A couple weeks ago, a street-corner preacher in Britain mentioned to a passing shopper that the Bible calls homosexuality a sin.

The comment got him thrown in jail.

An atheist homosexual policeman contended that since Dale McAlpine’s remark was loud enough to be overheard, he had broken the Public Order Act—a law passed in 1986 to control violent rioters and football hoodlums. Police carted McAlpine off, and he spent seven hours in a cell for causing “harassment, alarm or distress.”

It was quite the crackdown, considering what happened elsewhere on Britain’s streets at about the same time. After an Israeli official gave a lecture at the University of Manchester, she was attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters. Police responded to this provocation by escorting the official from the premises in a police car. The protesters climbed onto the hood of the vehicle and tried to break the windshield. They were not prosecuted. Apparently in Britain, this is “protected speech.”

Welcome to the Upside-Down World.

It’s a world where truth is trashed and lies are lauded. Where the honorable are despised and the depraved are empowered.

This disorienting phenomenon comes under the microscope in Melanie Phillips’s new book, The World Turned Upside Down. “Society seems to be in the grip of a mass derangement,” she writes. “[S]elf-designated ‘victim groups’ have turned right and wrong, victim and aggressor inside out.”

In this world, simple belief in biblical teaching against homosexuality is a hate crime. Judges rule that antidiscrimination law trumps religious belief. Last December, a British registrar was forced to resign for refusing to conduct same-sex “weddings.” A pediatrician had to leave an adoption panel because he wouldn’t approve homosexual couples for adoption. In February 2009, a Scottish couple were denied their request to adopt their two grandchildren—so that the children, ages 4 and 5, could be adopted by a gay male couple; when the grandparents objected, the judge told them to hush up if they ever wanted to see the children again.

Such bullying bears the hallmarks of history’s despotic regimes. In fact, Phillips argues that the religious tyrannies of the Middle Ages and the political tyrannies of the 20th century have been replaced by something just as pernicious: cultural totalitarianism. “Medieval Christianity—like contemporary Islamism—stamped out dissent by killing or conversion; Western liberals do it by social and professional ostracism and legal discrimination,” she says. “It is a kind of secular Inquisition. And the grand inquisitors are to be found within the intelligentsia—in the universities, the media, the law, the political and professional classes—who not only have systematically undermined the foundations of Western society but are heavily engaged in attempting to suppress any challenge or protest.”

In the Upside-Down World, “reason” supposedly reigns. The reality, however, is that false and empty values have become the new dogma—at the expense of reason. Facts that don’t fit the party line are discarded or ridiculed. Biblical orthodoxy has simply been replaced by a rabidly secularist orthodoxy.

In this world, the solution to debt problems is increased spending; the antidote to government waste is more government. “Freedom of speech” is used as a shield for vulgarity and filth—and a bludgeon against godliness and virtue. Efforts to enforce existing immigration law in order to curb rising kidnapping and murder are branded as racist, even by the highest office in the land.

In Upside-Down downtown Manhattan, a retail store damaged by shrapnel from the 9/11 terrorist attacks was razed—in order to make room for a new 13-story mosque. “In the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise,” commented Mark Steyn.

The increasingly universal immunity to reason vividly showed in the recent Times Square bomber incident. As always happens when a Muslim commits or tries to commit a terrorist act, politicians and press in America and Britain disregarded facts, threw out the religion connection and searched for a cause within trivialities like the would-be bomber’s struggle to pay his mortgage. New York’s mayor speculated that he was probably a right-winger, “somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill.” Wrong. Turns out the perp was on orders from the Pakistani Taliban. The mayor responded to the news by praising his city’s Pakistanis and gravely stating, “We will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”

The rush to exhibit such multicultural sanctimony has become so predictable after such incidents. The more that Muslims attack, the louder we praise them. The same perverse Upside-Down reaction was on parade five years ago, after Islamic suicide bombers killed 52 Londoners on their morning commute. British officials didn’t blame Islam—but Islamophobia. London’s mayor asserted that the true fault lay in “80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil.”

Reality is screaming in their faces, and they are closing their eyes, plugging their ears, and saying “La la la la la.”

“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!” the Prophet Isaiah lamented. “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:20-21).

He couldn’t possibly have described the Upside-Down World with more penetrating precision.

A similar hostility to reason can be seen in the supposedly irreproachable, objective realm of science: the evidence-defying, data-manipulating commitment to the manmade global warming doctrine and the impassioned vilification of skeptics; the blacklisting and excommunication of scientists who so much as acknowledge the possibility that the elegance and predictability of the material world suggests intelligent design. The scientific establishment brusquely closes the curtain on any ideas at odds with the unchallengeable notion that there are any answers beyond matter itself—what Democritus called “atoms and the void.”

As a result, the establishment must turn its back on a great many facts—and simultaneously embrace some ludicrous fictions. Befuddled by the majesty of life, and the impossible perfection of the Earth that supports it, scientists have entered the realm of fantasy in order to sustain their belief in a godless universe. They have suggested, with nothing to offer as proof but their own ideologically driven imaginations, that perhaps there are an infinite number of universes—magically making statistical impossibilities possible. Famous atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins—who delights in ridiculing religious believers and calling faith “a virus of the mind”—says he believes life may have been deposited on Earth by beings from outer space.

That’s right. In the Upside-Down World, superintelligent little green men from great beyond (whose origin also must require an explanation, I might add) are easier to believe in than God. “[F]or scientific triumphalists mere facts apparently cannot compete with the doctrines laid down by the scientific priesthood,” Phillips explains.

The Apostle Paul put it this way: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” In the Upside-Down World, foolishness is wisdom—and true wisdom, foolishness.

The common denominator is the assault on truth as defined in Scripture. If the Bible calls something evil, this world calls it good. If God forbids something, this world awards it legal protection. If God explains something a certain way, this world is certain anything other than that is possible. In its own eyes, this world is wise and prudent, and God is fictional.

I’ve had enough of this Upside-Down World. Jesus Christ instructed His disciples to pray, “Thy Kingdom come.” As far as I’m concerned, it can’t get here fast enough.