“You can be anything in Britain except a Christian,” says Ian Paisley Jr.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP was responding to what he saw as a sneering attack on his newly-elected party leader Edwin Poots by the BBC.

Poots, the new DUP leader, is a believing Christian. But the way the mainstream media has been reporting it you’d think this were freakier than if he were a practising Satanist.

Sky News couldn’t resist warning us that “in his past” Poots has “courted controversy” because of his “strongly held views on issues like evolution and homosexuality.”

Channel 4 News, meanwhile, felt compelled to mention that “Poots believes in Creationism, that the world is 6,000 years old”.

And in a report for BBC Newsnight, correspondent Nicholas Watt mentioned twice that Poots is a “Creationist”, while presenter Faisal Islam added for good measure that he is a “Creationist who once banned donations of blood from gay men.”

This appears to be what prompted Ian Paisley’s subsequent tirade on Newsnight to Faisal Islam:

The BBC want to lambast a man because he happens to be a man of faith. They want to take the Mickey out of his religion. You wouldn’t do that if he was a Muslim. You wouldn’t do that if he was of any other religion. But you can take the Mickey out of his Christian faith. you should be ashamed of yourself.

Paisley is right. There is no way on earth that Faisal Islam would preface an interview with, say, Sadiq Khan, by making light of the Muslim belief in Gabriel flying Mohammed around Heaven on a winged horse to meet Allah, Adam and Moses.

Indeed, were you to search the BBC news archives I doubt you’d find a single instance of a BBC interviewer even hinting to a Muslim that there was anything unhealthy about Islamic attitudes towards homosexuality.

The mainstream British broadcast channels all seem to be united in their loathing for Christianity — and routinely persecute politicians of faith.

Former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, for example, was effectively hounded out of his job because the media kept pestering him with questions about whether he believed homosexual sex was a sin.

In the days before he settled for being just a stooge of the Boris Johnson administration, when he still actually counted for something and believed in something, Leader of the House Jacob Rees Mogg, too, was endlessly tormented by journalists because of his profound Catholic faith.

The BBC’s Jo Coburn once asked him whether his religious belief was a “barrier to holding high office” — which she would certainly never have asked of a devout Muslim, Sikh, or Jew.

Rees-Mogg — who still had some fire in his loins in those days — asked: “Why do you pick on these views of the Catholic Church?” He added: “Isn’t this stretching into religious bigotry?”

Most certainly it is. But this bigotry is so routine, so widespread, so unthinking that none of these MSM stooges such as Faisal Islam are even aware that they are doing it.

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