Here's the problem when someone is locked in the "iron cage of secular rationalism"...

...they may discover that other people do not agree with their view of the secular good.

Nobel peace prize winner defends law criminalising homosexuality in Liberia.

The Nobel peace prize winner and president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has defended a law that criminalises homosexual acts, saying: "We like ourselves just the way we are."

In a joint interview with Tony Blair, who was left looking visibly uncomfortable by her remarks, Sirleaf told the Guardian: "We've got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve."

Liberian legislation classes "voluntary sodomy" as a misdemeanour punishable by up to one year in prison, but two new bills have been proposed that would target homosexuality with much tougher sentences.

And:

Blair, on a visit to Liberia in his capacity as the founder of the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), a charity that aims to strengthen African governments, refused to comment on Sirleaf's remarks.

When asked whether good governance and human rights went hand in hand, the British former prime minister said: "I'm not giving you an answer on it."

"One of the advantages of doing what I do now is I can choose the issues I get into and the issues I don't. For us, the priorities are around power, roads, jobs delivery," he said.

Over his 10 years as prime minister, Blair became a champion for the legal equality of gay people, pushing through laws on civil partnerships, lifting a ban on gay people in the armed forces and lowering the age of consent for gay people to 16.

A Catholic convert, he called on the pope to rethink his "entrenched" views and offer equal rights to gay people. But gay rights, he said, were not something he was prepared to get involved in as an adviser to African leaders.

Wham! Multiculturalism runs head-on into political correctness!

Because obviously you can lecture the pope, but lecturing a Nobel peace prize winning president of a Third World Country would just be presumptious of Blair.

A more serious point is that this highlights the point made in Steven D. Smith's "The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse." Today, no one can seriously say that "accepting homosexuality" has no effect on anyone else. If there is one thing that recent history shows it is that the people who start out arguing for decriminalization pretty quickly start to criminalize the conduct of other people who are minding their own business, whether it is making cakes or officiating at marriages.

In the West, the position championed by Blair has been based on a "smuggling" of concepts which have never been seriously vetted. The reason is that these concepts are not self-evident and not something that can be discovered through pure secular reasoning.

Consequently, when faced with someone like Sirleaf, what can Blair say? All he's got is his muzzy intuition that everyone ought to agree with him because he has "reason" itself on his side. If someone doesn't agree with him, all he - and other people on his side - can do is yell louder or resort to some kind of force, such as linking foreign aid to the Western politically correct agenda.