When Pope Benedict XVI announced his 2008 U.S visit, Americans appeared delirious and clamored for their city to be on the itinerary. Not so Britain. His just-announced September visit has secularists and progressive Anglicans in Parliament spitting mad and sponsoring protest petitions.

What set them off were remarks Monday by Benedict on British labor laws and proposed bills that supporters say promote gender equality in the workplace and society. The Pope, in a speech Monday, recast those same laws as imposing

... unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed ... Fidelity to the Gospel in no way restricts the freedom of others -- on the contrary, it serves their freedom by offering them the truth...

Ah, "the truth." It's always a good way to start a fight.

Thinking Anglicans blog has one wrap-up of mostly negative reactions. (Remember how unhappily surprised the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was this fall when Benedict through open the doors to conversion to traditionalist Anglicans opposed to gay and female bishops?)

Ruth Gledhill, at The Times, says 4,000 people have already signed a protest petition against the visit and quotes Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society who says:

The taxpayer in this country is going to be faced with a bill of 20 million (British pounds) for the visit of the Pope, a visit in which he has already indicated that he will attack equal rights and promote discrimination."

British Catholics take a different spin. Rev. Ray Blake, blogging on his Brighton parish site, says the critics of natural law miss the point. He writes that, "Equalities Legislation," which incidentally is Labor's only 'big idea' " violates natural law because it..

...bases human rights on sexual orientation, the tendency is therefore to reduce human beings to being a set of genitals attached to a person, rather than seeing first and foremost a human being a mind, a soul who has a certain sexual orientation.

Do you see the Church and Benedict's views as universal, as "natural law," or as a particular Catholic view of the world?