“ARLENE FOSTER TO QUIT DUP AFTER LEAVING LEADERSHIP ROLES”

(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-politics-56938539)

So reads the headline of a BBC News story. The reason for her leaving is given in the body of the report. “Sources close to her said she thinks it is no longer the party she joined and it is moving in a different direction.”

She never said a truer word. She has been the main cause of change in the DUP!!

She joined the DUP in 2004. It was then an anti-Sinn Fein/IRA party. It was also anti sodomy and anti abortion. From 2007 the changes began, all of which she agreed with and helped to promote.

She whole-heartedly engaged in the shameful power-sharing arrangement between the DUP and Sinn Fein/IRA. She was appointed as environment minister in 2007 and went on to hold posts as minister of enterprise, trade and investment and finance minister.

When former DUP leader Peter Robinson stepped down as first minister in late 2015, Mrs Foster was elected unopposed as his successor. She was more than happy with the NEW direction of the DUP back then.

Since then she has led the DUP to embrace a pro-sodomite, LGBT position in utter contrast to the ‘old paths’ the DUP once followed. In 1977 the DUP had launched a ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ campaign which was in utter contrast to its stance under Arlene Foster’s leadership.

In 2016 Arlene Foster led her party to a vote in Stormont whereby posthumous pardons for those convicted of sodomy under the old law when such behaviour was a crime were proclaimed. Not one of her MLAs voiced opposition to the proposal and that includes those who are now scrambling to become the new leader.

In 2016, I wrote a letter to the Belfast Newsletter on that occasion.

I read with dismay the reports of the debate in Stormont on the Bill brought forward by the Executive to posthumously pardon sodomites convicted of violations of the law in the past.

I was particularly saddened that it would appear that Jim Allister, the Traditional Unionist Voice leader, was the only voice raised in opposition to this iniquitous proposal.

The failure of Christians to stand with Mr Allister, and I am thinking of Free Presbyterians in particular, is heart-breaking for one who recalls the various statements and protests that the Presbytery of the Free Presbyterian Church issued in the past and of the witness borne within our Province and much wider afield to the condemnation of God upon this wickedness and the warnings of the dire consequences on any people or nation which embraced and endorsed this evil.

Through the efforts of the DUP in Stormont, that which God has repeatedly condemned and manifested His wrath against, has been legitimised and validated. Sodomy is now accepted by the DUP and all its members, including Free Presbyterians, through this decision which validates sodomy, thereby shaking a fist in God’s face and wickedly defying Him and His holy Law.

There is one verse in God’s Word which comes to mind.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20.

Rev Ivan Foster, Kilskeery,

Co Tyrone.

That was also the year Mrs Arlene Foster and DUP MPs held ‘a champagne reception’ at the Conservative Party conference in October.

 This was the new DUP of Arlene Foster!

 Since 2016, the DUP has shown its altered character in the ‘Brexit Border debacle’, and in the recent failure to honestly and honourable oppose the Stormont proposal by the Ulster Unionist Party to oppose ‘Conversion Therapy’ which was couched in language which could lead to an outlawing of the preaching of the truth of God against the wickedness of sodomy and its related perversions.

Yes, Mrs Foster, the DUP is NOT the party you joined. It is moving in a different direction - one largely dictated by you!

Mrs Foster has shown herself to be a loyal member of the ‘Church of Ireland’. That body has embraced the apostasy of Ecumenism and the modernistic theology embodied in that evil philosophy for over three quarters of a century. It was under her bishop’s guidance that she attended a Sabbath-desecrating Gaelic football match in company with a DUP supporter - a professing Christian who then was a member of the Free Presbyterian Church - and sat beside Sinn Fein/IRA’s Northern Ireland leader and Deputy First Minister, Michelle O’Neill. That was in 2018.

In a BBC report of the event, Mrs Foster explained that “She realised that some may be ‘uncomfortable’ with her attendance, but that her party wanted to take steps towards a ‘shared society’ ”.

Yes, she was changing the DUP from being the party she joined!

In 2012, Peter Robinson, backed by Gregory Campbell, had taken a similar step but it did not involve Sabbath breaking as the game he attended was played on a Saturday evening!

(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-16777870).

Mrs Foster was taking the DUP even further from its foundational principles.

Now she plans to leave the DUP altogether because there are some who seem to have recognised rather late in the day  just where Arlene Foster has led them. She plans to do that which I suspect she was engaged in from the day she joined the DUP, forsake the bedrock of Protestant principles upon which the DUP was founded but from which it has been drifting for many years.

Like the proverbial ‘shutting of the stable door after the horse has bolted’, the slight stirrings within the DUP ranks show no indication that the ‘horse is to be caught and restored to the stable’, but they seem content to make do with a party bereft of its former principles and do a little light ‘airbrushing’ in an effort to regain the supporters who have been recently forsaking it  in droves!

 A quote appears in today’s (30/4/21) Belfast Newsletter regarding the front runner for the leadership, Mr Edwin Poots, regarded by many as a ‘hardliner’. The quote says, “a former DUP member who has worked closely with Mr Poots but is not a hardliner said that despite the Lagan Valley MLA’s innate conservatism, he was not as wholly in the traditionalist camp as widely perceived by many Stormont observers.”

When it is borne in mind that Mr Poots went along with all the changes and ‘liberalising’ trends up to now, without any public opposition, this statement is easily deemed as true.

Political opportunism has a tendency to put on a new, impressive ‘face’. One designed to influence and that fits the demands of the hour!

Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)

30th April 2021.