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.

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.


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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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