Some 28,000 aggressive secularists have signed a petition for Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown calling on him to make the Church pay for Pope Benedict’s planned state visit to Britain later this month.

The secularists, who claim to want a pluralist society, object to the fact that the tax-payer if footing the bill for security and related protocol that surrounds a visit by any Head of State.

It’s strange that of the many Heads of State who visit Britain in an official capacity every year the only one that secularists object to is a visit by the Pope.

You see, while many aggressive secularists try to pretend that they’re for “live-and-let-live” pluralism, they’re really anti-religious and object to any public expression of religion.

While they have no objection to a visit by the Head of State of China, for example (where people are regularly imprisoned for expressing their opinions or beliefs), a religious leader like Pope Benedict XVI is too much for them to stomach.

This kind of secularism is not pluralist: it is bigoted and anti-religious.