so andrew why have you decided that you'd rather listen to folksingers than politicians or newspaper pundits or clergymen

this is why

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7VXxZgpK3U

vi

The example that keeps cropping up, and which proves that gay now runs the country and everyone else is an oppressed minority is the case of an hotel, run by a Christian family, who allegedly refused to let a homosexual couple rent a room.

The story strikes me as rather more nuanced than either side is admitting. As I read the story, no-one was turned away for being gay: and neither have the Secret Elders of Frankfurt launched an attack on the hotel owners for being Christians.

What seems to have happened is that the hotel had a policy of only renting double rooms to married couples (and had, in fact, frequently required unmarried straight couples to sleep in separate rooms). Now, this might very well be silly and priggish. We might very well ask why the hotel wasn't equally strict about kicking out guests who didn't go to church on Sunday or honour their parents; or people who take the Lord's name in vain and go around coveting other people's oxes. Or, why God was okay with people committing fornication in single beds. Or what they did to stop unmarried straight couples signing in as "Mr and Mrs Smith" in the time honoured fashion.

But the rule that said "We only rent double rooms to married couples" wasn't illegal per se. Daft, maybe, but there's no law against being daft.

The problem arose because the representatives of the Secret Gay Conspiracy were Civil Partners. They regarded themselves as married under the law. Mr and Mrs God did not. And therein lies the problem. Mr and Mrs God were perfectly free to turn away unmarried couples. What they were not free to do was to pick and choose which forms of marriage they regarded as valid. They would not have been free to say that Mr and Mrs Smith were not married because they got married in front of a registrar, as opposed to a priest; or to say that Catholic weddings didn't count.

So everything turned on whether "civil partnership" is legally the same thing as marriage.

Common sense suggests to me that it is not: the clue would seem to be that one is called "civil partnership" and the other is called "marriage"; that registry offices hold "civil partnership ceremonies", not weddings, and that The Gay Lobby is still lobbying for the right to marry. However, after due consideration, M'Learned Friends decided that civil partnerships and marriages were the same thing.

This strikes me as a rather subtle point of both morality and legality. It's not illegal for someone to say that it's immoral for people who are not legally married to have sex; but it is, apparently, illegal for someone to say that an institution which is not legally the same as marriage is not morally the same as marriage.

It makes my head spin, rather.

The question about whether gay people should be allowed to get married in the eyes of the law is a good one. Getting individual judges to decide whether civil partnerships are or are not marriage on a case by case basis may not be the best way of answering it. But it's a rather subtle question and it has been argued about right up the legal system to the highest court in the land: and a judge (himself an Anglican) has given a considered judgement, which Mr and Mrs God have the right to appeal against. (They may even have the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)

It is hard to see how that equates to dragging too poor innocent Christians before an Un Gay Activities Panel. 

Dear Mel, 

I don't want you to die. But I do want you to slip over on a banana skin, fall down, hurt your bottom really, really badly, and spend the rest of the day feeling very stupid.

Or be arrested for hate crimes and held over night in one of those nice "holiday camps", with only a smelly bucket and two big, butch lesbians for company.

Heterosexual love and kisses

Andy

v

American readers should probably be reminded at this point that the Daily Mail isn't a mere supermarket tabloid. It's the second best selling newspaper in the UK. It has influence: even, astonishingly, on what used to be called the left-wing of British politics. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and David Blunkett read and cultivated the Daily Mail. They feared it. Melanie Phillips appears on the radio and the tellybox -- on respectable programme like Question Time and Any Questions and the Moral Maze: not, like Nicky Griffin, as part of a freak show, with demonstrators screaming outside and the chairman not allowing anyone to get a word in edgeways -- step right up folks, and see the amazing performing fascist -- but as a normal, non-controversial talk-show pundit. And every word she writes – and very nearly every word that appears in the Daily Mel – is dedicated to a proposition. That the white, male, Church of England, middle class heterosexual is an oppressed and endangered minority.

This is a nasty, nasty, nasty tendency in political discourse, and it needs to be knocked on the head before someone gets hurt. Everybody is at it. I don't know whether it's a post-Christian thing – the Archbishop of Canterbury has long since ceased to preach Christ Crucified, but something in the culture still tells us to fetishize victimhood. Or if its a hangover from the collective trauma of the holocaust. Or if it's just like one of those abusive relationships where you deliberately provoke your partner into hitting you because you enjoy the make-up sex. ("I wish someone would oppress me – then everyone would have to be nice to me, like the Jews.")

But if you want to get a political movement going, you have to start out by pretending that you are victims. That's why the Dawk makes the risible claim that Chaps Who Think Like Me are worse off than Homosexuals were in 1950s America. (Homosexuals: Beaten up; murdered; barred from adopting children; sent to jail; subjected to chemical castration; lynched. Atheists: Not allowed to appear on Thought For The Day.) That's why the appalling Sarah Palin quite deliberately and consciously applied the word "blood libel" to herself. We, white conservatives, are in a position directly analogous to the Jews of Medieval Europe. And while it's actually a very good and clever song, Yoko used the same dubious tactic many years ago when she made John say that  woman was the nigger of the world.

I am, as a matter of fact, still very angry that the BBC cancelled my favourite radio show. I do, as a matter of fact, think it absurd that at a time when Bellowhead and Show of Hands can sell out big venues overnight, the BBC can only muster one hour -- one hour -- of folk music per week. And won't play folk on mainstream shows. I can join in as loudly as anyone else when Steve Knightley protests about Kim Howells and the 2003 licensing act. But when people on the Facebook "Save Folkwaves" group start to use expressions like "cultural cleansing" and wondering if there is a systematic attack on the culture of us, the English, I politely take my finger out of my ear and leave.

Unlike certain Guardian columnists, I don't think that religion should be banished from public discourse. I don't think that members of the House of Commons should be forbidden from referring to their beliefs. I don't understand how you can talk about abortion or the death penalty or telling lies about weapons of mass destruction without appealing to your core, bottom level beliefs, and for many people, those core beliefs are religious. I don't even have too much of a problem with religious schools (including schools for religions I don't particularly like) although I'm prepared to debate that. But it is perfectly obvious that my own religion, protestant Christianity, has massively disproportionate influence in this country, compared to the number of actual churchgoers. And that it's likely to carry on having massively disproportionate influence even as the formal and legal advantages given to Christians are (inevitably and rightly) reduced. People are going to carry on paying attention to Bishops long after we kick them out of the House of Lords. Of course it annoys me when some half-wit unfunny comedian does a sneery look-how-clever-I-am sketch about Jesus. But "ooo poor ickle sunday school boy now I'm an oppressed minority. like the Jews"   Do me a favour, Carey. You should be ashamed of yourself. 

But that's what the Daily Mel implies every time it uses terms like McCarthyite . They, the boys who have boyfriends and the girls who have girlfriends, are or soon will be, in a position of power analogous to that of white, conservative, anti-communists in 1950s America. We, the boys who have girlfriends, and the girls who have boyfriends, are in the position of the minority of communists and communist sympathisers and alleged communist sympathisers in 1950s America.

And what do oppressed minorities always do? What is the only thing an oppressed minority can do in the face of Big Brother?

When anyone else tries to make a group of people feel like victims, and tries to stir them up and make them cross and provoke them into doing something they might regret in the morning, he Daily Mail has a word for it. They call it "radicalisation".

I call it, to use the Daily Mail's favourite word, evil.

Being seen in posession of a copy of the Daily Mail should  now be  unacceptable in decent society, in the same way that no-one civilized would admit to being a member of the National Front or the BNP.