held Christian beliefs act merely as an inconvenient roadblock. Which is probably why they have been so deprecated in recent decades.
Christianity is opposed *precisely because* it advocates a form of law which places itself above the state, and not at its whim. And it has been opposed for the same reason by the radical right, in countries where that gained force.
And we have now reached a stage where the Church of England looks for any way to bend the teachings of Christianity to the will of the state and managerial elite, when it outwardly celebrates the sacrifice of clerics who died to set the opposite example.
Re: Really, harking back to the French revolution, one can see view the history of secular progressivism as an attack on Christianity and Christian morality
Minor point, but the Jacobins, and later on the Bolsheviks were actually more puitanical than most Christian churches. It's capitalism which has spearheaded an attack on traditional morality on several fronts ("If it feels good do it- if you can pay the bill"; "Greed is good", etc.)
Well some of the Bolsheviks were puritanical, but many were essentially just modern day leftists in their views, eg on open marriages, feminism and free love, except those views were controversial and rare at the beginning of the 20th century but now are the mainstream. Bolshevik values won out in the end, not through military conquest but institutional subversion.
To help cement his power Stalin led a mild reaction against the socially liberal elements of early Bolshevism, eg banning abortion after it was legalised and anti-clericalism, but he was no Christian and very clearly saw the remnants of the Russian Orthodox Church as just a tool to be used.
Regardless of their moral beliefs, the Jacobins waged a war on the Catholic Church and arguably Christianity altogether, effectively paganising Christian places of worship.
Capitalism is an amoral force, not necessarily pro or against traditional morality but adapting itself to the status quo, although one could say the victory of the left in the cultural sphere ironically weakened the social bonds that once restrained capitalism. And in another irony, perhaps the high standard of living and surplus created by capitalism empowered the left, by creating a class of socially critical intellectuals (that is the economist Joseph Schumpeter's argument).
Bolshevik values? Lenin was a bit progressive on some things, probably owing to his wife's influence. But Stalin was more puritanucal (in his decrees) than the strictest priest. As a by reality, Communist societies have been quite unfriendly to the sexual revolution. The latter is an aspect of bourgeois decadence in their view.
We need to think about the times we are writing. In the time they were first formed, Communist societies were generally socially progressive relative to the West. However, by the late 1960s, the West had become more socially progressive, probably at least in part due to the influence of the Soviet Union and its fellow travellers.
There is a limit to how much social liberalism a fundamentally authoritarian system with little in the way of economic surplus can tolerate. The Soviet elite were not opposed to social liberalism on moral grounds so much as pragmatic ones. And many of Lenin's fellow revolutionaries (eg Trotsky) had unconventional lifestyles, even if he was comparatively conservative. Many had formed their personal values and habits growing up in socially conservative societies, whatever their theoretical beliefs about equality.
Stalin was not particularly puritanical, just a pragmatic opportunist (though he did seem to be a convinced Marxist of some kind). He allowed his teenage daughter to hang around with older men, even though he wasn't particularly happy about it.
Re: The Soviet elite were not opposed to social liberalism on moral grounds so much as pragmatic ones.
IMO, those are the only grounds a government should care about. Morality is for the Church. Government is the art of the practical and possible.
Years ago the powers that be in Pittsburgh renamed the Christmas holiday "sparkle Season". I still enjoy wishing people a happy Sparkle Season just to remind them how insane it can get.
Cringe! Couldn't they have called it Winterfest at least? The old pagan Yule is available too.
Beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.
thanks!
"Back in 1612, the Baptist lawyer and theologian Thomas Helwys wrote that the king’s power extended ‘to all the goods and bodies of their servants’ but not their spirits, and therefore all religions should be tolerated: ‘Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it appertynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.’
Two years later, Leonard Busher wrote a tract called Religious Peace; or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience in which he argued that king and Parliament ‘permit all sorts of Christians; yea, Jews, Turks, and pagans, so long as they are peaceable, and no malefactors’."
Interesting how "Turk" in the Early Modern Period was the generic, vernacular term for Muslim given how much Ottoman Turkey dominated the lands of that faith in Christians minds.
Those paragraphs are intriguing and I think need to be bracketed by some sort of explanation of how the current malaise may not caused so much by multicultural tolerance per-se but by actively abandoning founding principles. In other words we need to address how immigration and nationalism or patriotism intersect with culture and civilization.
Ed: I love your comment under the Wilton Diptych. Presumably a council of demons would pursue them asking then to take St George's flag down and be more inclusive.
a council of demons in hi-viz
I read Dominion recently, and while I agreed with Holland's thesis I think a number of his arguments lacked the rigorous historical evidence which seems to underpin Onrani's book, if this piece is any indication, so I look forward to reading that!
Speaking of which, I found the latest Canon Club episode fascinating, and I'm annoyed I missed it in person. I've been thinking of setting up a Western Canon book club in London in the same vein. There's clearly a gap in the market for that kind of thing, so to speak, but even a Lit degree these days often fails to supply you with the cultural grounding that was more or less universal a couple of generations ago.
great idea! Get in touch if you want help!
Thanks Ed! I may take you up on that - currently just trying to think through how best to tackle 3,000+ years of literature...
That is a good idea. If there's a way of signing up, please let me know.
Will do!
Precisely!
Splendid piece.
Though you omit to mention that the disparagement and disavowal of Christianity, our collective heritage and the family unit are the objectives of the tribes of Marxist heathens who govern us.
This includes the senior members of the Church of England who constantly preach the fatuous creed of ‘climate change’…….how they can insist that man and not God makes the weather is beyond me.
A few years ago, I walked angrily out of the Remembrance Sunday service at Exeter Cathedral when the execrable prelate of said diocese commenced his sermon with a plea to remember the victims of ‘climate change’……..on fucking Remembrance Sunday!
They are self-absorbed morons, and they will not prevail.
p.s.
Incidentally, Donahue vs Stephenson is one of three civil cases that take me back to my degree course in the mid-1980s……
……the other two being Rylands vs Fletcher and Carlill vs Carbolic Smokeball Company.
Climate change is real. The communication if it, is of course, being manipulated but it is nonetheless real.
As the UK warms, you will clearly notice the warmer and drier conditions.
Climate change may indeed be genuine…….but it has absolutely NOTHING at all to do with humanity’s existence and activities……..
……..consequently, it is absolutely pointless for humanity to intervene……indeed, it is positively counter-productive…….
…….the idea that we pay more taxes to change the weather is fundamentally ridiculous - particularly as green morons chop down rain-forests to facilitate discussion of the ‘protection of the environment’.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Erase the past, control the present.
"When I was at primary school, my mother recalled, the ILEA types in charge decided that they would drop the Nativity Play because it was inappropriate in such a multicultural institution. They relented after parental protests, the strongest objections coming from Islamic families who were utterly baffled by the decision. Like many Muslim immigrants, they felt more comfortable as minorities in a Christian society than one without any religion; Christianity was an old rival and adversary, but also a brother-faith. They also, more simply, enjoyed the festivities."
I believe I have mentioned before that here in Canada, many Muslims prefer to send their children to the Catholic school system for precisely that reason.
It is funny how progressives often urge "Westerners" to try to see the world through "non-Western" eyes. Yet, Muslims clearly recognize that Western and Eastern Europeans are the heirs of "Franks" and "Romans"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Franks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_(endonym)
Same in England about Christian schools
When I was in grade school my class did a play, "How The Grinch Stole Christmas". We sang the Whos' hymn, "Jubilate deo". I wonder if a public school would allow that now.
The British have an ineradicable habit and tendency towards thinking that the most commonplace things in our culture extraordinary and the most ordinary ones commonplace.
When it comes to the truly inestimable, invaluable, unrepeatable treasures of our national inheritance we behave "Like the base Indian, who threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe;"
But when faced with phenomena which, in world historical terms, are pulverisingly trivial we pile Pelion on Ossa to see them preserved and transmitted.
The Parish Church system, for instance, is a treasure of incomparable international significance but it is in danger now of passing into desuetude and dereliction. As has already happened to the Scotch Church.
Loved the ‘angels on the way to put the 🏴 on lamp-posts’ subtitle!
"Most major charities are now overtly progressive, the successor faith (or heresy) of Christianity which still proclaims that the last shall be first, or as they might phrase it, ‘the most vulnerable members of society’. "
I was curious if any readers have seen this article.
https://unherd.com/2025/09/faith-is-the-new-successor-ideology/
"In a similar vein, my son has recently been learning about human rights at school, and the classroom material explains about the 1998 Human Rights Act, and the background literature mentions Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights as origin stories. But where do they come from? Why should humans have ‘rights?’ We tend to assume that our laws came about through reason, or that this is just the obvious way to order society, or perhaps there is some force called ‘progress’ pushing us towards higher levels of personal freedom"
At the present, the concept of "human rights " is derided mainly in the far left and far right. In my view, the aspect of "human rights " that future generations of Homo Sapiens may mock as much as Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment figures mocked the real and supposed inconsistencies of medieval Catholic theology is that some "rights" inherently contradict or at least water down others.
The right to freedom from discrimination and the right to freedom of association are both considered human rights but as per Christopher Caldwell's book, anti-discrimination principles (particularly in "society" rather than formal rights by the state) must interfere with freedom of association to be meaningful. And without freedom of association, none of the others like freedom of expression or conscience can in my view be exercised meaningfully and certainly not effectively.
A year before Caldwell's book, John Gray made an article on this (though he never specified anti-discrimination rights):
https://unherd.com/2019/06/our-illiberal-empire-of-rights/
Similarly, the right to self-determination of distinct nations, peoples, etc is a human right. But doesn't this principle give them the right to exclude others (such as for example with immigration restriction) and therefore "discriminate" in the eyes of others?
Re: The right to freedom from discrimination and the right to freedom of association are both considered human rights but as per Christopher Caldwell's book, anti-discrimination principles (particularly in "society" rather than formal rights by the state) must interfere with freedom of association to be meaningful.
Well, no one (as far as I know) demands you must marry or befriend people you do not want to associate with. Private life is sacrosanct from that sort of demand-- though some trans activists are mightily peeved when other people, gay or straight, will not date trans people as the sex they are presenting to be and instead want the real thing in their love (and sex) lives.
Once you are dealing with public matters however it's a very different situation: there you really do have to accept that everyone has the same value and rights as you yourself do. There are specific instances when you can refuse to have dealings with individuals (the individual has wronged you in the past; or lacks what you require, e.g., money for customers or skills for employees), but you do not have the same free rein in public dealings that you do in private.
“The Reformation helped to give us rights, while taking away our rites.” A succinct summary of this whole excellent article. Thankyou Ed. Your pithy 12 word sentence has a distinct Chestertonian ring to it. We first need ‘The Angel of the Lord’ to help us ‘Conceive’ the mysterious nature of our English flag’ and so ‘enflesh’ it’s reality in these Lands and bear fruit that will last. If that makes sense.