iii

I mean, if you or I were briefed to take her side in a debate, any one of us  could construct a better argument than Mel

"This house disapproves of homosexuality"

"If you've got a choice, it would be better to to be heterosexual than homosexual, because heterosexuals get to have kids, and have a wider choice of potential partners, and because the boffins are better at curing the sexually transmitted diseases of straight people than of gay people. So don't saddle children with those sort of problems by encouraging them to be gay. You might just as well encourage them to choose to be women. No-one would want to be woman if they could help it. Er...."      

Sexuality isn't a choice, any more than gender is. Any more than race. I can learn to dance and wear one of those hats that the cool kids in St Pauls wear, but I won't suddenly become black. We can fill the school libraries with children's books full of black faces, and we won't suddenly find an epidemic of negro  among the Caucasian population.

Surely this doesn't still need to be spelled out?  Surely Daily Mail readers don't really think that gay is a club that is always looking for new recruits. Mel seems to live in that bizarre 1980s version of reality in which people catch gay off text books, in which "teaching about" is equivalent to "promoting".

I work in a library. We have sex-ed books for very young children. Unlike proper sex-ed books (the ones we had in our library when I was a very young children) they are not just about mummy cats and daddy cats and where kittens come from, but about feelings. They acknowledge that even quite small boys have embarrassing swellings in the trouser area. And they say things like "Sometimes, boys have boyfriends and girls have girlfriends: those people are called 'gay' or 'homosexual'."  

This is the kind of brainwashing material with which children are being bombarded and will eventually destroy all sense of a normal etc etc etc. 

(The same books also cover "OK touching" and "Not OK touching". In tabloid speak, this equates to "masturbation lessons.")

OK: lets assume that Mel has something stronger in mind. The picture book about the two male penguins which hatched and reared a chick. The picture book about a child who happens to have two mummies instead of a mummy and a daddy. Or for slightly older children, a book which acknowledges the possibility that a famous male playwright who wrote love poetry to pretty boys was not exclusively straight. One which mentions that Jews like Anne Frank weren't the only people who went into the concentration camps. The Importance of Being Earnest.

Suppose that sort of seditious literature actually did become compulsory -- mandatory, as Mel puts it. What bad thing would follow? Would children become more accepting of classmates who did have "two mummies"? If so, why would that be a bad thing? Would they stop using homophobic words to bully their classmates? If so, why would that be a bad thing? Would there be a sudden outbreak of gay in classrooms? Even if there were, why would that be a bad thing, necessarily?

How would things work in Mel-world? Would "The Importance of Being Earnest" be taken down from the shelf and burned, along with all other books by boys who had boyfriends, or by boys who sometimes had boyfriends or might have had boyfriends, or boys who sometimes glanced at other boys cocks in the showers after gym, but only in a very manly, heterosexual kind of way? Or will children be allowed to read the play, but not to know about the life of  the author? Or will the teacher be obliged to say "Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for sondomy. And a very good thing to. We should bring it back. Along with the birch." Or what? 

Neil Gaiman recalls that when he was a child, no-one would tell him what Wilde went to gaol for. He formed the impression that he must have been some kind of dandy pirate or highwayman. He was very disappointed when he found out.

I can't parse it any other way. When you talk about homosexuals brainwashing children, you either mean that gay is catching, that gay books make you gay; or you are saying too many books about gays will make straight people less prejudiced, and this would be a bad thing because....because... Because prejudice is a good thing and we want more of it.

Is there another, more benign reading that I've missed?

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ii

I don't, personally, believe in magic. On the other hand, I am not 100% confident in my disbelief in magic. I could be quite tolerant of a devout wizard who tried to sell me a magic potion. I don't think such things work, but I don't know that they don't. The reason that homoeopaths are scumbags is that they are selling their magic potions on the basis of scientific claims which are just. not. true. Eye of newt and gall of bat might summons up the ghosts of all the kings of Scotland, for all I know. But atoms do not remember things which used to be dissolved in them. They just don't. 

If I'd spent longer planning this essay, there'd  have been a clever pun on "homophobic" and "homoeopathic" in there somewhere.

It is one thing for a Muslim to say "I don't drink wine because it's against my religion to drink wine". It's another thing to say "You shouldn't drink wine because it's against my religion for you to drink wine." But it's different again to say "No-one should drink wine because everybody knows that the infidel introduces special cancer inducing chemicals into the grapes." The first two claims are matters of opinion and conscience; the third is just.not.true. Same for the Pope saying that the magic HIV worms can swim in between the atoms in the condom as -- opposed to "Using birth control is a mortal sin worth a century in purgatory or two hundred hail Marys."

Yes, I know the indulgence system was largely abolished after Vatican II.

So: is Mel claiming that homosexuality is wicked because it hurts people and causes pain, like getting drunk and telling lies about weapons of mass destruction? Or is she claiming that it is immoral because it makes little baby Jesus cry, like playing with your thing and eating flesh on Friday.? (Yes, I know the compulsory weekly fast was largely abolished after Vatican II. The Guardian has recently developed a thing about playing with your thing but so far as I can tell it's only wanking over pictures you found on the Internet which makes C.P Scott cry.)

So far as I can say, she says neither. She says instead that homosexuality is not "normal". Or, at any rate, she says that if children are bombarded with homosexual propaganda they will be brainwashed and lose their idea of "normal" sexuality. That sounds to me like a scientific claim, not a religious one.

But what does "normal" mean? If it means "natural" then homosexuality is perfectly natural, in that is occurs in nature: human beings, and indeed penguins, do it, and have always done it. If it means "consistent with social norms" then again, it is pretty normal, because lots of people do it it and most people don't mind other people doing it.

But that usage gets you into horrible circular arguments. I could say that public nudity is not "normal" because most people don't do it, and most people are freaked out when somebody else does it. But if I was advocating that we should get over ourselves and leave our pants off on hot days, there wouldn't be much point in appealing to the present "norms". It doesn't mean very much to say "We mustn't change our norms because that would involve changing our norms." Norms change all the time. I am reliably informed that in olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. 

I suppose a traditional conservative says "We developed our norms gradually, over a series of centuries, and if you change them suddenly, the whole mechanism might come crashing down." That comes into Mel's thinking. She has a theory that Western rationality is based on the Bible (sort of possibly maybe true, debatably) and that it follows that if we depart from Biblical principles we will descend into irrationality and chaos. But this doesn't seem to involve reading the Bible and saying "How does Deuteronomy 23 apply to issue of detention without trial?" It seems to involve using the Bible as a fetish-object which makes the ways we do things right now the only ways that things can be done. And that the state of Israel is always right about everything. How she gets round the fact that, until very recently indeed, letting women vote in elections and work on newspapers was not considered "normal" I am not quite sure.

If you are going to sell me a magic potion, sell me a magic potion. If you are going to preach traditional morality then preach traditional morality. Don't wrap it up in weirdo language about what is and isn't normal. 

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i

Sorry: I decided I really needed to write down why Melanie Phillips is so uniquely hateful. There is probably no need for you to read it, though. Go away for a few days, and I really promise to write something about children's books when I'm done. Or comics, maybe. Going to hear the miserable one from Show of Hands on Saturday, and everything, so I'm bound to write about that. Even got some follow up notes on Baby Jesus, but I'm thinking maybe hold them over til next Christmas?





When little Nicky Griffin sees two grown men holding hands, he finds it "creepy". This is on the same level as not wanting girls in your tree-house because they're smelly.

When America's favourite comedy bigot Fred Phelps says that God hates homosexuals he is pretty much just projecting his own gut-feelings onto the universe. He also thinks that God hates Hollywood, television, America in general, the media in general, soldiers, children who have been killed by gunmen, and Methodists. (Especially Methodists. Methodists are even worse than homosexuals.) Doubtless very distressing if it's your funeral he decides to yell at, but not really something you could describe as a point of view.

Someone like Anne Atkins thinks that homosexuality is taboo and would rather the priests of her religion didn't openly engage in taboo practices. (Priests who say "I know, tobacco is my besetting sin, I'm trying really hard to quit, and I would urge everyone else not to start" would be another matter.) One can quarrel with her exegesis, of course,  but I'm guessing that most gay theists wouldn't want to go to that kind of church in the first place, although Anne says they'd be made perfectly welcome if they did. 

Melanie Phillips is in a completely different class. The common or garden bigot makes a lot of noise, but is completely ignored by everyone who doesn't already share their prejudices. You can't argue someone into having a gut feeling. Or out of it. They don't matter. The Daily Mail is systematically using sleight of hand to trick people into believing in things which don't make sense. And people pay attention to it. Including powerful people. It matters.

 

Your average white, middle class Brit is not particularly homophobic. He doesn't mind what people get up to behind closed doors, although he'd probably just as soon the doors stayed closed. Phillips is not trying to infect these readers with a Fred Phelps style revulsion against homosexuals. She's too clever for that. She's not even presenting an argument that homosexuality is immoral or contrary to holy scripture or fattening. (Your average white middle class Brit thinks that religion is another thing that you should really only do behind closed doors.) She's trying to smuggle into their mind a theory that "gay" is out to get them.

And she's doing this, I submit, not because she is herself homophobic, but as a tactic in a wider political game. 

The article was published on January 24th. On January 23rd, the Daily Mail had run two substantially fictitious anti-gay stories: Governments £30 million to find out if hovercrafts discriminate against gays and Gay messages built into maths lessons for children as young as FOUR  Both of these stories have been substantially debunked elsewhere on the web. There was no big investigation into homosexual hovercrafts: there was a footnote about gay equality in the section on sea transport in a general report on the implementation of the governments equality laws. (It said there were no particular issues to worry about.) There is no secret plot to insert homosexuals into maths books: a gay/lesbian group has put some free lesson plans on the web which teachers could download and use during gay/lesbian awareness week, if they want to.

It's quite common for junior schools to use thematic integrated study programmes. The class might spend two weeks learning about Ships, which would include learning about the Spanish Armada in history, reading sea adventures in English, and making model boats in art.  Obviously if you look at  it objectively, this is a bad way to teach children. The only objectively good way to educate children is "Like what it was when I was at school". (Apart from gym teachers. First thing we do is hang all the gym teachers.) But what we're talking about here is clearly "ways in which you might incorporate maths lessons into  your Gay People In History week". That's not the same as smuggling sex education into general maths books.

This is how the Daily Mail works. It makes shit up and puts it on the cover as if it was news. The next day, its columnists write opinion pieces, which repeat the same points made in the original, fictitious, articles. Members of the public then write outraged "Won't someone think of the children" letters based on the columns. With any luck, one of the qualities takes the story up. And before long, you have a huge pseudo-fact and anyone who says "But no-one has banned Christmas" sounds like a whinging pedant or a denialist.

All newspapers print opinion as well as news. All newspapers print chit chat about actresses and footballers alongside the important bit about how this years manglewurzle crop is up 1% on last years manglewurzle crop due to a new type of fertilizer devised by local man Mr Smith, 45, pictured left. Polly Toynbee and Germain Greer are not always notably less unhinged than Melanie Phillips. But "comment is free but the facts are sacred" remains a pretty good rule. In the Guardian, despite its many sins, you can usually still tell one from the other.

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No.