In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ

“WHAT a wonderful Christian attitude some have,” says a commenter to a Daily Mail story about a priest who has been receiving hate mail.

And why has this member of the clergy been the subject of a hate campaign that has even included what appears to be an arson attack? Because this member of the clergy is female.

She is Yvonne Hobson, who has been vicar of the seaside village of Paul in Cornwall, UK,  since July 2006. The 54-year-old had few problems for about a year, and then in came anonymous letters “expressing hatred for women priests”, according to the Mail. Then a fire was started in a log basket on the porch of her vicarage, and a fire crew was required to put it out.

Now let’s be clear. The Freethinker’s role is to point up the sillier and more dangerous sides of religion, and, both in the print magazine and on this blog, it often does it in an irreverent way that tends to pull few punches.

But, notwithstanding the fact that this priest’s beliefs are not our beliefs, we think there is no excuse for this sort of behaviour, committed out of some twisted notion that, perhaps, Jesus would approve; that Jesus had twelve men as his gang, not women; that women have no place dispensing the religious mumbo-jumbo. If anything, it is this very sort of behaviour that exemplifies the potential religion has for buggering about with people’s minds. The idea that Jesus’s choosing twelve blokes automatically means a woman should not be a priest in the twenty-first century is plain barmy.

The letters “expressed anger at Mrs Hobson for being a femail priest”, say police investigating the arson attempt. One piece of hate mail was left in a private church room, where Hobson found it. “We don’t lock our churches,” said a diocese spokesman, Jeremy Dowling. Someone, he said, had left “a particularly frightening piece of hate mail” there.