Saturday, January 29, 2011

iv

What gay people, like Jewish people and disabled people and Christian people and Doctor Who fan people chiefly want is for everybody else to go away and mind their own business. They want to be able to live where they want and with whom they like, and get the jobs they want. They'd also just as soon not be pelted with rubbish in the street or have petrol bombs let off in the pubs they frequent, and it irks them a good deal when they are arrested, imprisoned, chemically castrated or hanged. They'd rather not have the mickey taken out of them on the TV, or have their name used as a playground insult. They don't think it's fair that they are turned down for jobs on the basis of being gay; and they think that if it turns out that there are disproportionately few gay people working on hovercraft, then the hovercraft captains must be, consciously or unconsciously, discriminating, and they should be encouraged  not to.

One way of stopping hovercraft captains from being prejudiced to to encourage them to read books and do maths examples which happen include gay characters (and black characters, and Methodists, and people in wheelchairs.) Because then they are less like to think of black wheelchair using Methodists as weird, exotic furriners but as, you know, people.

This, you would have thought, is a basic democratic belief shared by pretty much everybody in the world: "Everybody should be treated the same as everybody else." Doubtless, from time to time, my  right to be left alone comes into conflict with your right to be left alone, but, hey, that's what laws and courts and judges are for.

The Daily Mail has a problem with "everybody should be treated the same as everybody else". And it's not hard to see why. Their readers are rich white middle class Christians, and rich white middle class Christians are used to being treated better than everybody else. So any claim by (say) a wheelchair user that you ought to design buildings in such a way that he can get into them is instantly perceived as a vile attack on the rights of the bipedal majority. (This  week's comedy masterpiece was an article claiming that the only real sexism in modern society was that perpetrated by women against men.)


But the threatened hegemony doesn't merely lament the passing of the good old days when the black folks tipped their hat and said "Sir". Oh no. They have discovered up a scary conspiracy in which the lower orders really are Out To Get Us.



It happened like this. Some years ago Melanie Phillips was waiting in the Gay Lobby on Victoria Station (the line is immaterial) and found a copy of a sinister and incriminating document which someone had carelessly left there. In a handbag, very likely. This blog is most happy to be able to publish the entire text:

THE GAY AGENDA

1: Apologies for absence
2: Minutes of last meeting
3: Matters arising
4: Destroy the very concept of normal sexuality
5: Bring down western civilisation

6: Arrange trip to hear John Barrowman singing show tunes.
7: Any other business.

We have seen that those who take the idea of Political Correctness seriously believe in a sinister organization ("the Frankfurt school") that deliberately invented P.C (and Climate Change) as part of a plot to undermine western civilisation and make it ripe for a Communist take over. (This is what they actually believe, and is not a comical exaggeration on my part.  Melanie Phillips has herself argued in so many words that the liberalisation of sexual laws and attitudes in the 20th century were part of a Marxist Plot to destroy civilisation.  "For years we have watched helplessly the undermining of the traditional family, which has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers and ‘cultural Marxists’ who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society."`  The reference to "cultural Marxism" is a pretty clear indication that she believes in the Frankfurter conspiracy theory.)
 
It seems clear that her Gay Lobby is a different manifestation of this conspiracy. The Gay Lobby isn't just a way of saying "gay people", any more than Political Correctness Brigade is just a buzz word for "polite people". Melanie Phillips' Gay Lobby doesn't just want toleration and equality. Oh, it may say that that is what it wants, but it has an ulterior motive. In the name of equality, it wants to brainwash our children into rejecting the very concept of normal sexuality. This will undermine the family, which is the very bedrock of civilisation. Once the family as an institution has been destroyed, Western Civilisation will collapse and the Communists can take over. 

She  also appears to believes, along with certain members of the Teapot movement, that in the United States this has already happened.


continues

11 comments:

Gavin Burrows said...

Provided point six is optional, I am on their side.

SK said...

I still haven't read any of these articles, but I do find it slightly surprising that anyone claims 'destroy the concept of normal sexuality' is an ulterior motive. I've spoken to some people on that side of the question, and they are usually very open that the concept of normal sexuality -- the idea that any sexuality is more 'normal' than any other sexuality -- is exactly what they are out to destroy. Their aim is a world where no consensual sexual act is regarded as any more or less 'normal' than any other. And this isn't an 'ulterior motive' -- it's a stated aim.

So it confuses me that anyone is claiming this movement is some kind of 'secret conspiracy'. It exists, it's out there, it has web pages and e-mail addresses and Peter Tatchell, but it's neither secret nor a conspiracy.

SK said...

(And if by 'the traditional family' what you mean is 'the assumption that stable monogamous relationships ought to be the norm' then they are definitely out to destroy that, and replace it with the idea that 'monogamy' is merely an edge case of the vast number of permutations of relationships which are out there, none of which are any more 'normal' than any other -- so the woman who lives with three boyfriends is just as 'normal' as the swinging couple, or the social circle where everyone is a node of some complex spider's-web of relationships. Again, though, this isn't exactly 'ulterior': wanting to destroy the idea that the traditional family is the only acceptable, or even the best, way to organise relationships, is something they are quite open about.

Personally, I think they should never have allowed annulments.)

Gareth McCaughan said...

Are the readers of the Daily Fail really rich, on the whole? (Except in the sense in which just about everyone in the UK is "rich".)

guy.jackson said...

I was under the impression that most of its readership is lower-middle-class, so they'd be well-off compared to most working-class people, but not what we usually think of when we say "rich".

(I'd also quibble about the "Christian" part, too: yes, they'd probably self-identify as Christians, but I don't see anything in the Mail to indicate that its readership is particularly devout when compared to the average Briton. In fact, given that the Church of England has a reputation for being a bit wishy-washy, I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite were true, and the Mail's readers were less devout than most people. Although I suppose some members of less liberal demoninations might be attracted by its stance on moral issues.)

Andrew Rilstone said...

1: The Gay Lobby is a seperate, revolutionary Marxist group who wish to make homosexuality compulsory and destroy the family with the ulterior motive of destroying western civilisation and bring in a dictatorship of the proletariate. All gays are not members of the gay lobby, any more than all Jews are Elders of Zion.

2: It is true that there exist sexual radicals, and that Peter Tatchell is one. The claim that everyting in Britian is controlled by these sexual radicals, and that any mention of homosexuality at school, in any context, is part of a deliberate ploy to advance the cause of these sexual radicals seems a little far fetched, to me.

3: Even assuming that Peter Tatchell's supporters run the country, it is hard to connect this to a New McCartyhyism. Tatchell himself as strongly argued that people should be quite free to attack and criticise gay people in public, with the proviso that they shouldn't be allowed to incite violence. ("Gay people will go to hell" = fine "Let's go and burn down some gay people's house" = not ok. "The Pope is an evil biogt" = fine "The Pope should be assassinated" =- not ok)

4: Could you please cite examples of school books advocating sexual radicalism of this kind.

Anonymous said...

What is this idea of "class" that you all keep referring to? We don't have that here in North America....

Gareth McCaughan said...

ZZ, I think you do; it's just that (1) you don't call it that and (2) it's nearer to being purely determined by wealth than in the UK.

Gavin Burrows said...

Dubya was of course a classic example of someone who gained their rank through personal merit, and not at all from family connections...

Phil Masters said...

Virtually every Hollywood comedy with a contemporary setting these days seems to be about social class. Bruce Springsteen has made a long career and some quite decent songs out of the subject of social class. Veronica Mars was largely about social class...

Okay, okay, ZZ is joking.

Anonymous said...

Phil, surely you understand that the products of the US entertainment industry are NOT an accurate depiction of American culture. That is the entire point. They are escapist and provocative. They take imagined or trivial issues and blow them way out of proportion to make them seem dramatic and more important than they are.

What you NEVER hear is any American saying that so-and-so belongs to this class or that class. What makes a class, anyway? Birth? That confers zero privilege in our society, unlike yours with it's house of lords. Money? Opinions about Dubya aside, people like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Bill Gates all rose from humble backgrounds solely by their own merits. Nearly every American believes that is possible for them. Whether is is TRULY possible is open to debate, but we all BELIEVE it.