As Proud as a Row of Pink Tents

As Proud as a Row of Pink Tents

For almost 15 years the homosexual community has been coming out to tell us all how proud they are to be gay. This has always been a source of bewilderment to me. Just what is there to be proud of with regards to sexuality? Anal sex with another man hardly ranks up there with finding a cure for AIDS as far as things to be proud of go. Winning an Olympic medal, getting a job promotion, achieving a university degree, raising decent children, are the sorts of things about which people might rightly feel proud. But, taking it up the arse? Any Bombay hooker can do that. And if, as increasingly seems to be the case, sexuality is a matter of nature rather than choice, there is as much sense in being proud of having ginger hair, green eyes, or curly pubes. As fun as Curly Pubes Pride day sounds there isn’t really much worth in it, except for the market it would create for the manufacturers of crotchless pants.

Despite the fact that I find this phenomenon so queer that I can’t bend my mind around it, there are those who think differently. It seems to be a great source of fun and meaning for many, and I’m willing to accept and respect that without further ado.

The Gay Pride Parade is due to take place on 6th August this year, but for the first time it is facing serious organised opposition. In previous years there was always some guy in a sandwich-board (“ye must be born again”) yelling “sodomy is sin” from the sidelines as the parade meandered its way through Belfast city centre. But the nature of the opposition has now changed. Two weeks ago I received an email from a group calling itself the Stop the Parade Coalition. This organisation is an attempt to get as many people as possible to contact the Parades Commission to complain about the parade with a view to having it banned on the grounds that it offends public decency and morality, and “promotes a sinful lifestyle.”

The gay community has not allowed the coalition to go unheckled. Unfortunately their response has not been tempered by reason or thoughtfulness. Instead they have adopted their typical tom-cat-with-a-firework-up-its-arse approach: “bigots MEORRR fanatics MEORRR MEORRR.”

It is quite regrettable that the most vocal critics of the Gay Pride Parade have been religious fundamentalists. This has created the impression that it is only such people who have any problem with the parade. Of course, this suits the gay community nicely, giving them a fantastic opportunity to characterise anyone who opposes them as closed-minded, backward, homophobic, ignorant bigots fuelled by religious zeal. If these types of people are saying something, then it must be wrong. This is brilliant ammunition and it has been fired off by every pro-gay commentator that I have read or listened to lately. The orthodox line is, “well, it’s only a handful of religious bigots who have problems with this.”

This is false. There is a great number of non-religious people who have issues with it, and, even more surprisingly, there is a high number of homosexuals themselves who have problems with the parade. If you take your eyes of the eccentric men in sandwich-boards for a few seconds you will see just how many other people who are uncomfortable with the parade or with certain elements of it. Last year I purposely went to watch the parade and listen to the comments of other observers. It was quite an eye-opening experience.

The first thing that I found rather repulsive about it was the sight of sweaty semi-naked men writhing to incredibly loud dance music. Before I’m charged with homophobia let me say that this point also holds for heterosexual men. Lets face it guys, us men look appalling when we’re dancing at the best of times. Every wedding party in the country testifies to this fact. Taking off our clothes and writhing in public doesn’t help us out much. As a few more floats went by I heard a woman getting rather irate: “My God there’s children up on that float.” Indeed there were children on that float. Now, I’m not suggesting that there is something sinister going on here. I’m just wondering why the gay community thought it would be a good idea to involve children in what is fundamentally a celebration of a certain form of sex. It would be ill-advised to involve children in an Oral Sex Pride parade for similar reasons. As a PR exercise it, rightly or wrongly, just makes you appear to the public like a bunch of paedophiles. Young children and sex should not be mixed. How to lose friends and alienate people, folks. On the next float we had a bunch of transvestites. Nothing wrong with that - Lily Savage is quite a hoot. But, who wants to watch a bunch of transvestites simulating sex? And even those who do enjoy doing so generally recognise that 2:30pm on a busy shopping day in a city centre is an entirely inappropriate time and place for it. Feeling rather ill now I averted my eyes from the parade and looked down the street, only to see a bunch of homosexual people who had been watching the parade groping each other and sticking their tongues down any available consenting throat. Now, I hate it when heterosexual couples do this, so to be fair I have to criticise the gay community for it to. I guess that makes me an equal opportunities critic. Not nice to look at. Lastly, some of the banners carried were both insulting and provocative - most of it aimed at religious people generally (“God save me from your followers” being amongst the nicest things they had to say). Now, I’m not against this at all but it’s a little hypocritical of the gay community to whinge like little bitches if someone so much as fails to give a hearty thumbs-up to their lifestyle and culture let alone aims a bit of criticism in their direction. If you give it, you must be prepared to take it. Surely gay men are well acquainted with this principle.

I’m sure any gay readers are seething right now, if they’ve even managed to get this far without the big vein in their head popping. But, I should point out that I have in the past argued for full gay rights - such as the right to marry - and abhor incidents of gay-bashing. Live and let live. What takes place between consenting adults isn’t any concern of mine. If you wish to engage in consensual homosexual activity then you are and should be free to do so. However, too often the gay community link failure to endorse their lifestyle with the closed-minded desire to outlaw it, and confuse homophobia with genuine criticism or mockery. Whilst I don’t consider homosexual behaviour to be immoral I certainly don’t find it tasteful, even when it’s expressed in milder forms as it is during the gay pride parade.

The gay community is its own worst enemy. I said above that there is a great number of homosexual people who do not like the gay pride parade. Often this is explained by the mainstream gay community as fear: fear of what might happen to be seen as openly gay. But, I have heard from several gay people that they don’t like the parade because of the image it paints of homosexuals. For instance, the gay men who take part in the parade simply behave in accordance with their stereotype: as camp as a row of pink tents, and a little sleazy. And, the gay community comes across at best as being obsessed with sex and at worst as insidious sexual deviants. And many of these dissenting gay people resent the fact that the in-your-face nature of the parade is putting off many people who might otherwise be sympathetic.

The gay community often complains about how it is stereotyped, mocked and reviled. But before they point their fingers at everyone else they would do well to engage in a little introspection and realise that their own behaviour and image is as much a cause of this mockery and revulsion as anything external to them.

Stephen Graham B.Th (Hons)

If You're Stupid and you Know it: Blame Iraq

If You’re Stupid and You Know it: Blame Iraq

I feel sorry for Iraq. It gets blamed for everything. There is a certain group of political commentators who like to link every misfortune to the war in Iraq. The London bombs: because of Iraq. Increased racial tensions: because of Iraq. Social unrest in impoverished areas? Blame Iraq. Burn your toast? Bloody Iraq! Finger go through the toilet paper when you were wiping your arse? Troops out!

Iraq has become an obsession. As soon as the bombs went off in London on 07/07 we were deafened by the clamour of anti-war explanations regarding the “root-cause” of the bombs. It was Blair’s fault. It was Iraq’s fault. That was an illegal and immoral war you know! The Socialist Workers Party were at it. George Galloway was at it. The Guardian was at it. The stuff was spreading like the AIDS virus in Africa. Few of these Leftist folks could find it in them to condemn the attacks in London without “we told you so,” or “well, no surprise really,” tagged on, along with a finger of blame pointing at someone other than the nut-cases who blew themselves - and around 50 innocent people - to shards. I wonder how they would respond to the family of a man killed while walking through a dodgy area: “Well, he had it coming really, didn’t he, going there? It’s his own fault for being so foolish.”

Apologists for murderers and wackos have always been with us. Of course, they will deny that they are apologists for murderers. In their own minds they are just honestly attempting to understand the things that are going on in the world around them. But, their comments are both smug and self-satisfied. “We were right, you were wrong.” And it should be pointed out that their seeking to dissipate the responsibility for mass murder has little to do with understanding. It is difficult to view the apologists as honestly seeking explanations for things going on around them when they are highly selective about what crimes and atrocities they apply their “root-cause” methodology to. They only ever use it when it suits their political ends. Being anti-war, it suits the political agenda of George Galloway to offer a root-cause explanation of the London bombs in terms of the war in Iraq. The Socialist Workers Party also gain political capital with a root-cause explanation in terms of the oppressed people around the world bullied by Western Imperialists, (the Socialist Workers preaching in Belfast on Saturday proclaimed “you’re naïve if you think the bombs in London were motivated by anything other than British and American imperialism”). They can easily direct blame towards their political opponents. What I want to know is why you never hear a “root-cause” explanation for certain other forms of thuggery. For example, lets say a bunch of BNP thugs beat up an African immigrant because of the government’s immigration policy. I very much doubt that the apologists would be out in such force to give us a sympathetic “root-cause” explanation of this violence. For the apologists there is little to gain here in terms of advancing their own cause or knocking their opponents.

And on their constant quest after the causes of terror they never quite manage to go beyond the “Blame Blair and Bush” mantra that has become rather tiresome. They never seem to catch on to the most basic “root-cause” of such atrocities. Why does George Galloway, who feels as strongly about Iraq as anyone else, not contemplate blowing himself up in the London underground? Why do millions of people in Britain who oppose our involvement in Iraq not engage in bombings of this kind? How come most people don’t murder others when they’re angry? Could it be something to do with the fanatical, fundamentalist belief and values system that infects the heads of those who engage in this sort of terror? Might it have something to do with the cultures that nurture this mindset or at best fail to check it? This system teaches hatred and justifies murder. Unfortunately this most obvious of root-causes never gets a mention from the mouths of the apologists.

In any event, lets say the apologists are right on this occasion: the London bombings are solely because of our involvement in Iraq. What is supposed to follow from this? The apologists seem unable to differentiate between two very different concepts: causality and moral responsibility. Just because a person, group or nation does something that contributes causally to a crime, atrocity, or other misdeed, does not mean that they are agents who must bear moral responsibility for that crime. An obvious example is the Second World War. Our involvement in the Second World War contributed causally to the German bombing of British cities, but this certainly did not mean that Britain had to bear moral responsibility for it.

Unfortunately conceptual blurs and confusions are rife in the minds of the apologists. Writing in the Belfast Telegraph this week, Eamon McCann gave approval to sentiments expressed in a poem by his friend Mike Rosen. At several points in this poem we have the line: “If you go into other people’s countries and bomb them they will bomb you.” This poem was written after the London bombs, seemingly to explain the “root-cause” of the bombs and dissipate responsibility for them. On this occasion the facts weren’t allowed to get in the way of a “good” poem. The facts of the matter were glazed over by this crude, inaccurate, high misleading, line. The plain truth was ignored: the bombers in London were all British. They were not Iraqis or Afghans. They weren’t even of Iraqi or Afghan origin. Three were Pakistani and the other one was Jamaican. To the best of my knowledge Britain has not engaged Pakistan or Jamaica with military action recently. Even if they were Iraqis the sentiments expressed in this poem wouldn’t hold. It gives the impression that we just went to Iraq and bombed the place randomly, and now are suffering random bomb attacks ourselves. This sentiment illustrates further the sorts of the conceptual blurs that dog the anti-war movement: the inability to distinguish between targeted military action and random bomb attacks, and the inability to see a difference between collateral damage and the deliberate targeting of innocents. Furthermore, it assumes moral equality: that the task of our troops in Iraq - to remove a dangerous dictator, bring stability to a country and protect innocent people - is no better than the deliberate and random slaughter of innocent people.

Eamon McCann finishes his horrible little diatribe with the line “The cause [of the bombs in London] is plain. The cure is simple. Britain and America should get out of Iraq.” I’m not entirely sure what his argument actually is here. It seems to be something like this:

(1) We should do whatever it takes to stop acts of terror in our own country
(2) Pulling the troops out of Iraq would stop such terror attacks
(3) Therefore, we should pull our troops out of Iraq.

I’m probably flattering McCann a little here, as I suspect this argument is much better than anything he could actually state himself. Regardless, his apparent assumptions are highly dubious. For one thing it is not at all obvious that Britain would be safe from terror attacks if it withdrew from Iraq. There are many other grounds on which religious nut-jobs might seek to cause mayhem in Britain. The fact that we are infidels who should succumb to the supposed will of Allah in the form of Sharia law is an obvious one. And what breeding ground for terrorism would we be leaving behind in an Iraq in total disorder? McCann and others of his ilk never offer us an explanation as to what would happen in Iraq if our troops were to withdraw. Are they really so naïve as to think Iraq will turn into some hippy utopia if only Britain and America left? Nonsense. Iraq would pull itself to bits and God only knows what bunch of fanatics would eventfully gain power there. And whilst McCann and others lament the number of deaths in Iraq they never admit that this death-rate would spiral further out of control in a civil war and the inevitable ensuing dictatorship.

His other assumption fairs no better: even if we would be safe from terrorist attacks by withdrawing from Iraq this is insufficient in and of itself to warrant a withdrawal. Take the Second World War once more as an example. If we stopped bombing Germany and withdrew our troops from Europe then the German bombing of British cities would have ceased. And yet despite this fact it would have been much worse to have withdrawn. Given the likely consequences of a troop withdrawal from Iraq in response to the London bombs - greater instability in the middle east, a rapid rise in power for fanatics, an encouragement to terrorists everywhere to get what they want by bombing - it would be a much better to stay on in Iraq to finish the job, despite the increased risk of attacks such as those on 07/07.

If stupidity was rice then the current band of apologists would be China. It’s bad enough having to fight a war against fundamentalist lunatics but it seems that we are destined to fight on a second front: against the lunacy emanating from the political left.

Stephen Graham B.Th (Hons)