It seems the suppression of free speech isn’t limited to the halls of American universities.

Rod Dreher of The American Conservative reports.

Another Victory For Unreason

This time, at a college in London.  A Catholic speaker was prevented from giving a talk about the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality, because, yep, bigotry. Excerpt:

Mr Williams was preparing to address a busy room of students when he was approached by a representative of the Catholic Society and the student union and told he could not give a talk because the Catholic Society had failed to submit a speaker approval form.

Comments written by students on social networking websites since the cancellation have provoked concerns about freedom of speech.

Hannah Webb, the external affairs and campaigns officer for the student union, wrote on Facebook about the talk: “This was cancelled!” After she was asked how, Miss Webb replied that “their speaker hadn’t been approved so fairly easily”.

Miss Webb added that the event had been “flagged up” beforehand and “a number of us were alarmed that such a speaker had been allowed to go through the external vetting process”.

Beth Sutton, the student union’s Women’s Officer, also wrote on Twitter: “We managed to stop it [the talk] because union protocol wasn’t followed.”

Mr Williams responded on Twitter and asked if Miss Sutton would have been so concerned about protocol were it another event. She replied she would be equally concerned for events “on the boundaries of what UCLU allows and requires discussion”.

Miss Sutton had also made a Twitter appeal to her followers prior to the talk asking them to disrupt the “bigoted homophobic” event.

Mr Williams said that he was worried about the future of Catholic apologetics on campus. He said: “This experience makes me concerned for the ability of Catholic apologists and speakers to talk on university campuses.

“If student unions will ban a presentation of Catholic teaching on the specious grounds that it is ‘homophobic’ or ‘hate speech’, or merely because it might make some people feel ‘unsafe’, then this will constitute an effective censoring of the presentation of Catholic teaching (at least on sexual ethics and sexuality) in any student atmosphere.