Could it actually be a sin to pay for your television licence fee?

From Mr Stefano Mazzeo, coordinator of Catholics Unplug your Televisions (CUT) SIR – I wholeheartedly agree with Eric Hester (Letter, December 23) that it is immoral for Catholics to fund the BBC. From the mid-1960s to the present day the BBC has promoted a form of revised ethics and lifestyles that are contrary to divine and natural law.
Here is an example of how the BBC led the opinion both in Parliament and in general regarding the legalisation of abortion debate. In the 1960s, when this debate was raging, the BBC came down firmly on the side of legalisation even though its charter required it not to be interventionist in areas of politics and ethics. But it did so in a crafty way by the use of drama.
In the Wednesday Play Up the Junction, with its portrayal of a backstreet abortion, it also depicted the working-class people of Clapham to be poorly educated, oversexed and only interested in a good time. It then followed Up the Junction with emotive current affairs programmes on backstreet abortions via BBC Two’s Late Night Line Up and BBC Radio Home Service’s The Critics. With MPs’ postbags filling up with pleas from constituents to support David Steel’s Bill to legalise abortion the BBC job on this issue was done.
Today, the politically correct bright young things of the “BBC tribe”, as ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken calls them, have their own religion, dogmas and core values, but many of these values are diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. The BBC is also exporting its core values to the world through its World Service radio and television network in many languages and by its website. One BBC dogma, abortion, is being promoted by its World Service “Sexwise” programme in which the BBC proudly proclaims its partnership with IPPF, the world’s largest commercial abortion provider.
Therefore, if it is immoral for Catholics to fund the BBC is it not also a sin? After all, would it be a sin to give money to an organisation that promotes abortion? By paying the licence fee people are doing just that, helping to market abortion on a worldwide scale.
Therefore, I can see our bishops putting their priests on danger money next Saturday morning or before Mass as the queues for confessionals stretch around the church car park and into the street. Or, more than likely, you will get a mail bag of self-right eous Catholics telling me not to be so judgmental.
Yours faithfully, STEFANO MAZZEO By email From Dr Christopher Shell SIR – Eric Hester’s letter demonstrates how staggeringly unrepresentative the BBC is. On latest figures, they pay 5.7 times as much to advertise in the Guardian as in the Times and Telegraph combined – even though Guardian sales total only 22.5 per cent of the sales of the other two. Therefore, the BBC is 25 times (2,400 per cent) more anxious to court Guardian readers (ie, 0.38 per cent of the British population of 61.1m) than to court the others combined. Quite apart from its employing only 22.5 per cent Christians in a 70 per cent Christian country.
Opponents of bias, elitism and social engineering will surely join friends of democracy and equality to make these unacceptable facts so publicly known that the BBC has no option but to democratise.
Yours faithfully, CHRISTOPHER SHELL Hounslow, Middlesex