The notion of the tipping point in historical processes - more traditionally known as the last straw - has acquired a great deal of academic kudos in recent years, and I thought it had finally been reached last week in Britain.
The chief inspector of British prisons, Anne Owens, banned the wearing of tiny, cross of St George flags - bought in aid of a cancer charity - by prison officers in Wakefield jail because each could, in her own words, be "misinterpreted as a racist symbol". She added that she was also concerned about "the lack of cultural understanding" in the jail, based on the range of limited range of hair and skin products available for black and Asian male prisoners.
A national flag, in aid of a cancer charity, banned because it could be "misinterpreted as a racist symbol"? Not enough hair and skin products available for black male prisoners? Well, this is the tipping point, I thought joyfully, and sat back and waited for the hoots of derision and incredulity, from Tories at least. But there were none: British self-confidence has been so eroded by years of liberal mockery and national doubt that it seems no one has the wit or the courage to tell this particular multiculturalist twit where to shove her unconditionally banned red cross and her crossly unbanned black conditioner.
Worse, the only obvious response came from Chris Doyle of the Council for Arab-British understanding, who declared the cross of St George should be outlawed anyway, because it was borne by Crusaders in the 11th century - yes, the one that was a thousand years ago - and was therefore offensive to Muslims. In which case, of course, the union jack should be outlawed because it contains the cross of St George: and maybe the British should abolish all signs of the cross, even ones that raise money for cancer research, lest they offend someone or other.
I refer to this here, because it's sort of relevant. For we too have our own cancer-religion controversy, at the Mater hospital in Dublin - accompanied by, of course, the usual liberal ration of liberal misreporting and liberal hysteria. As we all know, the Mater recently refused to allow clinical trials of drugs on women with cancer after the company involved, Roche, asked it to tell its patients that they must not get pregnant, and therefore should take contraceptives or be sexually abstinent. Yet who can really be surprised that a Catholic institution would decline to urge its patients to use contraceptives, no matter how ill they were? Opposition to contraception has been a defining feature of the Catholic Church for the past century or more: did intelligent people really think a Swiss drugs company doing trials in a Dublin hospital was going to change everything?
Ah, and here we go, back into deep and shark-infested waters again. For moral theology aside, the Mater was, in terms of practice, totally right, and Roche utterly wrong. Sexual intercourse allows of no 100 per cent safe form of contraception. One forgotten pill, one leaky condom, one loose diaphragm, one unwanted foetus. The only way for a fecund, sexually engaged woman to avoid pregnancy totally is either through complete abstinence or through some form of masturbation. The Mater would urge the former, but I rather think the spiritual heirs of Sister Catherine McAuley might baulk at the latter.
Yet since the drug is a thalidomide-type threat to any foetus, and since the issue for the mother is one of her own life and death, then her abstaining from intercourse is not merely a perfectly reasonable condition - it is a primary one. And whatever other forms of sexual activity remain are of course solely the business of the patient and her husband or companion, in the privacy of their bedroom.
At all events, the Mater is simply the wrong place to conduct such drugs trials. A hospital with a legally enshrined "Catholic" ethos, in neither canon, contractual or secular contractual law may waive its own rules on contraception merely because the patients concerned have cancer. No more can a State suspend its laws for people simply because they're ill.
The Catholic Church has always urged the chastity of sexual moderation, in marriage and out of it - and the promotion of chastity to prolong life at a time of mortal crisis is surely a righteous course. Or so one would have thought. But, broken by a decade of self-imposed wounds and endless liberal flagellation, the Irish Catholic Church now seems utterly unable to defend its own position, just as the Church of England, at least an entire generation ahead in decomposition and decay, has almost abandoned an institutional belief in God.
Cultural morbidity is endemic across Europe, as the institutions which shaped our civilisations lose faith, wither and die. Practising Christians who publicly praise God are mocked, even as incoming Muslims are acclaimed for praising Allah. The day might soon come when Englishmen may no longer fly the flag of the their national saint, as in Dublin the Mater Misericordiae tamely becomes Matter A Damn.
Either way, the inescapable lesson of history is that those who abandon rules will sooner or later surrender power over their own dominion to those who have retained them.