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