Orangemen are not the only fruits

March 24, 2010 at 1:33 am (Homophobia, Norn Iron, Tories, Unionism)

See this punter? His name is Adrian Watson, and he’s the mayor of Antrim. Why are we interested in him? Allow me to recap.

So, the Unionist Party has formed an electoral bloc with the British Tories, which goes under the catchy name of the Ulster Conservative and Unionist New Force. From “Dave” Cameron’s point of view, the UCUNF arrangement provides him with eighteen candidates in the north at a cut price, and the possibility of one or two Unionist MPs pledged to support him in a hung parliament; from Reg Empey’s point of view, it provides him with a Big Idea (non-sectarian pan-UK civic unionism) and a little Ashcroft money. Since the Big Idea seems mostly to be of interest to four or five Toryboy bloggers, one presumes Reggie is more interested in the bottom line.

There are also minuses on both sides. From Cameron’s point of view, he’s now stuck with the Unionist Party, which as any Tory grandee could tell him is more trouble than it’s worth. From Reggie’s point of view, it means having to give a leg up to the 250 or so Ulster Tories and whatever dingbat candidates they came up with. It also meant a commitment to run in all eighteen constituencies, which ruled out arrangements with the DUP to run pan-Prod candidates in Fermanagh/South Tyrone and South Belfast. (This didn’t, however, stop them playing footsie with the DUP over electoral pacts, and managing as a result to mislay the two Catholics who had been induced to become Tory candidates.) Moreover, there’s been the small matter of the sole Ulster Unionist MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon, who unfortunately for Reggie is a Labour supporter and adamantly refused to stand under the Tory banner.

However, despite such small hiccups, the laborious UCUNF candidate selection process has proceeded. A couple of weeks back, the first nine were announced, including TV’s Mike Nesbitt, rugby legend Trevor Ringland, Daphne Trimble and Norn Iron’s top Freddie Mercury impersonator Flash Harry. We were then told the other nine would soon be forthcoming, and yea, we have eight of them. Thereby hangs a tale, but first, who are the eight?

Firstly, in the two seats that have been the subject of megaphone diplomacy with the DUP, Tom Elliott is nominated in Fermanagh and the scarily energetic Paula Bradshaw in South Belfast. That means no pact with the DUP, and both parties can continue tearing lumps out of each other on the subject of who’s most in favour of unionist unity.

Secondly, there are only two Tories, and I’m not sure one of them counts. The completely unknown Irwin Armstrong is a candidate in North Antrim, but that will be fought out between Ian Óg Paisley and Jim Allister, with Irwin a mere supporting attraction. The other, entering a very crowded field in North Down, is local councillor Ian Parsley.

Come on, you remember Ian Parsley. He was a candidate in last year’s Euro-election. For, er, the Alliance Party, who were evidently pitching for the votes of dyslexic DUP supporters who thought Ian Paisley was on the ballot. He did reasonably well. Then a couple of weeks later he defected to the Tories. This was entirely a matter of principle, and had nothing at all to do with him getting a job at Iain Duncan Donuts’ Centre for Social Justice. And now he’s standing in North Down for UCUNF – to be more precise, he’s standing in front of stuff. Indeed, there has been a little joshing at Westminster about young Mr Parsley.

And what of the vacancy? That would be South Antrim, which is a DUP marginal; the sitting MP, Rev Willie McCrea, is not too popular in the area (basically because you can’t dig him out of Magherafelt and get him to visit South Antrim) and a TUV candidacy could hand the seat to UCUNF. So why no candidate? Perhaps this might explain:

Adrian Watson, the mayor of Antrim, has been chosen by his constituency association as its candidate for the UUP in South Antrim this May. He caused outrage within the gay community in Northern Ireland after saying he would not allow gay and lesbian couples to stay in his family-run bed and breakfast.

In 2006 the UUP councillor told a local radio station: “This is a bed and breakfast in a family home with three young children. Common sense has to prevail. There is no difficulty with members of the gay community phoning up and booking a room. The difficulty would arise because of the logistics of the bed and breakfast – if it was a same-sex couple – and because my wife has strong Christian views she felt it was difficult to facilitate that.

“It is difficult because my 14-year-old daughter helps out immensely. And the obvious question: ‘Why are two men, or why are two women, in a double room?’”

Watson has also been accused of racism towards Ireland’s Traveller community. A year before his remarks about gay couples, he described Travellers at a local halting point in the Antrim area as “scumbags” and “scum of the earth”.

Now, this is very much out of step with “Dave” Cameron’s resprayed Tories, who have been ferociously courting the pink vote and trumpeting their gay candidates. (Nobody seems to have objected too strongly to Mr Watson’s views on Travellers.) And so, the rumour has it, Tory HQ has put the kibosh on Watson, as someone who might be a bit of an embarrassment on the campaign trail. Furthermore, national treasure Peter Tatchell has spoken out, and you really don’t want Peter dogging your footsteps during an election. Best to neutralise the Tatch by getting rid of the candidate.

But the Lord loves a trier, and Mr Watson is not giving up. He’s not the first local politician to say something incautious on Stephen Nolan, and learning from the example of Iris Robinson, he has rushed to say that his original argument was purely hypothetical, and anyway, it was his wife who had the problem:

“I have a completely live-and-let-live attitude to gays and I know that many gay people support our party [I am not sure that Steven King and Jeff Dudgeon count as “many”, but we'll let that go] which has a far more tolerant view than the DUP, which has been tainted with homophobia through the interventions of the First Minister’s wife, the then MP and MLA, Iris Robinson.

“I would never discriminate against gay people and, if elected as the MP for South Antrim, I can honestly say that I would work for my gay constituents as energetically as for any other constituent. The gay community has absolutely nothing to fear from me.”

Well, perhaps. As a B&B owner, Mr Watson might also be aware that under New Labour’s Sexual Orientation Regulations, that sort of thing can get you into trouble. Indeed, from now on, holding an opinion deemed unfashionable by Mr Ben Summerskill could get you into quite serious legal difficulties. I suppose, if you wanted to mount an entirely grudging and half-hearted defence of Mr Watson, he’s probably more progressive on such matters than Willie McCrea.

But here’s an interesting point. Over recent months, the Tories have been taking a little heat about their exotic allies in the European Parliament – Czech climate change deniers, Belgian flat-taxers, and those wacky Latvian SS veterans. One of the lightning rods has been one Michał Kamiński, a Polish MEP who – weirdly enough – looks like Johann Hari’s evil twin, and who belongs to the Law and Justice Party. There has been a lot of argument about exactly what Mr Kamiński may or may not have said about the Jews at various points in his past; what’s not seriously disputed is that Law and Justice takes a line on Teh Gayz that would not be wildly out of place in the north.

Perhaps Mr Cameron could explain why what’s unacceptable in Antrim is perfectly all right in Warsaw. But don’t hold your breath.

17 Comments

Here’s something you won’t read on Shiraz Socialist

February 9, 2010 at 10:34 pm (Homophobia, Judaica)

It seems it’s not only Pat Robertson who has some weird ideas about the Haitian earthquake:

Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America issued the following statement:

“When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homosexualist agenda forcing the highlighting of homosexuals and homosexuality on an unwilling military. This is the equivalent of the spiritual rape of our military to satisfy the most extreme and selfish cadre of President Obama’s kooky coalition.
We agree with Eileen Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that this will hurt the cohesiveness of the military, cause many to leave the army, and dramatically lower the number of recruits, perhaps leading to the reinstatement of a compulsory draft.

“Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl.

“We plead with saner heads in Congress and the Pentagon to stop sodomization of our military and our society. Enough is enough.”

Now, imagine the shitstorm if this had been a Muslim cleric…

18 Comments

Damno ergo sum

June 6, 2009 at 10:46 pm (Catholicism, Europe, Greens, Homophobia, Philosophy, Poland)

Descartes

While we’re waiting for the Euro-election results – and scuttlebutt is looking extraordinarily bad for the DUP – I’d like to ponder on something that Green MEP Caroline Lucas was saying on Newsnight the other night. This was apropos of Rankin’ Dave Cameron’s plan to take Tory MEPs out of the European Peoples Party and form a new Strasbourg bloc of rightwing Eurosceptic parties, mostly of the Eastern European persuasion. This is something that Ian Traynor has been banging on about in the Grauniad for weeks, largely recycling talking points from New Labour and the Party of European Socialists. To be scrupulously fair to Cameron, he isn’t proposing an alliance with the real rightwing exotica in the European Parliament, such as the League of Polish Families, the Greater Romania Party or Alessandra Mussolini’s Azione Sociale. It’s just that, by the hysterical tenor of Traynor’s articles, you’d assume he was.

Now, I like Caroline Lucas a lot more than I like Ian Traynor, and I wish she was one of my MEPs rather than the shower we have over here, but she was talking very much along the same lines. What was interesting to me was her line of argument against Cameron’s proposed partners. Given Václav Klaus’ eccentric views on climate change, it’s unsurprising that the Czech Civic Democrats are ideologically treif for a Green. The thing that startled me a little was Caroline lighting into the Polish Law and Justice Party, the vehicle of the Kaczyński brothers, which has a stringent moral conservatism as a key part of its platform. “Some of these people,” thundered Caroline, “actually believe that homosexuality is a sin!”

If I was being unkind, I might linger a little on the fact that Caroline is running for parliament in the gay ghetto of Brighton. I don’t in fact think she’s being opportunistic, I just think she’s being slightly disingenuous. She can’t really be surprised that rightwing Polish Catholics aren’t as gay-friendly as leftwing British Greens, nor do I think she seriously is. What she was saying was that these people’s opinions were so outrageously beyond the pale that no decent person should consider even forming a tactical alliance with them.

There is possibly an aspect here of being a little inured to this kind of thing – he who listens to phone-ins on Radio Ulster will be exposed to a very different spectrum of views than she who listens to phone-ins on Five Live. After all, we get to hear the weird and wonderful thoughts of Iris Robinson and Sammy Wilson on a regular basis – lots of us even vote for them. On the other hand, I’m sympathetic to what Madam Miaow was saying on the dog ‘n’ bone this morning, that it’s when we lose the capacity to be shocked that we should be worried. Mind you, it’s something that has struck me for some considerable period of time, that a lot of well-meaning people, when faced with outright reaction, simply go haywire. It’s where you find this assumption that views falling outwith modern metropolitan cultural mores are not opinions you can disagree with, but psychopathologies to be anathematised. Britain isn’t quite as advanced as Canada, where those holding unfashionable opinions can be hauled in front of human rights tribunals and told to stop expressing those opinions in public, but it’s getting there.

So anyway, in my whimsical fashion, I was watching this segment on Newsnight and started thinking that this was the sort of thing that would be tailor-made for those jokey pieces they sometimes like to do in Philosophy Now, wondering what great thinkers of the past would make of contemporary problems. Actually, you could have a Newsnight Review-style round table, perhaps featuring Nietzsche, Locke, Descartes and the late Saint Augustine.

Nietzsche would, I think, have found the whole argument rather funny. He understood as well as anyone that religion is an integral system, and once you start removing planks then the whole edifice is under threat. You will notice, for instance, that Reform Judaism tends to suffer quite a high attrition rate, while the Haredi sects experience it hardly at all; in irreligious Britain, the Catholics and Pentecostalists are thriving, while the dear old C of E is virtually dying on its arse. That’s because there’s an incredibly strong imperative in religion to hold onto traditional values. The systematic aspect of this is quite important. For example, the Catholic stance on homosexuality is not some arbitrary and irrational piece of prejudice – if anything, it’s too rational, as Catholic teaching on sexual morality, deriving from an Aristotelian concept of natural law, is a one-size-fits-all doctrine that simply doesn’t make room for the gays. That’s why Pope Benny might, if you ask him the right question, talk about a compassionate approach to all of God’s creatures, but he’s not going to rewrite the rule book in accordance with the demands of OutRage! and Channel 4 News.

Nietzsche grasped this brilliantly, as an essential part of his “Death of God” thesis. His view was that, once you killed off the basis of religion, then you also destroyed the basis of traditional morality, and therefore the Umwertung aller Werte – the revaluation of all values – came into play as, if you had the courage of your convictions, you had to consciously rewrite values from the bottom up. He had particular fun attacking the freethinkers who, having disposed of Christian belief, wanted to hang onto those bits of Christian morality they found congenial, while ditching the bits they didn’t like. Even if you don’t like to use the word “sin”, you certainly believe in right and wrong. But without a firm ethical basis, the danger is that your morality is simply based on what is popular at any particular point in time.

So let us now turn to Augustine. His political theology is of interest in terms of the debate around separating church and state, especially regarding the distinction he drew between sin and crime, and why it wasn’t the business of the state to outlaw sin. In Augustine’s view, the state could legislate to prevent citizens from harming each other, but it couldn’t legislate to make citizens virtuous – that was the job of religion. The distinction is important when we come to the question of tolerance. You see, if one approves of something, or is indifferent to it, then tolerance doesn’t come into the equation. I don’t “tolerate” homosexuality because I don’t have a moral problem with it. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to believe that homosexual acts should be legal, and that gays shouldn’t be persecuted by the state, while simultaneously holding that homosexuality is sinful. I would suggest that this is in fact the majority viewpoint in the north of Ireland. You may similarly get people to agree that abortion should be legalised here as a social necessity, but it would be a much tougher ask to get people to stop disapproving of abortion – even the Alliance for Choice fight shy of that one.

While we’re on the subject of toleration, let’s turn to Locke, who still informs a lot of left-liberal thinking on cultural matters. I remind you that Locke’s call for religious toleration was restricted to the Non-Conformist sects; he explicitly opposed toleration for the Catholic Church, on the grounds that Catholicism was, well, intolerant. If you hear in this an echo of Geert Wilders and his call to protect Dutch tolerance by not tolerating brown people with funny religions, you aren’t far wrong. And you may also detect an affinity with the Decent Left. It has to be understood here, in the context of British constitutional history, that for over 300 years, from Henry VIII until about the 1850s, the central issue in English politics was the Catholic problem. I suggest that the Muslim problem currently exercising the intelligentsia is basically the Catholic problem by other means.

Finally, let’s have a brief pitstop with Descartes. Old René, following on from the Galileo affair, was insistent on the need to start from first principles and, if first principles are in conflict with standing public opinion, then so much the worse for standing public opinion. This works quite well for science, but, notwithstanding the pretensions of scientific socialism, I’ve never really believed that you can have a Cartesian approach to politics.

I believe this because of the difficulty in establishing unarguable first principles in politics. What you usually end up with is conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. Or one thinks of Francis Wheen’s Mumbo-Jumbo, where rationalism is identified with propositions Francis agrees with (though how his strident scientism is compatible with Private Eye‘s stance on MMR is still a mystery), while propositions he disagrees with are dismissed as mumbo-jumbo. Or one can get into the far left where the various shibbolethim of the various groups – “consistent democracy” for the AWL, “centrism” for Workers Power, “popular frontism” for the Weekly Worker, and whatever you’re having yourself – are elevated into first principles that can form a golden key to explaining the world and pointing a uniquely correct way forward.

My point here is that politics is, above all else, a dialogue. One may have one’s ethical or moral or ideological compass, although much of the political class appears to have none except the gaining and holding of office. But it’s vital to hang onto the necessity of dialogue. We don’t gain much from stating a tangled bunch of preconceptions as first principles and then acting as if those who hold dissenting positions are somehow mad or bad.

Yet, for all that, Caroline Lucas has some basic principles. So too have the mad Polish Catholics, although they aren’t the same ones. If Lord Snooty has any, I’ve yet to notice.

And that’s quite a ramble from where we started. Now, I think it’s time for a nice cup of tea, a chocolate gravy ring and some Battlestar Galactica.

11 Comments

Jocko Homo sighted in North Antrim

August 6, 2008 at 12:02 pm (Creationism, Homophobia, Norn Iron, Paisleyism)

You may have noticed that good old Prof Dawkins is popping up again on the TV, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species. And a fine populariser of science he is too, although I feel he does tend to go for the straw men rather a lot when he strays into the realms of theology.

But then again, over here in Norn Iron, where I’m amazed we haven’t yet had a monkey trial, we do rather give him plenty of ammunition. The newly appointed chair of the Stormont education committee, Mervyn Storey (DUP, North Antrim) popped up in today’s News Letter, demanding the teaching of creationism in science classes:

Creationism is not for the RE class because I believe that it can stand scientific scrutiny and that is a debate which I am quite happy to encourage and be part of.

The issue for the current Education Minister [Caitriona Ruane] is that she tells us she’s all for equality – surely if that is the case, you can’t have one set of interpretations being taught at the expense of others.

So, if there are those from the scientific community [who believe in creationism] who can give a view about how the world came into existence then it can’t be set aside. You can’t have one very narrow theory.

This is not about removing anything from the classroom – although that would probably be the ideal for me – but this is about us having equality of access to other views as to how the world came into existence and that I think is a very, very important issue for many parents in Northern Ireland.

And I am delighted that Prof Dawkins bothered to come back and reply:

I have no objection to all kinds of daft ideas being taught in comparative religion classes but in science what we should teach is what there is evidence for and children should be encouraged to examine evidence…

If this politician [Mr Storey] wants to import creationism into science classes, I’m wondering which kind of creationism – Hindu creationism, Jewish creationism, Babylonian creationism, Aztec creationism?

My guess is that it is probably Genesis creationism and there’s absolutely no reason for it.

And the good professor goes on:

We live in a democracy and anyone can get elected…

I think it’s sad that people with ridiculous views do get elected because it suggests that the electorate is not sufficiently well-educated to see through them.

I would hope that a flat-earther would not be elected and would not be serving as an important official in educational circles – exactly the same would be true of at least a young earth creationist.

Not, perhaps, a line that would go down well with the God-fearing folk of North Antrim, but at least Norn Iron’s small community of scientific rationalists will have a nice warm feeling today.

Hat tip: Slugger.

Rud eile: the gay debate rumbles on, with a new row over Rev McIlveen and his congregation placing an anti-gay ad in the News Letter. Some things never change, do they?

1 Comment

A grand day out

August 5, 2008 at 3:41 pm (Homophobia, Norn Iron)

Just a few brief reflections on last Saturday’s Gay Pride march in Belfast. It was a good deal bigger than in previous years – the 7000 figure quoted seemed a bit steep, but it was definitely in the thousands. All the recent media furore must have helped. Nice to see some marchers getting into the spirit of things by dressing up as Iris Robinson.

Apart from being rather large, the composition was a lot more working-class than you’d be used to. One expects the luvvies, but plenty of ordinary punters turning up to show their support, many of whom must not be gay themselves. This is all to the good. And lots of political banners – and, really, an awful lot of politicians, from every party bar the DUP. The nationalists might have been expected, but the intrepid Basil McCrea of the Official Unionists provoked a double-take. I also noticed a fair presence from Amnesty International, who weren’t much in evidence when they might have been useful here, but since the Troubles finished seem to have extended their mandate big time.

There was the usual picket of Free Presbyterians waving bibles and shouting about Sodom and Gomorrah, but they were relatively few in number and they don’t disrupt things the way they used to. Only two incidents worth mentioning arising from that. First was a lone fundamentalist rushing the parade, apparently with the intent of attacking a float featuring a papière-maché head of Iris Robinson. And one gay decided to moon the fundies. This last has led to the predictable outbreak of synthetic anger in the News Letter, which has been holding forth about Christians being subjected to abuse.

In general, though, quite a lively party atmosphere. The organisers seem to be going for the Mardi Gras style. And after years of tramping through damp streets in small numbers to the heckling of hellfire preachers, I suppose you can’t blame the gays for trying to have some fun for a change.

9 Comments

Man in powdered wig and lipstick may have been slightly bendy, claims Tatchell

July 28, 2008 at 4:23 pm (Homophobia, Norn Iron, Paisleyism)

Is Peter Tatchell deliberately trying to wind up Iris Robinson? I ask merely for information.

From today’s Telegraph:

A leading gay rights activist has raised the temperature in the row over homosexuality by claiming there was evidence King Billy had male lovers.

Peter Tatchell highlighted the controversial allegation as evidence of hypocrisy over homosexuality in Northern Ireland, but he was condemned by unionists for setting out to deliberately cause offence.

The campaigner will tonight deliver the Amnesty International Pride Lecture in Belfast…

King Billy was married, but some academics have pointed to his promotion of young men to high office as evidence of bisexuality.

A DUP spokesman dismissed the allegation.

“This is the kind of deliberately offensive and provocative comment and shock tactics that he has used in the past,” he said.

Bearing in mind that our First Lady seems to be afflicted by Tourette’s whenever anyone mentions homosexuality, if Peter keeps this up she’ll be keeling over with a stroke.

And are no loyalist icons sacred any more? Next he’ll be saying King Billy didn’t have a white horse.

16 Comments

And, speaking of Iris Robinson, here’s another daft woman sticking her oar in

July 24, 2008 at 4:01 pm (Homophobia, Journalism, Norn Iron, Paisleyism)

Of course, we can’t really be surprised by Iris Robinson’s outbursts, at least not if we’re familiar with the realities of the North. If you listen to Talk Back on a regular basis, you’ll be well aware that most callers are fiercely sectarian, and indeed most are homophobic if the issue arises. Day in and day out, you get comments on Radio Ulster that you’d never get away with broadcasting on, say, LBC.

And we’ve been here before in political terms. Last year, Ian Paisley Jr gave an interview to Hot Press wherein he claimed to be “repulsed” by gays. Immediately the DUP supporters swung into action, defending his right to free speech and to express his personal religious beliefs. But his personal religious beliefs were neither here nor there. The point was that, at the time, Baby Doc was a junior minister with responsibility for equality issues – including gay rights.

And so it is with Iris. Her attitude to homosexuality could be overlooked if it was just a matter of her personal religious beliefs. It’s another matter for the chair of the Assembly health committee to declare that homosexuality is a psychiatric disorder that can be cured with just a little Jesus-centred therapy. Likewise, her remarks in the abortion debate caused controversy not because she opposes legalising abortion – the majority of the public would support her in that – but because she said the job of the government was to uphold God’s law. Iran has a religious government. Good for them. I don’t particularly want to live under a religious government.

But what do we have here? We have the inimitable Gail Walker coming out batting for Iris. Unfortunately, Gail is put in an awkward position vis-à-vis the gays, as only a week ago she was bigging up UTV’s Julian Simmons for coming out. So instead Gail chooses the safer ground of abortion. But she doesn’t even really argue about abortion. This is just the jumping-off point for a rant about Gail’s great bête noire, the leftwing media:

Protestant and Catholic, urban or rural, our country is conservative. No amount of phone-ins are going to ‘correct’ that truism and make us all bohemians, run off with Russian girlfriends, advocate gay bishops or think polygamy is a good thing for society.

There is a serious problem in Northern Ireland, yes. But it isn’t what people believe that’s the problem.

The problem is that our media still haven’t got to grips with the new dispensation by which we are governed.

Over the years, the media got into the habit during the ‘Troubles’ of seeking out the minority view — that meant finding someone who didn’t represent any of the main political viewpoints. Somehow that became the sensible view.

Hence people who increasingly represented nobody at all, only themselves, gained access to the media almost by rote. ‘Liberal’ people. The pro-abortion lobby. The gay rights lobby. Conservative party candidates. Those advocating so-called ‘integrated’ education. Or, a favourite of the media, trades union activists who could always be counted on to fly in the teeth of their membership by raising Iraqi flags in protest at the visit of a US president. That type of thing.

These causes — which have their own merits — unfortunately became, for the media, something of a ‘middle ground’. They were causes the media deemed to be ‘good’ and ‘progressive’ and ‘nice’ and it never really mattered that practically the only people who espoused them were the spokespeople themselves.

This take on the Norn Iron media is so grotesque that, not for the first time, I’m left wondering whether Gail lives in an alternate universe. The big problem with the local media during the Troubles was that, with very few exceptions, they were content to relay whatever they were spoonfed from the Northern Ireland Office media centre.

Ireland is united on abortion, you see. And on Euroscepticism. In fact, it is a united Ireland on just about every single social and moral issue you care to name.

The freaks now are those who take opposing views.

They are easy to find, if you wish to speak to them. They are the bottom of every single poll in every single constituency in every single ward in Northern Ireland.

And in a few newsrooms across the province.

Because Gail is rarely specific when referring to “liberals” or “lefties”, it’s really quite difficult to know what she means. What are these far-left media outlets? Who are these unrepresentative people? Is Gail saying that, in a society where violent gay-bashing is all too common, gay activists shouldn’t get their thirty seconds on the evening news? Is she simply trotting out her own prejudices, which she imagines to be the popular will, and demanding the news reflect her priorities? A strange argument for a journalist to make.

And, by the way, the media outlet that’s made the most out of Iris Robinson’s outbursts has not been the Socialist Worker, or even BBCNI, but a venerable old unionist newspaper called the Belfast Telegraph. Gail may have heard of it – it’s where her column appears, and also where she’s employed as features editor.

I don’t know, maybe Gail ought to stick to what she’s good at. Like, for instance, slagging off fourteen-year-old girls.

4 Comments

Is there no stopping this woman?

July 21, 2008 at 2:15 pm (Homophobia, Norn Iron, Paisleyism)

Actually, it appears even Iris realises there are limits. From today’s Telegraph:

Iris Robinson today made an apparent U-turn over her controversial comments that homosexuality is “viler” than child sex abuse.

The First Minister’s wife told the House of Commons, during a debate on the assessment and management of sex offenders, that “there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children”.

When contacted by the Belfast Telegraph Mrs Robinson said that homosexuality was “comparable” to child abuse and that she feels “totally repulsed by both.”

“I cannot think of anything more sickening than a child being abused. It is comparable to the act of homosexuality. I think they are all comparable,” she said.

Later today however, she issued a fresh comment via the DUP press office stating: “I clearly intended to say that child abuse was worse even than homosexuality and sodomy … at no point have I set out to suggest homosexuality was worse than child sex abuse.”

Well, that’s all right then. I’m sure the gay community will be pleased to learn that Iris regards them as being not quite as bad as paedophiles.

12 Comments

Thought for the gay

July 16, 2008 at 2:24 pm (Anglicanism, Homophobia)

Hullo Brian, hullo Sue. You know, in a very real sense, sometimes I think the Anglican Communion is a bit like the Fourth International. I don’t mean in the theological sense, though I once heard Chris Bailey call Cliff Slaughter a mediaeval scholastic, which I thought was a bit hard on mediaeval scholastics. If St Thomas Aquinas could have travelled through time to a WRP dialectics class, one suspects his first instinct would have been to point and laugh.

No, I was thinking in terms of a disparate group of people who on the face of things don’t have a great deal in common, and are held together mostly by tradition and sentiment. A more exact parallel would be with the USec of the 1970s, a church divided into two hostile factions, barely on speaking terms with each other. In that case, things were complicated by the fact that the European sections had the majority but the Americans had the money. In the Anglicans’ case, the Africans have the numbers while, again, the Americans have the money.

Things have come to a head with the opening of the once-a-decade World Congress, sorry, the Lambeth Conference, a giant knees-up for the Communion’s bishops. And at the eye of the storm is Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who comes across in his TV appearances as a very nice, intelligent and witty man. Just the sort of bishop you’d like to have. Unfortunately, Bishop Robinson is openly gay, as opposed to the legions of closeted gays in the Anglican ministry, and the macho men of the Nigerian and Ugandan churches, who are locked in fierce competition with Muslim proselytisers, have taken exception.

In a vain effort to smooth things over, the Archbishop of Canterbury, affable John Peel lookalike Dr Rowan Williams, rather ostentatiously left Bishop Robinson off the invitation list for Lambeth, which puts Gene in the good company of Bishop Kunonga of Harare, a staunch supporter of Uncle Bob’s firm-but-fair regime in Zimbabwe. Alas, Rowan’s efforts were to no avail, as the Africans aren’t bothering to turn up anyway.

The other big issue, at least for the Brits, is the consecration of women bishops. This is really a rerun of the hoo-hah a lot of years ago about women priests, which actually managed to cause a minor schism in Ireland. That said, I haven’t heard tell of the Church of Ireland (Traditional Rite) for years, and fear they may have gone the way of the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist).

On the face of it, there really shouldn’t be an issue. If you’re willing to accept women as priests, there’s no obvious reason why they shouldn’t be bishops. But that would be to underestimate religious people’s ability to get upset over the strangest things. And also the Anglican knack for turning a relatively simple question into an enormously complicated fudge.

Last time around, I was tickled by the proposal for the brilliantly titled “flying bishops”, who would, it was foreseen, cater for those parishes unwilling to accept Dawn French as their vicar. Sad to say, the flying bishops never really got off the ground, as most people who cared strongly on this point upped sticks and defected to Rome. This time around, and sticking with the superhero motif, the C of E tops are mooting “superbishops” to attend to the recalcitrants. I suspect that the superbishops too will be, in the good old Yiddish phrase, nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn.

This is the background to last month’s GAFCON conference in Jerusalem, which has effectively seen the creation of an international opposition tendency, consisting of those traditionalists who object to swishy poofs, uppity women and the modern age in general. Prominent in their platform is an ambitious plan to set up a parallel section in North America, shadowing the liberal leadership there. So far, the Africans have been careful not to push things to an outright schism, perhaps being mindful that the Americans and Canadians bankroll many of their missionary and humanitarian enterprises. But one senses that Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria and his chums might just be painting themselves into a rhetorical corner.

Would that Joe Hansen were alive at this hour. He would have loved this.

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Another little vignette from our rainbow province

June 6, 2008 at 9:04 pm (Homophobia, Norn Iron, Paisleyism)

It really is amazing what gems you hear on Radio Ulster. From BBCNI:

A gay rights campaigner has rejected a Northern Ireland assembly member’s call for homosexuals to seek psychiatric counselling.

David McCartney from the Rainbow Project was responding to comments from Iris Robinson, who is the chair of the Stormont health committee.

Mrs Robinson said with help, gay people could be “turned around”.

Mr McCartney said there was “no body of evidence” to support this and asked to meet the MP.

Mrs Robinson made her comments on BBC Radio Ulster’s Nolan Show on Friday.

She said she would defend her right to express religious beliefs, while also condemning violence against the gay community.

“I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn away from what they are engaged in,” she said.

“I’m happy to put any homosexual in touch with this gentleman and I have met people who have turned around and become heterosexuals.”

It’s unfortunate for Iris that this follows hot on the heels of yet another horrific gay-bashing incident, this time in Newtownabbey. She has voiced the appropriate condemnation, but maybe not the best time to hold forth on the possibilities of “fixing” gay people. As for the efficacy of Christian teachings turning gays straight, the considerable number of closeted gays in the DUP raises a question mark over that.

Interesting to note that not only is Iris chair of the Stormont health committee, and the wife of our new prime minister, but she’s also a Westminster MP. That is to say, a member of one of the most gay-friendly parliaments in the world. Mind you, the DUP do tend to tone it down when they’re in the metropolis. It’s back here in Norn Iron that we get the uncut version.

More on this from Liam and WorldbyStorm and Stroppy.

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