I was one of the speakers at a colloquium this week on the subject of human rights and religion, and whether there is an inevitable clash between the two. Readers of this website will not be surprised to learn that I took the view that there was, and that this was not altogether to the advantage of society. Indeed, I said that modern human rights were acting as a solvent upon the moral values on which our society depended -- principally our sense of duty and responsibility – and that this was destroying real human rights, the ones that derived from those overarching obligations of duty which were now going down the pan (as was set out in a seminal book a few years ago, The Principle of Duty, by David Selbourne).

Perhaps not surprisingly, this didn’t go down too well with some of the participants. Indeed, there were open mouths and gasps of horror as if I was swearing in church – confirming my view that human rights are now our secular religion, complete with Inquisition. The extent of the moral bankruptcy brought about by this human rights culture was amply demonstrated by some of the questions I was asked by shocked participants. One took issue with my criticisms of the court ruling that gypsies were entitled to break the planning laws because these were trumped by their right to family life, and of the ruling that trans-sexuals were entitled to lie on their birth certificates about the sex in which they had been born. Life was much more complex than I had allowed, I was sternly told. Gypsies could not be expected to understand planning laws because they couldn’t read or write. And trans-sexuals were entitled to say on their birth certificates whatever sex they wanted to have been born in.

In other words, human rights culture means that anyone who can’t read or write can break the law, and truth is anything you want it to mean. As a demonstration of my contention that the rights culture was destroying morality, justice and truth this hardly have been clearer. Happily, a number of people who had kept silent during the meeting approached me afterwards to confide that they thought I was right. So don’t despair – there’s hope for civilisation yet.