Sin and sickness now and then

By Peter Mullen

THE CONSERVATIVE WOMAN

January 4, 2026

IT’S EASY to get into trouble these days – all I have to do is speak the blinking obvious in words that not even an idiot could fail to understand, and I find myself outcast as ‘far right’.

The public, egged on by the conscienceless mass media, is voraciously prurient about the publication of the Epstein files. The procuring of children to satisfy perverted sexual appetites is so despicable that it is overlooked only when the culprits are of immigrant stock. The ubiquitous euphemism is ‘grooming’. But it is horses that are groomed. The honest word is ‘corruption’.

The old word is sinful. But this vile practice has always gone on, usually less remarked upon than it is today. The procurement of minors is not the only sin. There are others. The extreme sinfulness of these other offences is that we no longer describe them as wrongs but as rights. We forget that there are no rights in wrongs. Take abortion on demand, for instance.

The abortionists began by arguing that abortion is a necessary evil to stamp out the back-street practitioner, that great danger to the health and even the life of the pregnant woman. But that was a lie. It was only the thin end of a very thick wedge and abortion on demand was always their goal. And in England they have achieved their aim with the result that more than 200,000 foetuses are aborted every year simply because so many people are sexually incontinent. Abortion is just another form of contraception. Tens of thousands of women choose abortion because to have a child would inconvenience their lifestyle. And in that word lifestyle you have it: the banality of evil.

Contraception is various, virtually infallible and free of charge. So why the clamour for abortions? I think society permits this slaughter because people lack the imagination to pause for a moment and contemplate the sheer horror of this massacre of the innocents. How can anyone, let alone a woman, regard abortion as something which demonstrates enlightenment and progress? What sort of people have we become? Answer: a sentimental people who ban the killing of foxes – vermin – but license the killing of our own humankind.

There is a broader consideration here. Many of the supporters of abortion claim that ‘it is a feminist issue’ – as if the procreation of children involved only women. In fact, decisions about the shaping of social morality are not the province merely of one section of the population, as if burglary were of concern only to shopkeepers: social ethics is above all a public matter. This is confirmed by the fact that parliament passes laws about social morality on behalf of the whole nation, all of us. Thus we are all – not only feminists and not only women even – implicated in these monstrous decisions.

Abortion used to be considered as an evil next to infanticide. And prostitution was a crime. Now those who solicit for prostitution are respectable ‘sex-workers’. The term itself shows how sex has been demoralised and turned into a mere commodity: thus ‘having sex’ is no more morally rooted than ‘having a sandwich’. I shall be reminded that Jesus was ‘a friend of prostitutes and sinners’. But this same Jesus told the woman taken in adultery to go free ‘but sin no more’. How is it we cannot follow Our Lord’s example and love the sinner while hating the sin?

I am old and it is a wonder that I have survived so long given that serious diseases were rife when I was growing up in the back streets of Leeds in the 1940s and 50s. There was the scourge of TB and so trams and buses displayed signs PLEASE DO NOT SPIT. There was polio, called in those days infantile paralysis. Measles with all its complications. Diphtheria. Scarlet fever. My baby sister nearly died in the whooping cough epidemic of 1947. Tetanus. Rheumatic Fever. Meningococcal Disease. All these potentially fatal conditions in an age before there were efficient vaccines and when antibiotics were in their infancy.

Thankfully, these diseases have been virtually abolished only to be replaced by fanciful and frequently fictitious conditions such as burnout, ADHD, long covid, gluten sensitivity. Doomscrolling, Highly-sensitive person (HSP), Adrenal fatigue and Orthorexia-lite. Notoriously, autism is wildly over-diagnosed. And anyone who might until comparatively recently have complained of being under the weather or a bit fed up now luxuriates in fashionable ‘mental health issues’.

Fascinating to discover that some people don’t drink too much but instead they ‘have a problem with alcohol’. And those who, in the time of our ignorance and insensitivity we said were fat, are now in these our enlightened times ‘suffering from obesity’ and demanding Ozempic.

Many complain of a lack of ‘self-esteem’ – forgetting that myself is the last person I should esteem. People worry about their ‘well-being’ until they make themselves ill. Last year I read of a boy who murdered and chopped up his parents and was officially described as ‘suffering from narcissistic personality disorder’. (I love that ‘suffering from’ – as if his own evil act had been visited upon him by some malicious demon). The final lunacy is to be found in the denial of the biological fact of the two sexes, male and female. (And it is sex not gender. It is only nouns that have gender.)

We have become so decadent that pseudo illnesses are enough to qualify their pretenders for a life on state benefits which often amount to more remuneration than that earned by working people. ‘Working people’ – that’s who the Labour party used to champion – and rightly. But Starmer and his gang have replaced ‘working people’ by their client state of professional idlers.

O brave new world that hath such people in it!

I must stop before I make myself sick.