The New Year’s Honours list informed us that a knighthood had been bestowed on the writer and actor Stephen Fry. That announcement revived in me memories of a debate I attended back in 2009.
The proposition under debate that evening was “The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World” and it was vigorously opposed and derided by Stephen Fry and the late Christopher Hitchens. During the debate and afterwards, both Hitchens and Fry expressed contempt for the Ten Commandments insofar as they were “commanded”, but reserved their saeva indignatio for the 9th Commandment regarding sexual “coveting”, denouncing it as an example of Orwellian “thought-crime”. Fry further denounced priests and monks as “sexually dysfunctional” on account of their vows of celibacy.
