Homophobic remarks by Tory candidates have become an almost weekly occurrence in this election campaign. David Cameron claims that these comments do not represent the Conservative Party's real attitudes to same-sex relationships. But he constantly talks about "families" in a way that still upholds only one type of relationship as the ideal. In the run-up to the election, Cameron tried to present the Tories as friends of equality. The first major blow came only days before the election was called, with the release of a crackly recording of a private meeting in which shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said that guest house owners should be allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples. He argued that if someone is selling bed and breakfast "in their own home" they should have the right to discriminate on grounds of conscience. Grayling made his old Tory attitudes very obvious. His determination to see a guest house as a private house rather than a public service seems to have more to do with a belief in property than in liberty or conscience. It was some days before Grayling apologised, and the Tories have kept him well away from the front line of the campaign. They may have thought that they had managed to get through that controversy, but then a letter came to light in which shadow defence minister Julian Lewis argued that the age of consent for same-sex relations should never have been lowered to 16, because homosexual sex puts teenage boys at "serious physical risk."
Unlike Grayling, Lewis stuck to his guns when challenged by the press. Lewis's desire to protect young people from sexually transmitted infection might make sense if he wanted also to raise the age of consent for heterosexual acts. But while Lewis backs civil partnerships, his comments display a form of prejudice that is scarcely more subtle, associating gay and bisexual people with disease and assuming that it is acceptable for them to have fewer rights than others. The next two incidents involved less prominent individuals with rather more shockingly homophobic views. First Philip Lardner, Conservative candidate for North Ayrshire and Arran, claimed that homosexuality is not "normal." Then Philippa Stroud, candidate for the Tory target seat of Sutton and Cheam, hit the headlines for her involvement in the leadership of a homophobic church that "exorcises" people attracted to members of their own sex. While Lardner was removed, Stroud was allowed to stay. But then Lardner wasn't in a winnable seat. It seems that prejudiced and hateful attitudes lurk only slightly below the surface in Cameron's "new" Conservative Party. While Cameron has been keen to play down the embarrassing incidents, his own record of tolerance is hardly more laudable.
The Tory leader has said that his tax breaks for married couples would also apply to same-sex couples in civil partnerships, but he still hasn't adopted a policy of allowing same-sex marriage. In reality, the very existence of the tax breaks policy is based on a series of fundamental and fundamentally flawed Tory premises - that marriage is about going through a ceremony, rather than about what happens in people's hearts, that the interests of single people are not a priority, that couples must conform to conventional family structures and that - as Cameron said several times in the televised leaders' debates - it is "families" that really matter. Of course, it is not only the Tories who talk of prioritising families. The term "hard-working families" has been a catchphrase of both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who appear to believe that all single people are lazy. The main problem with this sort of rhetoric - and with the Tory Party's attitude to sexuality - is not homophobia as such, but "heteronormativity." In other words, same-sex couples are tolerated as long as they conform to certain narrow and restrictive expectations. Society's general acceptance of homosexuality and divorce has liberalised attitudes to sexuality, but the boundaries are still more rigid than is often acknowledged. Homosexuality and bisexuality are tolerated as outlying exceptions that need to be crammed into the heteronormative marriage model, rather than accepted fully as part of the diversity of human relationships. Heteronormativity is also oppressive towards heterosexuals. The word describes an attitude that assumes that the ideal relationship involves a couple in a long-term relationship bringing up children.
Of course, many people are suited to this form of family. But the idealisation of this relationship relegates many people to second class status - including single, divorced and widowed people, children whose parents do not live together, couples without children and those who practise polyamory or other unconventional forms of relationships. It can also cause huge harm even to married, mixed-sex couples with children, pressuring them to live up to the ideal. As someone who was brought up in a Christian family, I find it particularly outrageous that many of those who defend heteronormativity most strongly often link it with Christianity. They use euphemistic phrases such as "family values." Many people who have read the Gospels must surely find it baffling that so many followers of Jesus are keen to support "family values," given how much effort Jesus seemed to put into opposing them. He differed from the expectations of his time by not getting married, he allowed women to make physical contact with him in a society that disapproved of it and he shocked observers by befriending prostitutes. Jesus even redefined family, asking: "Who are my mother and my brothers?" and answering: "Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." Cameron hopes to draw in Christian voters and others with "traditional values" with his rhetoric about "supporting families." Responding to a question about the Pope in the second leaders' debate, he said that the Roman Catholic Church still has "work to do" to convince people that its intolerant views have changed. So does the Tory Party.
Showing posts with label gay rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gay rights. Show all posts
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Being gay is still an issue
Last October, the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote one of the most bigoted and despicable articles that odious right-wing rag has seen fit to publish. She was responding to the untimely death of pop idol Stephen Gately. Despite the coroner's report which stated that Gately had died of natural causes Moir decided that she knew better - Gately was gay and therefore his "lifestyle" meant his death could not have been natural. It wasn't just that it was insensitive to his family and friends to write such an article before Gately had even been buried, it was also an attack on all the advances gay people have made in the last decade. According to Moir, civil partnerships cause suicide, while homosexuality is an unnatural lifestyle connected with promiscuity and drug taking which does not deserve to be regarded in the same way as heterosexual relationships. So far, so depressing, but there is a brighter side to this story. Moir got more than she bargained for when she penned this reactionary drivel. Within hours of the story going to print the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was being bombarded by those who were disgusted by the Daily Mail piece. Within a day the PCC had issued a statement saying that it had already received a record number of complaints and the reaction to her piece went to the top of the news agenda, helped no doubt by the star quality of her victim.
While Moir's article was a throwback to the '70s, the response was something new. It's not just that there was no email and Twitter back then, although that certainly speeded up the ability of people to write in. There has been a significant cultural shift against this kind of bigotry, even if the Daily Mail isn't printing the letters. You'd have to have a heart made of stone not to recognise the importance of that shift, but sadly there is no time for complacency because it is not just in the fetid corridors of the Mail that homophobia still exists. In the same week in Trafalgar Square Ian Baynham, a 62-year-old gay man on his way home, was attacked by a small gang of youths who hurled homophobic abuse at him and then kicked him to death; astonishingly, none of them were brought to justice. If anyone thought that homophobia was confined to an older generation raised with less enlightened values, they had better think again. The fact that Baynham's attackers were young men and women is a warning to us all that we need to be ensuring our schools are part of the fight against bigotry. "There have been major changes in some areas like civil partnerships, equal age of consent etc but we have to contrast this with problems at schools," says London Assembly Member Darren Johnson. "Bullying in many schools is as bad now as it was 30 years ago. We need to tackle this, taking a much more proactive approach."
Johnson's view is shared by Charlotte Dingle, editor of gay and bisexual women's magazine G3. She tells the Morning Star: "I think homophobia is slowly on the wane, but it's atrocious that things aren't moving faster. I think there's a widespread misconception that because of changes in the law gay people are now more or less treated equally. It's not all about laws, though. People's attitudes still desperately need changing. "The fact that people are still spouting homophobic rubbish in our papers and on our TVs and not being properly held to account, because, oh, it was a 'joke,' makes my blood boil. I'm afraid I don't have much truck with the political correctness gone mad brigade. The situation in schools is still pretty awful, despite the best efforts of groups like Stonewall campaigning to try and change kids' attitudes. There need to be far more regulations in place preventing gay children being bullied - indeed, this is one of the most important issues that needs addressing for the gay community in this country. Teachers just don't want to address the problem, mainly because they don't know how to, and they don't know what they're allowed to say or do. This needs to change." In 2008 the campaigning organisation Stonewall commissioned YouGov to conduct a comprehensive poll of lesbian and gay people. It found that one in five had suffered from some form of homophobic attack in the previous three years. For those who think we're living in a liberal utopia where bigotry has been abolished that may come as something of a shock.
Due to changes in the way that hate crimes have been recorded it is difficult to draw out a definitive picture of long-term UK statistics in hate crime, but what's clear is that there are two dominant trends. First, that it is easier to be openly gay now than at any time in the last 50 years. Second, that this is not the same thing as saying that we have wiped out homophobia from society - far from it. There is a social movement against prejudice that we can draw on. Sadly we're going to have to do just that, because there is an anti-social movement for prejudice that must be faced up to. The answer lies in reaching into every part of society to challenge stereotypes and equip those in positions of authority, like teachers, with the arguments and training they need. People in the media like small-minded Radio One DJ Chris Moyles who undermine the good work of campaigners against homophobia also need to be challenged. As Mark Healey, the organiser of a vigil in Trafalgar Square next week against homophobic attacks, says, "we need to unite against all forms of hate crime, stand together and say out loud that this is no longer acceptable in our society anymore." We certainly can't just sit back and assume things will get better on their own.
While Moir's article was a throwback to the '70s, the response was something new. It's not just that there was no email and Twitter back then, although that certainly speeded up the ability of people to write in. There has been a significant cultural shift against this kind of bigotry, even if the Daily Mail isn't printing the letters. You'd have to have a heart made of stone not to recognise the importance of that shift, but sadly there is no time for complacency because it is not just in the fetid corridors of the Mail that homophobia still exists. In the same week in Trafalgar Square Ian Baynham, a 62-year-old gay man on his way home, was attacked by a small gang of youths who hurled homophobic abuse at him and then kicked him to death; astonishingly, none of them were brought to justice. If anyone thought that homophobia was confined to an older generation raised with less enlightened values, they had better think again. The fact that Baynham's attackers were young men and women is a warning to us all that we need to be ensuring our schools are part of the fight against bigotry. "There have been major changes in some areas like civil partnerships, equal age of consent etc but we have to contrast this with problems at schools," says London Assembly Member Darren Johnson. "Bullying in many schools is as bad now as it was 30 years ago. We need to tackle this, taking a much more proactive approach."
Johnson's view is shared by Charlotte Dingle, editor of gay and bisexual women's magazine G3. She tells the Morning Star: "I think homophobia is slowly on the wane, but it's atrocious that things aren't moving faster. I think there's a widespread misconception that because of changes in the law gay people are now more or less treated equally. It's not all about laws, though. People's attitudes still desperately need changing. "The fact that people are still spouting homophobic rubbish in our papers and on our TVs and not being properly held to account, because, oh, it was a 'joke,' makes my blood boil. I'm afraid I don't have much truck with the political correctness gone mad brigade. The situation in schools is still pretty awful, despite the best efforts of groups like Stonewall campaigning to try and change kids' attitudes. There need to be far more regulations in place preventing gay children being bullied - indeed, this is one of the most important issues that needs addressing for the gay community in this country. Teachers just don't want to address the problem, mainly because they don't know how to, and they don't know what they're allowed to say or do. This needs to change." In 2008 the campaigning organisation Stonewall commissioned YouGov to conduct a comprehensive poll of lesbian and gay people. It found that one in five had suffered from some form of homophobic attack in the previous three years. For those who think we're living in a liberal utopia where bigotry has been abolished that may come as something of a shock.
Due to changes in the way that hate crimes have been recorded it is difficult to draw out a definitive picture of long-term UK statistics in hate crime, but what's clear is that there are two dominant trends. First, that it is easier to be openly gay now than at any time in the last 50 years. Second, that this is not the same thing as saying that we have wiped out homophobia from society - far from it. There is a social movement against prejudice that we can draw on. Sadly we're going to have to do just that, because there is an anti-social movement for prejudice that must be faced up to. The answer lies in reaching into every part of society to challenge stereotypes and equip those in positions of authority, like teachers, with the arguments and training they need. People in the media like small-minded Radio One DJ Chris Moyles who undermine the good work of campaigners against homophobia also need to be challenged. As Mark Healey, the organiser of a vigil in Trafalgar Square next week against homophobic attacks, says, "we need to unite against all forms of hate crime, stand together and say out loud that this is no longer acceptable in our society anymore." We certainly can't just sit back and assume things will get better on their own.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Tory bigotry shines a light
The recent homophobic comments of shadow home secretary Chris Grayling show the continued existence of anti-gay prejudice in the Conservative Party. Grayling defended people who run bed and breakfast (B&B) accommodation in their homes having the right to bar homosexual guests on religious grounds. Speaking to the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies, he stated: "Should a Christian hotel owner have the right to exclude a gay couple from their hotel? I took the view that if it's a question of somebody who's doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn't come into their own home." This appears to breach the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007, which states that no-one should be refused goods or services on the grounds of their sexuality. The regulations include "accommodation in a hotel, boarding house or similar establishment". Grayling later explained that his pro-gay voting record showed his commitment to gay rights. However, Grayling's comments reek of Tory hypocrisy. Cameron and his cronies talk of change publicly, but privately the Conservative Party remains deeply backward, reactionary, and homophobic.
If the Tories ever win a general election, Grayling will be home secretary - a man with dubious commitment to civil rights due to his own petty prejudices will be in charge of implementing equality legislation. Grayling's remarks come just one week after Tory leader David Cameron became flustered and awkward when questioned about the anti-gay voting record of his own party's MEPs in an interview with the Gay Times. David Cameron looked flustered and awkward in a televised interview with Gay Times' Martin Popplewell last week. The Tory leader asked for the camera to be switched off in the middle of a question about gay rights and homophobia in politics. He apparently could not think of a way to answer a direct question about the anti-gay views of his own party and those parties with which it is aligned in the European Parliament, including some far right racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic groups.
The Conservative Party's abstention from a vote in the European Parliament to ban an anti-gay law introduced by the government of Lithuania has highlighted the sad fact that many Conservative MPs and MEPs are still deeply prejudiced, despite Cameron's claims that the Tories have substantially changed and modernised their views. Cameron became visibly distressed when asked why he had not used the party whip to enforce a vote against the anti-gay law, and asked that the interview be terminated. Martin Popplewell says he was then "begged" by Cameron's press agent not to show the interview in which the politically correct Tory leader apparently could not decide whether or not it is acceptable that his party supports homophobia. This comes after Conservative MEP Edward McMillan-Scott defected to the Liberal Democrats a week earlier, saying he could no longer align himself with a party that has links with far-right and Nazi-sympathising groups in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic.
It appears that what the rest of us have suspected was true all along: the Tory party is still the same old prejudiced, backward-looking party that it has always been. None of this cynical PR talk of 'change we can all believe in' (lifted from Obama's campaign) is going to fool the gay and lesbian community in this country, who remember all too well the homophobic legislation introduced by the Conservatives in the 1980s.
If the Tories ever win a general election, Grayling will be home secretary - a man with dubious commitment to civil rights due to his own petty prejudices will be in charge of implementing equality legislation. Grayling's remarks come just one week after Tory leader David Cameron became flustered and awkward when questioned about the anti-gay voting record of his own party's MEPs in an interview with the Gay Times. David Cameron looked flustered and awkward in a televised interview with Gay Times' Martin Popplewell last week. The Tory leader asked for the camera to be switched off in the middle of a question about gay rights and homophobia in politics. He apparently could not think of a way to answer a direct question about the anti-gay views of his own party and those parties with which it is aligned in the European Parliament, including some far right racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic groups.
The Conservative Party's abstention from a vote in the European Parliament to ban an anti-gay law introduced by the government of Lithuania has highlighted the sad fact that many Conservative MPs and MEPs are still deeply prejudiced, despite Cameron's claims that the Tories have substantially changed and modernised their views. Cameron became visibly distressed when asked why he had not used the party whip to enforce a vote against the anti-gay law, and asked that the interview be terminated. Martin Popplewell says he was then "begged" by Cameron's press agent not to show the interview in which the politically correct Tory leader apparently could not decide whether or not it is acceptable that his party supports homophobia. This comes after Conservative MEP Edward McMillan-Scott defected to the Liberal Democrats a week earlier, saying he could no longer align himself with a party that has links with far-right and Nazi-sympathising groups in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic.
It appears that what the rest of us have suspected was true all along: the Tory party is still the same old prejudiced, backward-looking party that it has always been. None of this cynical PR talk of 'change we can all believe in' (lifted from Obama's campaign) is going to fool the gay and lesbian community in this country, who remember all too well the homophobic legislation introduced by the Conservatives in the 1980s.
Saturday, 17 April 2010
LGBT youth need more support
Recently the mainstream media has been following the plight of two LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) youth engaged in the struggle to take their same sex significant other to the senior prom, Constance McMillen in Mississippi and Derrick Martin in Georgia. The stories have focused on the sensationalism of adolescents bringing same-sex partners to what is a historically heterosexist event. Yet the media have chosen not to focus on the variation in responses in these stories, both on behalf of parents and schools.Constance has the support of her parents, yet the school chose to cancel prom rather than allow her to bring a female as her date. Derrick's school district agreed to allow him to bring a male date to prom, though not out of any sense of equality or tolerance, but out of fear of being sued. Several days after Derrick's victory, his parents kicked him out of the house; he is now homeless.LGBT youth like Constance and Derrick face extraordinary difficulties when they come out to parents and friends. Homophobic bullying and harassment are only two of the well-documented problems these youth suffer. They also face reduced social and cultural capital, two factors extremely important in terms of successful educational and work outcomes and transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Kicking LGBT youth out of their homes subjects them to increased risks of drug use, criminal behavior and unsafe sexual activity, not to mention ruining or delaying educational and employment opportunities. Other LGBT children not expressly kicked out turn to the streets as a relief from the hostile home environment created by ignorant parents.Parents have legal and moral obligations to provide food, shelter and schooling for their children. The family should be a source of comfort, protection, stability and structure. When one parent splits with the family through divorce, he or she can be legally required to pay child support to further these aims until the child reaches 18. So why do LGBT youth kicked out of their homes by their parents not enjoy similar access to legally mandated financial support? In the past year, LGBT activists have called for acts of civil disobedience as the next step in the struggle for equality; witness the brave Lt. Dan Choi, who recently handcuffed himself to the White House to protest the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Lt. Choi said his action was a response to President Obama's call for the LGBT community to keep the pressure on him.
Many in the community are tiring of "Change we can believe in" having become "Change we have to wait for." By making the struggle visible through civil disobedience, Lt. Choi is doing his part. The rest of the community now has to step up. One way to do that is through fighting for the financial support our youth deserve from their parents. LGBT adolescents need the protection of the community in order to enjoy the same opportunities and privileges as their heterosexual peers; imagine being kicked out of your home at the very time you are supposed to be applying to colleges and preparing to build a future. Many in our community have experienced the isolation that Derrick is going through now. The time has come for our larger communities to recognize the unique vulnerabilities of LGBT youth and to make parents legally and financially responsible for their heinous neglect. Family courts should provide an accessible venue in which adolescents exiled from their family can fight for their rights and secure legally mandated financial support from the parents who have turned their backs on them. Lawyers in the LGBT community can volunteer their services and time to help adolescents in crisis navigate the complexities of the legal system. Making the struggle economic and visible has a transformative potential for achieving real equality while also helping adolescents in crisis. Finally we must continually pressure the mainstream media to cover not just the sensational aspects of stories where our community is involved, but to present the real world consequences and implications.
Kicking LGBT youth out of their homes subjects them to increased risks of drug use, criminal behavior and unsafe sexual activity, not to mention ruining or delaying educational and employment opportunities. Other LGBT children not expressly kicked out turn to the streets as a relief from the hostile home environment created by ignorant parents.Parents have legal and moral obligations to provide food, shelter and schooling for their children. The family should be a source of comfort, protection, stability and structure. When one parent splits with the family through divorce, he or she can be legally required to pay child support to further these aims until the child reaches 18. So why do LGBT youth kicked out of their homes by their parents not enjoy similar access to legally mandated financial support? In the past year, LGBT activists have called for acts of civil disobedience as the next step in the struggle for equality; witness the brave Lt. Dan Choi, who recently handcuffed himself to the White House to protest the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Lt. Choi said his action was a response to President Obama's call for the LGBT community to keep the pressure on him.
Many in the community are tiring of "Change we can believe in" having become "Change we have to wait for." By making the struggle visible through civil disobedience, Lt. Choi is doing his part. The rest of the community now has to step up. One way to do that is through fighting for the financial support our youth deserve from their parents. LGBT adolescents need the protection of the community in order to enjoy the same opportunities and privileges as their heterosexual peers; imagine being kicked out of your home at the very time you are supposed to be applying to colleges and preparing to build a future. Many in our community have experienced the isolation that Derrick is going through now. The time has come for our larger communities to recognize the unique vulnerabilities of LGBT youth and to make parents legally and financially responsible for their heinous neglect. Family courts should provide an accessible venue in which adolescents exiled from their family can fight for their rights and secure legally mandated financial support from the parents who have turned their backs on them. Lawyers in the LGBT community can volunteer their services and time to help adolescents in crisis navigate the complexities of the legal system. Making the struggle economic and visible has a transformative potential for achieving real equality while also helping adolescents in crisis. Finally we must continually pressure the mainstream media to cover not just the sensational aspects of stories where our community is involved, but to present the real world consequences and implications.
Saturday, 10 April 2010
How working-class LGBT people are sidelined
As working-class people we should welcome the opportunities which the equalities agenda presents for us to extend union organisation into all areas of our members' working lives - and we can do this through the proletariat struggle of the trade union movement. The concerns of women members, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered members and black and disabled members are raised within our unions, either through self-organised groups or through the mainstreaming of equality issues politically and industrially. These can be demands for campaigning such as legal rights for equality reps or equal pension rights for same-sex partners or as issues on negotiating agendas from gender segregation to discrimination in performance pay. Issues such as equal pay, work-life balance, discrimination, harassment and bullying at work are key for many of our members and form an increasing part of many union representative's activity. Over the past few decades, the pace of social change on equality issues has been massive. This change is working its way through the democracy of our trade union movement. The increasing involvement of women, black workers, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered workers and disabled workers reflects this process. We should see this fact as an opportunity to renew our democracy - to enhance and strengthen it. Strengthening our unity across gender and ethnic divides, between workers of different sexualities, of different religious affiliations, disabled or not, older and younger, strengthens our movement as a whole.
But the changes in our society are also reflected in our employers' agendas too. Increasingly, they are using equality issues to extend their influence in the workplace. As more equality laws are brought in by the Labour government, we have seen many employers make virtue out of necessity. They join in the progressive talk, while continuing to fail to deliver in the workplace. If we, as a trade union movement, do not take equality issues seriously, we cede the ground and the ideological initiative to them and their shallow commitment to equality. One of the examples of employers using equality issues for their own ends is in the area of the new rights on sexual orientation discrimination at work. Since the introduction of this anti-discrimination legislation at the end of 2003, the lobbying organisation Stonewall has worked with employers to promote equality in the workplace while sidelining trade unions. Stonewall has a project for employers called Diversity Champions and has recently signed up its 200th employer. The idea is to promote employment good practice on sexual orientation issues. But there are flaws in Stonewall's approach.
The organisation makes decisions on how to encourage good practice from the top down. It does not have democratic links to lesbian, gay and bisexual workers organised at the workplace level and cannot, unlike their union representatives, be called to account for what they do. Despite its lack of democratic structure, hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money has been given to Stonewall to run a review of the government's workplace anti-discrimination legislation. It has played a major part in encouraging a business case for equality, organising conferences with government and employer representatives. What is left out is the involvement of trade unions, which are already active on these issues. The establishment of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which, for the first time, will have enforcing power on matters of homophobic discrimination, is, in many ways, a continuation of this "quango" approach to equality. As the power of the "pink pound" - the commodification and commercialisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered lives - becomes hegemonic in our communities, there is more reason for us, as trade unionists, to take a strong stand on the real issues that affect working people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered at work and in our communities.
The experiences of working-class lesbian, gay, bisexual and trangendered people is rarely reflected in the lifestyle politics of "pink culture." The pink press, like the straight press, is owned and run by a few rich individuals; the bars and clubs are exactly the same. We need a sense of community based on the diversity of the experiences of all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, not a monochrome model. Issues of equality should be central concerns of our trade union movement. They should be the focus of campaigning, negotiating and organising. It is the right thing to do by our members, but it is also necessary if we are to build up our trade union movement for the 21st century. If we don't act, then we will lose out where it matters - in the workplace. We do not need to give away this important area of our trade union work to employers who will not and cannot deliver for working people. We need to build up a solidarity big enough to tackle the discrimination and homophobia still present in many working people's lives.
But the changes in our society are also reflected in our employers' agendas too. Increasingly, they are using equality issues to extend their influence in the workplace. As more equality laws are brought in by the Labour government, we have seen many employers make virtue out of necessity. They join in the progressive talk, while continuing to fail to deliver in the workplace. If we, as a trade union movement, do not take equality issues seriously, we cede the ground and the ideological initiative to them and their shallow commitment to equality. One of the examples of employers using equality issues for their own ends is in the area of the new rights on sexual orientation discrimination at work. Since the introduction of this anti-discrimination legislation at the end of 2003, the lobbying organisation Stonewall has worked with employers to promote equality in the workplace while sidelining trade unions. Stonewall has a project for employers called Diversity Champions and has recently signed up its 200th employer. The idea is to promote employment good practice on sexual orientation issues. But there are flaws in Stonewall's approach.
The organisation makes decisions on how to encourage good practice from the top down. It does not have democratic links to lesbian, gay and bisexual workers organised at the workplace level and cannot, unlike their union representatives, be called to account for what they do. Despite its lack of democratic structure, hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money has been given to Stonewall to run a review of the government's workplace anti-discrimination legislation. It has played a major part in encouraging a business case for equality, organising conferences with government and employer representatives. What is left out is the involvement of trade unions, which are already active on these issues. The establishment of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which, for the first time, will have enforcing power on matters of homophobic discrimination, is, in many ways, a continuation of this "quango" approach to equality. As the power of the "pink pound" - the commodification and commercialisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered lives - becomes hegemonic in our communities, there is more reason for us, as trade unionists, to take a strong stand on the real issues that affect working people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered at work and in our communities.
The experiences of working-class lesbian, gay, bisexual and trangendered people is rarely reflected in the lifestyle politics of "pink culture." The pink press, like the straight press, is owned and run by a few rich individuals; the bars and clubs are exactly the same. We need a sense of community based on the diversity of the experiences of all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, not a monochrome model. Issues of equality should be central concerns of our trade union movement. They should be the focus of campaigning, negotiating and organising. It is the right thing to do by our members, but it is also necessary if we are to build up our trade union movement for the 21st century. If we don't act, then we will lose out where it matters - in the workplace. We do not need to give away this important area of our trade union work to employers who will not and cannot deliver for working people. We need to build up a solidarity big enough to tackle the discrimination and homophobia still present in many working people's lives.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
The march of progress
With the centenary of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 2006, the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights decided to publish an account of the part played by labour in the transformation of legal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Although there is a large range of literature dealing with most other aspects of modern LGBT life and culture, Sodom, Gomorrah and the New Jerusalem: Labour and Lesbian and Gay Rights from Edward Carpenter to Today is the first publication to explore the connection between the labour movement and the campaign for LGBT rights. This was a serious gap, because the labour movement has played the single most important role in winning equality law. Lobby groups like Stonewall - even though they have been unrepresentative of the community which they claim to speak for - have been key players. But the hard work to make possible the reforms won since the election of Labour in 1997 was all done in the 20 years prior to that date and it was done through the trade unions and from inside the Labour Party. Tony Blair didn't suddenly wake up to realise the discrimination faced by an oppressed section of society and, indeed, as many activists are all too aware, he had to be reminded of it continually, up to and including the attempts to gain exemptions for Catholic adoption agencies from the sexual orientation goods and services regulations this January. The book is about that history, events which I am proud to have been a part of.
The connection with the labour movement is not accidental. Hence the link with Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), a socialist who lived openly with his male partner and who promoted a vision of socialism that included liberation both for women and for people of different sexual orientations. For many years, the socially conservative leaders of trade unions and the new-born Labour Party would not touch the question or even think about it, even though Carpenter was widely appreciated for his writings on every other subject. But, although there was wider public debate on homosexuality across Europe and although, during the 1920s and 1930s, some homosexual and transgender men and women were able to inhabit a subculture in some European cities, there was no sign that legal discrimination was going to be challenged by governments or that leaders of the labour movement would champion such a step. Fascism and war quickly ended the glimmerings of greater openness, while post-war austerity and the cold war were scarcely more congenial climates for so drastic a step as reforming laws on sex. In Britain, the first steps came when liberal-minded MPs proposed an investigation of the law following a spate of arrests of high-profile men for homosexual "offences." The resulting Wolfenden commission recommended partial decriminalisation in 1957. But it was not until 1964 under Harold Wilson's Labour government that anything was done about it.
That had a lot to do with the creation of the first campaigning organisation on the issue in Britain, the Homosexual Law Reform Society, in 1960. Pressed by Labour and Liberal MPs and aware that the current law encouraged blackmailers, Wilson gave practical support to legislate the Sexual Offences Act 1967, enacting the Wolfenden recommendations. Two years later, the birth of the Gay Liberation Front in New York following the riot provoked by a police raid on the Stonewall bar quickly created a radical international movement for liberation; the first Gay Pride march in London was held in 1972. Between then and now, the British labour movement has been transformed into a dynamic champion of the cause of equality. Other have written on how gender and race issues came to be seen as integral to the concerns of the trade unions and these struggles led the way for others, among whom were lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers demanding recognition. That recognition was won because, initially, unions saw the unfair treatment dealt out to their members, such as NUPE member Susan Shell, who was sacked for being a lesbian in 1981. Unions saw the need to defend all their members and realised that LGBT members had no legal protection. In 1984, NUPE became the first major union to affiliate to the then Labour Campaign for Gay Rights. In 1984-5, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners groups, which were set up to back the famous NUM strike, also had a big impact within the trade union movement.
Basic union principles of equality and solidarity were at stake and, although there was resistance from some, the majority of unions had soon adopted an inclusive policy. Alongside, LGBT members organised themselves in an increasing number of unions and demanded recognition. The 1985 TUC Congress carried the first lesbian and gay rights motion, although the creation of a dedicated TUC structure had to wait until 1998, when it was set up following significant pressure from unions. That 1985 TUC Congress motion was carried just a few weeks before Labour conference debated the subject for the first time and the first of, so far, six conference victories on LGB equality - the T was not included - was secured. Union votes were crucial. Since then the support, which was restricted to the left and progressive forces for many years, has reached all corners of the party. The consequence is clear for all to see. Equalisation of criminal law, repeal of section 28, civil partnerships, employment and now goods and services protection. All of this has been won under Labour - sometimes, only because of a sharp reminder, such as the unions going to the High Court to challenge the exclusion of pensions from the employment regulations. They were instead covered in the Civil Partnership Act. All of this has been won because of the increasingly strong voice of the unions. We still have to win full equality for transgender people. Then, we face an even harder struggle - to defeat underlying prejudices, bullying and exclusion. For this, though, the labour movement will be engaged from the start.
The connection with the labour movement is not accidental. Hence the link with Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), a socialist who lived openly with his male partner and who promoted a vision of socialism that included liberation both for women and for people of different sexual orientations. For many years, the socially conservative leaders of trade unions and the new-born Labour Party would not touch the question or even think about it, even though Carpenter was widely appreciated for his writings on every other subject. But, although there was wider public debate on homosexuality across Europe and although, during the 1920s and 1930s, some homosexual and transgender men and women were able to inhabit a subculture in some European cities, there was no sign that legal discrimination was going to be challenged by governments or that leaders of the labour movement would champion such a step. Fascism and war quickly ended the glimmerings of greater openness, while post-war austerity and the cold war were scarcely more congenial climates for so drastic a step as reforming laws on sex. In Britain, the first steps came when liberal-minded MPs proposed an investigation of the law following a spate of arrests of high-profile men for homosexual "offences." The resulting Wolfenden commission recommended partial decriminalisation in 1957. But it was not until 1964 under Harold Wilson's Labour government that anything was done about it.
That had a lot to do with the creation of the first campaigning organisation on the issue in Britain, the Homosexual Law Reform Society, in 1960. Pressed by Labour and Liberal MPs and aware that the current law encouraged blackmailers, Wilson gave practical support to legislate the Sexual Offences Act 1967, enacting the Wolfenden recommendations. Two years later, the birth of the Gay Liberation Front in New York following the riot provoked by a police raid on the Stonewall bar quickly created a radical international movement for liberation; the first Gay Pride march in London was held in 1972. Between then and now, the British labour movement has been transformed into a dynamic champion of the cause of equality. Other have written on how gender and race issues came to be seen as integral to the concerns of the trade unions and these struggles led the way for others, among whom were lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers demanding recognition. That recognition was won because, initially, unions saw the unfair treatment dealt out to their members, such as NUPE member Susan Shell, who was sacked for being a lesbian in 1981. Unions saw the need to defend all their members and realised that LGBT members had no legal protection. In 1984, NUPE became the first major union to affiliate to the then Labour Campaign for Gay Rights. In 1984-5, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners groups, which were set up to back the famous NUM strike, also had a big impact within the trade union movement.
Basic union principles of equality and solidarity were at stake and, although there was resistance from some, the majority of unions had soon adopted an inclusive policy. Alongside, LGBT members organised themselves in an increasing number of unions and demanded recognition. The 1985 TUC Congress carried the first lesbian and gay rights motion, although the creation of a dedicated TUC structure had to wait until 1998, when it was set up following significant pressure from unions. That 1985 TUC Congress motion was carried just a few weeks before Labour conference debated the subject for the first time and the first of, so far, six conference victories on LGB equality - the T was not included - was secured. Union votes were crucial. Since then the support, which was restricted to the left and progressive forces for many years, has reached all corners of the party. The consequence is clear for all to see. Equalisation of criminal law, repeal of section 28, civil partnerships, employment and now goods and services protection. All of this has been won under Labour - sometimes, only because of a sharp reminder, such as the unions going to the High Court to challenge the exclusion of pensions from the employment regulations. They were instead covered in the Civil Partnership Act. All of this has been won because of the increasingly strong voice of the unions. We still have to win full equality for transgender people. Then, we face an even harder struggle - to defeat underlying prejudices, bullying and exclusion. For this, though, the labour movement will be engaged from the start.
Friday, 26 March 2010
Is football ready for another gay player?
It is the prejudice that dares not speak its name. Homophobia exists in football, just as surely as it does in all other areas of society, but just how severe is the problem? Who is to blame for the climate of fear that keeps, as publicist Max Clifford claimed last December, at least three bisexual and gay footballers in the closet and arguably many more? Clifford advised the players to keep their sexuality secret, telling them that football "remains in the dark ages, steeped in homophobia." Indeed, to date there has been just one openly gay footballer in Britain - former Norwich City striker Justin Fashanu, who tragically committed suicide in 1998.
But the question remains - is football mature enough for another Fashanu? The sport may have made huge strides in tackling racism over the last 15 years - today it is highly unlikely that fans, especially in the top flight, could racially abuse a footballer en masse without fear of reprisal. But how would an openly gay player be received? Opinion on this is split. First there is the issue of reaction from fellow players. On this front, the director of anti-racism initiative Kick It Out believes Clifford is "scaremongering." Piara Power argues that while players may suffer abuse from fellow professionals, it would not go unpunished because, since 2007, homophobia is penalised heavily in the Players' Code.
Rules E3(2) and E4 penalise homophobic abuse as heavily as that of a racist nature. Players who use homophobic abuse towards a fellow professional, as Robbie Fowler infamously did against Graeme Le Saux in 1999, would now receive an immediate red card. In short, the hope is that a player who came out today would not be going it alone, as was the case with Fashanu, who was bullied in the dressing room, particularly at Nottingham Forest where manager Brian Clough ostracised him from the rest of the squad. However, preventing similar abuse from taking place in the ultra-macho world of the changing room would be the job of the football clubs and unsurprisingly evidence of how severe the problem is behind the closed doors of the locker room is anecdotal at best; and yet the picture of the situation on the terraces is also unclear.
Home Office statistics of football-related arrests and banning orders for last season lists a range of offences, including missile throwing, racist chanting and ticket touting, but a section entitled homophobic abuse is conspicuous by its absence. Incidents of homophobic abuse are recorded under the banner of "indecent chanting," so statistics specifying which of these incidents involved homophobia are not released to the public.
However, a call to the Home Office revealed that there were four arrests for homophobic behaviour last season and one in the 2007-8 season. Darren Ollerton, director of anti-homophobia initiative The Justin Campaign which takes its name from the late footballer, is convinced that any player who came out in the current climate would be letting themselves in for a baptism of fire. The Justin Campaign was founded in Brighton, whose football club's fans are regularly targeted with chants of "Does your boyfriend know you're here?" and "You're queer and you know you are. "Homophobia is still considered acceptable amongst a number of football fans," says Ollerton, whose campaign launched Football v Homophobia Day, an international day opposing homophobia in the amateur and professional game, last Friday on what would have been Fashanu's 49th birthday. "It's the last socially acceptable prejudice and I imagine in a hyper-macho environment, which some areas of the terraces can be, homophobic comments aren't only common but are in some senses expected. The use of words like poof, queer, gay boy, faggot are part of football language for a number of fans and the longer it remains consistently unchallenged the more it becomes an acceptable form of expression amongst the next generation of football fans. "I think it's a very serious problem, but the longer the authorities debate over what's acceptable and what's not, as though certain homophobic words are 'less' offensive, the more entrenched this problem will become."
Kick It Out, which turned their attentions to tackling anti-gay abuse five years ago, keep some records of incidents of homophobia at English football matches but do not turn them into statistics. Measuring homophobia - and the successes or failures of campaigns against it - is therefore difficult. However, the Home Office confirmed on Wednesday that their statistics of football-related arrests and banning orders for next season will specify homophobic abuse in a separate column. However, the government department believe that there is currently no evidence that homophobic incidents at football matches are increasing or a significant phenomenon, but say that the matter is under review. Even so, statistics would only paint a partial picture of the problem, as, without any openly gay footballers currently playing, we can only guess at how fans would react to them. There could be a sudden explosion of homophobia in the stands. Conversely, football may have grown more tolerant since Fashanu's playing days. Either way, his demise must surely loom large in the mind of any player considering coming out. With the media obsession with players' private lives showing no sign of abating, a gay or bi player would have to be a sado-masochist to want to be a guinea pig in an experiment into the moral state of British society.
Yet this is the end goal of the Justin Campaign - for gay footballers to feel that they can be open about sexuality without being targeted for abuse, as well as being treated as equals in the changing room. The campaign's Football v Homophobia Day, which was held in Norwich, received support from the city's football club, local MPs Charles Clarke and Chloe Smith, as well as Justin Fashanu's niece Amal, who expressed pride that her uncle's memory was being used as a force to fight one of football's last bastions of prejudice. "It's just amazing that people who were strangers to Justin, who didn't actually know Justin, feel so greatly for him," said Amal. "If the campaign does expand, if it does become bigger, then it's an opportunity for many other players to come into it. It's a sign that people can just be who they want to be." Support for the Justin Campaign is growing, but it is has struggled to gain significant support from clubs. All 92 Premier and Football League clubs were contacted about the launch of Football v Homophobia, but only four - Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe and Gillingham - agreed to include information about the campaign in their match day programmes. Two clubs, Crystal Palace and Norwich, hosted information about the campaign on the website, while Brighton & Hove Albion endorsed the event and maintain close ties with the campaign.
Overall, though, the sense is that most clubs are fearful of going it alone when it comes to tackling homophobia without strong leadership from the FA, whose decision to pull a recent anti-homophobia video has been interpreted in many quarters that they have no identifiable strategy on how to tackle the issue. For the time being, however, the biggest battle may be convincing the authorities that homophobia is actually a problem at all.
But the question remains - is football mature enough for another Fashanu? The sport may have made huge strides in tackling racism over the last 15 years - today it is highly unlikely that fans, especially in the top flight, could racially abuse a footballer en masse without fear of reprisal. But how would an openly gay player be received? Opinion on this is split. First there is the issue of reaction from fellow players. On this front, the director of anti-racism initiative Kick It Out believes Clifford is "scaremongering." Piara Power argues that while players may suffer abuse from fellow professionals, it would not go unpunished because, since 2007, homophobia is penalised heavily in the Players' Code.
Rules E3(2) and E4 penalise homophobic abuse as heavily as that of a racist nature. Players who use homophobic abuse towards a fellow professional, as Robbie Fowler infamously did against Graeme Le Saux in 1999, would now receive an immediate red card. In short, the hope is that a player who came out today would not be going it alone, as was the case with Fashanu, who was bullied in the dressing room, particularly at Nottingham Forest where manager Brian Clough ostracised him from the rest of the squad. However, preventing similar abuse from taking place in the ultra-macho world of the changing room would be the job of the football clubs and unsurprisingly evidence of how severe the problem is behind the closed doors of the locker room is anecdotal at best; and yet the picture of the situation on the terraces is also unclear.
Home Office statistics of football-related arrests and banning orders for last season lists a range of offences, including missile throwing, racist chanting and ticket touting, but a section entitled homophobic abuse is conspicuous by its absence. Incidents of homophobic abuse are recorded under the banner of "indecent chanting," so statistics specifying which of these incidents involved homophobia are not released to the public.
However, a call to the Home Office revealed that there were four arrests for homophobic behaviour last season and one in the 2007-8 season. Darren Ollerton, director of anti-homophobia initiative The Justin Campaign which takes its name from the late footballer, is convinced that any player who came out in the current climate would be letting themselves in for a baptism of fire. The Justin Campaign was founded in Brighton, whose football club's fans are regularly targeted with chants of "Does your boyfriend know you're here?" and "You're queer and you know you are. "Homophobia is still considered acceptable amongst a number of football fans," says Ollerton, whose campaign launched Football v Homophobia Day, an international day opposing homophobia in the amateur and professional game, last Friday on what would have been Fashanu's 49th birthday. "It's the last socially acceptable prejudice and I imagine in a hyper-macho environment, which some areas of the terraces can be, homophobic comments aren't only common but are in some senses expected. The use of words like poof, queer, gay boy, faggot are part of football language for a number of fans and the longer it remains consistently unchallenged the more it becomes an acceptable form of expression amongst the next generation of football fans. "I think it's a very serious problem, but the longer the authorities debate over what's acceptable and what's not, as though certain homophobic words are 'less' offensive, the more entrenched this problem will become."
Kick It Out, which turned their attentions to tackling anti-gay abuse five years ago, keep some records of incidents of homophobia at English football matches but do not turn them into statistics. Measuring homophobia - and the successes or failures of campaigns against it - is therefore difficult. However, the Home Office confirmed on Wednesday that their statistics of football-related arrests and banning orders for next season will specify homophobic abuse in a separate column. However, the government department believe that there is currently no evidence that homophobic incidents at football matches are increasing or a significant phenomenon, but say that the matter is under review. Even so, statistics would only paint a partial picture of the problem, as, without any openly gay footballers currently playing, we can only guess at how fans would react to them. There could be a sudden explosion of homophobia in the stands. Conversely, football may have grown more tolerant since Fashanu's playing days. Either way, his demise must surely loom large in the mind of any player considering coming out. With the media obsession with players' private lives showing no sign of abating, a gay or bi player would have to be a sado-masochist to want to be a guinea pig in an experiment into the moral state of British society.
Yet this is the end goal of the Justin Campaign - for gay footballers to feel that they can be open about sexuality without being targeted for abuse, as well as being treated as equals in the changing room. The campaign's Football v Homophobia Day, which was held in Norwich, received support from the city's football club, local MPs Charles Clarke and Chloe Smith, as well as Justin Fashanu's niece Amal, who expressed pride that her uncle's memory was being used as a force to fight one of football's last bastions of prejudice. "It's just amazing that people who were strangers to Justin, who didn't actually know Justin, feel so greatly for him," said Amal. "If the campaign does expand, if it does become bigger, then it's an opportunity for many other players to come into it. It's a sign that people can just be who they want to be." Support for the Justin Campaign is growing, but it is has struggled to gain significant support from clubs. All 92 Premier and Football League clubs were contacted about the launch of Football v Homophobia, but only four - Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe and Gillingham - agreed to include information about the campaign in their match day programmes. Two clubs, Crystal Palace and Norwich, hosted information about the campaign on the website, while Brighton & Hove Albion endorsed the event and maintain close ties with the campaign.
Overall, though, the sense is that most clubs are fearful of going it alone when it comes to tackling homophobia without strong leadership from the FA, whose decision to pull a recent anti-homophobia video has been interpreted in many quarters that they have no identifiable strategy on how to tackle the issue. For the time being, however, the biggest battle may be convincing the authorities that homophobia is actually a problem at all.
The Tories' dubious chums
A Nazi, a homophobe and an old Etonian walk into a bar... not a joke, merely a likely scenario at October's Tory Party conference. Well, I was wondering how long it would take for them to revert to type and show their true colours, if not policies. All this cuddly "caring" conservatism must have really been sticking in the craw of the dyed-in-the-wool bigots and reactionaries who make up a large proportion of their voters. They probably dozed off at party conference a few years ago and woke up wiping drool from their palsied gobs to think they'd joined the Liberals. "Next they'll be saying we can't beat the servants! What do you mean we can't have servants any more? Hired help? I thought that was what Jeffrey Archer got in trouble for. Well I tell you I didn't fight and die in two world wars and have my buttocks used as a toast rack by my house master at Eton to put up with this kind of thing!" But this week the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade will have had cause to celebrate. Yes, the Tories have shrugged off their caring, sharing facade and reverted to the vindictive reactionaries we always knew they were, having sensed blood as a gravely wounded Labour Party limps towards defeat, having chewed its own leg off in a bid to survive.
And the most galling thing for the new Labour project is that the Tories are doing it with their policies, just with an added injection of malice like a schoolyard bully giving a Chinese burn to someone whose dinner money he's already stolen. This time the Tories brought pals from eastern Europe to make sure the message really got through. Michal Kaminski, who looks a bit like Alan Carr on steroids - but with fewer knob gags - was on hand to support his new best friend Dave. The right-wing MEP has publicly referred to gay people as "fags" and his party is rabidly opposed to same-sex marriages and has some rather dubious views on the Jewish race. So something for the Middle England voters there then. And if that wasn't endorsement enough, the Tories also wheeled out Roberts Zile of the uber right-wing Latvian party - there's a clue in the title here - Fatherland and Freedom. The FF, which appropriately sounds a bit like a Gestapo officer with a lisp, holds annual commemorations for the butchers of the Waffen SS. It tries to justify it by saying that the Latvian members of the murder gang were merely "following orders." Just like every defendant at the Nuremburg Trials. I can't wait to see who the Tories invite next year. The recently disinterred corpse of Adolf Eichmann perhaps? It takes something special to make David Miliband look like a principled defender of our nation's morals. This is the man who as Foreign Secretary is so up to his neck in human rights and torture litigation at the moment that he's probably been given a season ticket for the Courts of Justice. Yet, remarkably, this week the Tories made him look good.
It is perhaps then no coincidence with such dubious partners listening in that they wheeled out the race card, condemning Muslim extremism, but not the home-grown variety of Islamophobia, and pledging a "fortress Britain"-style immigration policy. But perhaps the most sickening aspect of the whole pantomime was when both Osborne and Cameron spoke about the pain which was necessary before the economic gain. Whose pain would that be then? Not theirs certainly, with their trust funds and multimillion-pound incomes. Its takes a real genius in hypocrisy to be lecturing us on realism and responsibility while quaffing £140-a-bottle bubbly and erecting a Potemkin village-style shopping mall in the conference centre so as not to have to slum it with the oiks outside. The Tories feel our pain all right - like a sadist tightening the thumb screws.
And the most galling thing for the new Labour project is that the Tories are doing it with their policies, just with an added injection of malice like a schoolyard bully giving a Chinese burn to someone whose dinner money he's already stolen. This time the Tories brought pals from eastern Europe to make sure the message really got through. Michal Kaminski, who looks a bit like Alan Carr on steroids - but with fewer knob gags - was on hand to support his new best friend Dave. The right-wing MEP has publicly referred to gay people as "fags" and his party is rabidly opposed to same-sex marriages and has some rather dubious views on the Jewish race. So something for the Middle England voters there then. And if that wasn't endorsement enough, the Tories also wheeled out Roberts Zile of the uber right-wing Latvian party - there's a clue in the title here - Fatherland and Freedom. The FF, which appropriately sounds a bit like a Gestapo officer with a lisp, holds annual commemorations for the butchers of the Waffen SS. It tries to justify it by saying that the Latvian members of the murder gang were merely "following orders." Just like every defendant at the Nuremburg Trials. I can't wait to see who the Tories invite next year. The recently disinterred corpse of Adolf Eichmann perhaps? It takes something special to make David Miliband look like a principled defender of our nation's morals. This is the man who as Foreign Secretary is so up to his neck in human rights and torture litigation at the moment that he's probably been given a season ticket for the Courts of Justice. Yet, remarkably, this week the Tories made him look good.
It is perhaps then no coincidence with such dubious partners listening in that they wheeled out the race card, condemning Muslim extremism, but not the home-grown variety of Islamophobia, and pledging a "fortress Britain"-style immigration policy. But perhaps the most sickening aspect of the whole pantomime was when both Osborne and Cameron spoke about the pain which was necessary before the economic gain. Whose pain would that be then? Not theirs certainly, with their trust funds and multimillion-pound incomes. Its takes a real genius in hypocrisy to be lecturing us on realism and responsibility while quaffing £140-a-bottle bubbly and erecting a Potemkin village-style shopping mall in the conference centre so as not to have to slum it with the oiks outside. The Tories feel our pain all right - like a sadist tightening the thumb screws.
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Why can't Constance bring her date?
Officials in Mississippi's Itawamba County School District are calling Constance McMillen a "distraction." But the real distraction is the policies of a school district that promote homophobia and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students. People across the U.S. have been rallying to the 18-year-old's defense since the news emerged that she, with the support of the Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), had filed a lawsuit against the school district--after the district cancelled the high school prom rather than allow Constance, who is a lesbian, to dress in a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend as her date.In early February, after McMillen spoke with a vice principal about bringing her girlfriend to the prom, a memo was released in the school stating that prom guests "must be of the opposite sex." In a textbook example of the discrimination that young LGBT people continue to face in many parts of the U.S., according to the Associated Press, 'In the court documents, McMillen said Rick Mitchell, the assistant principal at the school, told her she could not attend the prom with her girlfriend, but they could go with "guys." Superintendent Teresa McNeece told the teen that the girls should attend the prom separately, had to wear dresses, and couldn't slow dance with each other because that could "push people's buttons," according to court documents. '
McMillen told the Associated Press that she stood up to the vice principal. "I explained to them that that's really not fair to the people who are gay at this school," she said. On CBS's Early Show, McMillen said she told the vice principal that "you can't pretend like there's not gay people at our school, and if you tell people they can't bring a same-sex date, that is discrimination." Since district officials cancelled the prom, Constance has gone on the offensive, launching a public campaign for her right, and the right of her classmates, to bring whomever they wish as a date to the prom. She started a Facebook page titled "Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!" which gained more than 300,000 "fans" in just five days. In a video posted on her page, McMillen, who has proclaimed in several interviews that she is proud to be a lesbian, thanked her supporters and encouraged them to "stand up for you what you believe in, stand up for who you are." Although school district officials have not explicitly stated that their decision to cancel the prom is a result of McMillen's case, they released a statement saying they cancelled the prom due to "distractions to the educational process caused by recent events."
Christine Sun, McMillen's attorney, said on the Early Show that this was "clearly the reason they cancelled the prom...The ACLU sent a letter on Constance's behalf, and one week later, the school cancelled the prom." McMillen's struggle has garnered national attention, including appearances on the CBS Early Show, MSNBC, and the Wanda Sykes Show, and there has been an outpouring of support from around the country. Matthew Sheffield of the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (MSSC), a group that works to ensure that LGBT students may attend school free of harassment and discrimination, told USA Today that "his office was flooded by people looking to help" with the Second Chance Prom, which will be held in Itawamba County this year as a safe space for LGBT students and the rest of McMillen's classmates. According to Sheffield, "We've had a definite spike in people signing on and joining our organization," as McMillen's stand has encouraged others to get involved in the struggle against homophobia in schools. McMillen told the Associated Press that she stood up to the vice principal. "I explained to them that that's really not fair to the people who are gay at this school," she said. On CBS's Early Show, McMillen said she told the vice principal that "you can't pretend like there's not gay people at our school, and if you tell people they can't bring a same-sex date, that is discrimination."
Since district officials cancelled the prom, Constance has gone on the offensive, launching a public campaign for her right, and the right of her classmates, to bring whomever they wish as a date to the prom. She started a Facebook page titled "Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!" which gained more than 300,000 "fans" in just five days. In a video posted on her page, McMillen, who has proclaimed in several interviews that she is proud to be a lesbian, thanked her supporters and encouraged them to "stand up for you what you believe in, stand up for who you are." Although school district officials have not explicitly stated that their decision to cancel the prom is a result of McMillen's case, they released a statement saying they cancelled the prom due to "distractions to the educational process caused by recent events." Christine Sun, McMillen's attorney, said on the Early Show that this was "clearly the reason they cancelled the prom...The ACLU sent a letter on Constance's behalf, and one week later, the school cancelled the prom." McMillen's struggle has garnered national attention, including appearances on the CBS Early Show, MSNBC, and the Wanda Sykes Show, and there has been an outpouring of support from around the country.
Matthew Sheffield of the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (MSSC), a group that works to ensure that LGBT students may attend school free of harassment and discrimination, told USA Today that "his office was flooded by people looking to help" with the Second Chance Prom, which will be held in Itawamba County this year as a safe space for LGBT students and the rest of McMillen's classmates. According to Sheffield, "We've had a definite spike in people signing on and joining our organization," as McMillen's stand has encouraged others to get involved in the struggle against homophobia in schools. Constance McMillen is not the only LGBT student to struggle for the right to attend the prom with a same-sex date, or to wear what they want. Last fall, then-17-year-old high school junior Cynthia Stewart of Tharptown, Ala., stood up for--and won, with the help of the ACLU--her right to bring her girlfriend to the prom after the Tharptown High School Principal Gary Odom initially told her that she would not be allowed to. Also last fall, a Wesson, Miss., high school senior, Ceara Sturgis, who is openly gay, was not allowed to appear in her yearbook wearing a tuxedo. The ACLU sent a letter to school officials demanding they allow Sturgis to appear in the yearbook wearing a tuxedo, stating "You can't discriminate against somebody because they're not masculine enough or because they're not feminine enough."
Then there is Will Phillips, a 10-year-old boy from Washington County, Ark., who has refused, despite pressure from a teacher, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because, as he told CNN, "There really isn't liberty and justice for all... Gays and lesbians can't marry...there's still a lot of racism and sexism in the world." If individuals feel emboldened to take such stands, one big reason is the explosion in struggle as tens of thousands protested against the passage of Proposition 8, which revoked same-sex marriage in California.
Actions like the Itawamba School District's, however, paint a target on the back on LGBT students. So far, McMillen has faced verbal harassment from some fellow students who blame her for the district's decision to cancel the prom. And Phillips told CNN that he has been verbally attacked by students and called a "gay wad" for taking a stand for same-sex marriage. As commenter Tom Head wrote on About.com, school administrators such as those in Itawamba County are "bullying [LGBT teens] at state expense," when they should be supporting them. Their discrimination encourages homophobia, transphobia and sexism, and gives others a green light to bully LGBT teens and those who do not conform to gender norms.
Such bullying has had deadly consequences. Although there is limited information available, EDGE Boston reports that a 2005 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education study found that "gay teens had suicide rates nearly double those of their peers," and "were four times more likely to attempt suicide in the past year." Last fall, according to Tulsa World, a survey of LGBT youth in Tulsa, Okla., found, "Sixty-seven percent of respondents reported having suicidal thoughts or feelings, and 39 percent said they had attempted suicide." Half of respondents reported facing bullying at school, and few reported seeing a school official intervene. The bullies in the school administration in Itawamba County, meanwhile, are emboldened by the bullies in the Mississippi state government, which provides no protection for LGBT people from employment discrimination and bans same-sex marriage. Constance McMillen deserves our full support for taking a courageous stand against institutional discrimination. We should honor her advice to stand up for what we believe in--and get involved in the movement for LGBT equality.
McMillen told the Associated Press that she stood up to the vice principal. "I explained to them that that's really not fair to the people who are gay at this school," she said. On CBS's Early Show, McMillen said she told the vice principal that "you can't pretend like there's not gay people at our school, and if you tell people they can't bring a same-sex date, that is discrimination." Since district officials cancelled the prom, Constance has gone on the offensive, launching a public campaign for her right, and the right of her classmates, to bring whomever they wish as a date to the prom. She started a Facebook page titled "Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!" which gained more than 300,000 "fans" in just five days. In a video posted on her page, McMillen, who has proclaimed in several interviews that she is proud to be a lesbian, thanked her supporters and encouraged them to "stand up for you what you believe in, stand up for who you are." Although school district officials have not explicitly stated that their decision to cancel the prom is a result of McMillen's case, they released a statement saying they cancelled the prom due to "distractions to the educational process caused by recent events."
Christine Sun, McMillen's attorney, said on the Early Show that this was "clearly the reason they cancelled the prom...The ACLU sent a letter on Constance's behalf, and one week later, the school cancelled the prom." McMillen's struggle has garnered national attention, including appearances on the CBS Early Show, MSNBC, and the Wanda Sykes Show, and there has been an outpouring of support from around the country. Matthew Sheffield of the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (MSSC), a group that works to ensure that LGBT students may attend school free of harassment and discrimination, told USA Today that "his office was flooded by people looking to help" with the Second Chance Prom, which will be held in Itawamba County this year as a safe space for LGBT students and the rest of McMillen's classmates. According to Sheffield, "We've had a definite spike in people signing on and joining our organization," as McMillen's stand has encouraged others to get involved in the struggle against homophobia in schools. McMillen told the Associated Press that she stood up to the vice principal. "I explained to them that that's really not fair to the people who are gay at this school," she said. On CBS's Early Show, McMillen said she told the vice principal that "you can't pretend like there's not gay people at our school, and if you tell people they can't bring a same-sex date, that is discrimination."
Since district officials cancelled the prom, Constance has gone on the offensive, launching a public campaign for her right, and the right of her classmates, to bring whomever they wish as a date to the prom. She started a Facebook page titled "Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!" which gained more than 300,000 "fans" in just five days. In a video posted on her page, McMillen, who has proclaimed in several interviews that she is proud to be a lesbian, thanked her supporters and encouraged them to "stand up for you what you believe in, stand up for who you are." Although school district officials have not explicitly stated that their decision to cancel the prom is a result of McMillen's case, they released a statement saying they cancelled the prom due to "distractions to the educational process caused by recent events." Christine Sun, McMillen's attorney, said on the Early Show that this was "clearly the reason they cancelled the prom...The ACLU sent a letter on Constance's behalf, and one week later, the school cancelled the prom." McMillen's struggle has garnered national attention, including appearances on the CBS Early Show, MSNBC, and the Wanda Sykes Show, and there has been an outpouring of support from around the country.
Matthew Sheffield of the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (MSSC), a group that works to ensure that LGBT students may attend school free of harassment and discrimination, told USA Today that "his office was flooded by people looking to help" with the Second Chance Prom, which will be held in Itawamba County this year as a safe space for LGBT students and the rest of McMillen's classmates. According to Sheffield, "We've had a definite spike in people signing on and joining our organization," as McMillen's stand has encouraged others to get involved in the struggle against homophobia in schools. Constance McMillen is not the only LGBT student to struggle for the right to attend the prom with a same-sex date, or to wear what they want. Last fall, then-17-year-old high school junior Cynthia Stewart of Tharptown, Ala., stood up for--and won, with the help of the ACLU--her right to bring her girlfriend to the prom after the Tharptown High School Principal Gary Odom initially told her that she would not be allowed to. Also last fall, a Wesson, Miss., high school senior, Ceara Sturgis, who is openly gay, was not allowed to appear in her yearbook wearing a tuxedo. The ACLU sent a letter to school officials demanding they allow Sturgis to appear in the yearbook wearing a tuxedo, stating "You can't discriminate against somebody because they're not masculine enough or because they're not feminine enough."
Then there is Will Phillips, a 10-year-old boy from Washington County, Ark., who has refused, despite pressure from a teacher, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because, as he told CNN, "There really isn't liberty and justice for all... Gays and lesbians can't marry...there's still a lot of racism and sexism in the world." If individuals feel emboldened to take such stands, one big reason is the explosion in struggle as tens of thousands protested against the passage of Proposition 8, which revoked same-sex marriage in California.
Actions like the Itawamba School District's, however, paint a target on the back on LGBT students. So far, McMillen has faced verbal harassment from some fellow students who blame her for the district's decision to cancel the prom. And Phillips told CNN that he has been verbally attacked by students and called a "gay wad" for taking a stand for same-sex marriage. As commenter Tom Head wrote on About.com, school administrators such as those in Itawamba County are "bullying [LGBT teens] at state expense," when they should be supporting them. Their discrimination encourages homophobia, transphobia and sexism, and gives others a green light to bully LGBT teens and those who do not conform to gender norms.
Such bullying has had deadly consequences. Although there is limited information available, EDGE Boston reports that a 2005 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education study found that "gay teens had suicide rates nearly double those of their peers," and "were four times more likely to attempt suicide in the past year." Last fall, according to Tulsa World, a survey of LGBT youth in Tulsa, Okla., found, "Sixty-seven percent of respondents reported having suicidal thoughts or feelings, and 39 percent said they had attempted suicide." Half of respondents reported facing bullying at school, and few reported seeing a school official intervene. The bullies in the school administration in Itawamba County, meanwhile, are emboldened by the bullies in the Mississippi state government, which provides no protection for LGBT people from employment discrimination and bans same-sex marriage. Constance McMillen deserves our full support for taking a courageous stand against institutional discrimination. We should honor her advice to stand up for what we believe in--and get involved in the movement for LGBT equality.
Monday, 8 March 2010
In the name of the father
Someone really ought to point out to Pope Benedict XVI that cannibalism was an integral part of religious belief in many societies. However, this society deems it to be an unacceptable practice and it is outlawed in this and every country. And yet, in the societies in which it was prevalent, any such ban would have been attacked as, in the Pope's words, "running contrary to natural law" and restricting the freedom of religious communities. Religions, the pontiff must accept, have no right to insist on acting "in accordance with their beliefs" if such actions contravene the laws of the land. It's not asking an awful lot, after all, to expect religions to obey the same laws that apply to the rest of us, especially since the law in question relates to the equality of every person in the land, something that most of us non-religious people have been told is an integral part of the Christian canon.
If it had been a bearded and robed imam who had said that Muslims should not be subject to the laws of Britain but should fight for the implementation of sharia law in the Islamic community, there would be uproar in the red-top press. It is to be hoped that the Pope's comments will arouse similar indignation, but it's likely they won't. And it's not even as if the head of the Catholic faith has got it right. He hasn't. The Equality Bill, which he has encouraged Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight, does not do what he seems to think. It won't prevent the churches from discriminating against gay and lesbian people in the selection of clerics, although there are many people who make a strong argument that it should. It will merely prevent the churches from extending that discrimination into the realms of manual and administrative jobs inside religious organisations. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who is head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, has defended the Pope's intervention, saying that "I think he has every right to express the concerns of many."
The archbishop should perhaps exercise a little of that reason that he boasts of his church possessing. Benedict XVI is, after all, the head of state of the Vatican and, while comments on the propriety of other countries' human rights legislation seem to be acceptable these days for heads of state, active intervention and organisation within those states to overturn their laws is most certainly not - which leaves his exhortations to his bishops in a very grey area indeed.
Churches which insist in incorporating primitive and illogical prejudice into their canons are on very thin ice at the moment. But it isn't the first time in history that church and state have collided and it certainly won't be the last. Catholics, of course, have the right to consider homosexuality to be abhorrent, although there are many within that church with a more enlightened view. Law does not prescribe what people can think. But it does set boundaries on how far they can carry that prejudice into the organisation of their public bodies and it is quite proper that it should. And no-one can be exempted from that law. The Catholic church is shaping up for a confrontation with civil authority over its attitude to homosexuality and, as is usual, is claiming the moral high ground in that confrontation. It must be made clear to the Pope and his officers in this country that, far from occupying the moral high ground in this case, the official attitude of their church should be a cause for shame and embarrassment to them, as it is for many thousands of British Catholics who hold an opposing and more civilised view. And, although all religious communities claim divine authority for their views, they need reminding that this Earth is, after all, the province of mammon in which the will of humans, not divinities, is paramount.
If it had been a bearded and robed imam who had said that Muslims should not be subject to the laws of Britain but should fight for the implementation of sharia law in the Islamic community, there would be uproar in the red-top press. It is to be hoped that the Pope's comments will arouse similar indignation, but it's likely they won't. And it's not even as if the head of the Catholic faith has got it right. He hasn't. The Equality Bill, which he has encouraged Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight, does not do what he seems to think. It won't prevent the churches from discriminating against gay and lesbian people in the selection of clerics, although there are many people who make a strong argument that it should. It will merely prevent the churches from extending that discrimination into the realms of manual and administrative jobs inside religious organisations. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who is head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, has defended the Pope's intervention, saying that "I think he has every right to express the concerns of many."
The archbishop should perhaps exercise a little of that reason that he boasts of his church possessing. Benedict XVI is, after all, the head of state of the Vatican and, while comments on the propriety of other countries' human rights legislation seem to be acceptable these days for heads of state, active intervention and organisation within those states to overturn their laws is most certainly not - which leaves his exhortations to his bishops in a very grey area indeed.
Churches which insist in incorporating primitive and illogical prejudice into their canons are on very thin ice at the moment. But it isn't the first time in history that church and state have collided and it certainly won't be the last. Catholics, of course, have the right to consider homosexuality to be abhorrent, although there are many within that church with a more enlightened view. Law does not prescribe what people can think. But it does set boundaries on how far they can carry that prejudice into the organisation of their public bodies and it is quite proper that it should. And no-one can be exempted from that law. The Catholic church is shaping up for a confrontation with civil authority over its attitude to homosexuality and, as is usual, is claiming the moral high ground in that confrontation. It must be made clear to the Pope and his officers in this country that, far from occupying the moral high ground in this case, the official attitude of their church should be a cause for shame and embarrassment to them, as it is for many thousands of British Catholics who hold an opposing and more civilised view. And, although all religious communities claim divine authority for their views, they need reminding that this Earth is, after all, the province of mammon in which the will of humans, not divinities, is paramount.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Putting Prop 8 on trial
While ostensibly about the marriage rights of lesbians and gays in California, the Perry v. Schwarzenegger court case that begins January 11, 2010, will likely debate the constitutionality of discrimination against LGBT people nationwide. The trial is in a federal district court in California, but the smart money has the case winding up before the Supreme Court. The two high-power, straight male attorneys challenging California's 2008 Prop 8 referendum that overturned marriage equality are famous as former adversaries in the Bush v. Gore 2000 presidential race decided by the Supreme Court. Theodore Olson, a prominent conservative who served as George W. Bush's solicitor general, and David Boies, who was Al Gore's lawyer, have teamed up to battle the anti-gay marriage forces and aim to litigate a Supreme Court case they hope will challenge the notion that the American state has a vested interest in perpetuating second-class citizenship for LGBT people. Their sights are set on creating a cultural and legal landmark on the order of the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education case that struck down school segregation or the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that ended anti-miscegenation laws, thus legalizing marriages between Blacks and whites.
Whether the case will amount to anything approaching those cultural and legal turning points is impossible to predict. However, there's no shortage of controversy and intrigue surrounding this high-profile case. Organizations such as the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Lambda Legal initially opposed--and now grudgingly accept--the logic of taking Prop 8 to court. They fear that an expected victory in the California court will be appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then on to the Supreme Court, which "will say that discrimination against LGBT people is fairly easy to justify," a number of organizations argued in a joint memo. Attorneys at the ACLU, HRC and Lambda are haunted by the Court's devastating 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case that upheld sodomy laws until 2003. Yet it was under Bush and with the starkly conservative current crop of Supreme Court justices that sodomy laws were struck down. By contrast, these mainstream groups argue for continuing a gradualist, state-by-state strategy that could take as long as 20 years to gain equal rights.
No doubt, Justice Antonin Scalia's written dissent to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case overturning sodomy laws is certainly cause for concern. "Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive." The fact that such a cultural fossil sits on the nation's highest court at all calls the institution itself--and the 98 Senators who heartily voted to confirm him--into question. One rather controversy of Perry is that Olson and Boies plan to argue their case partially on the dubious claim that sexual orientation is immutable, and therefore gays and lesbians should be treated as a "suspect class"--that is, in the same manner as racial minorities and religious groups. Their right-wing opponents have curiously taken up the traditional position of Marxists and queer theorists who insist that sexuality is fluid and exists along a continuum--in order to advance the reactionary notion that gays and lesbians don't deserve protection from the courts.
It's a problem that Olson and Boies would choose to promote an unproven biological determinist argument to gain civil rights for LGBT people. Religion is indisputably mutable, and yet nobody challenges legal protections for religious minorities. Millions have experienced shifts in their own sexual orientation or preference--and many have not. Yet civil rights should simply be a question of equal treatment under the law, regardless of the debate over the nature of sexuality. A brouhaha has ensued over whether or not the bench trial in California--a judge will decide the case, not a jury--should be televised. Judge Vaugn Walker, who is hearing the case, has ruled that the proceedings should be taped for YouTube and made widely accessible. This is a victory against the conservatives who wanted to keep the trial closeted. "Those who want to ban gay marriage spent millions of dollars to reach the public with misleading ads, rallies and news conferences during the campaign to pass Prop. 8," said Chad Griffin, board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which has amassed a multimillion-dollar war chest to fund Olson and Boies. "We are curious why they now fear the publicity they once craved."
There is reason to be optimistic. Opinion has shifted positively over the past years, not least due to the outpouring of dissent since Prop 8's passage. According to a Pew poll, 57 percent of Americans overall approve of at least civil unions, if not marriage, for gays and lesbians. The very fact that two prominent, white-shoe lawyers perceive this case to be winnable is notable. Even the conservative Cato Institute wrote a moral and legal defense of equal marriage in the pages of the New York Daily News. Judge Walker pursued an encouraging line of questioning in the pretrial hearings when he probed the ridiculous contention by anti-LGBT lawyers that marriage is centrally about procreation. He asked, "The last marriage I performed...involved a groom who was 95, and the bride was 83. I did not demand that they prove that they intended to engage in procreative activity. Now was I missing something?"
Activists who have mobilized in massive numbers since the passage of Prop 8 should not wait passively as the case winds its way through the courts. As much as the judicial system attempts to appear above the political fray, it is clear that demands for equality expressed through protest and other organizing efforts have forced a fundamental shift in public--and as the Lawrence decision overturning sodomy laws shows, judicial--opinion.
Whether the case will amount to anything approaching those cultural and legal turning points is impossible to predict. However, there's no shortage of controversy and intrigue surrounding this high-profile case. Organizations such as the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Lambda Legal initially opposed--and now grudgingly accept--the logic of taking Prop 8 to court. They fear that an expected victory in the California court will be appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then on to the Supreme Court, which "will say that discrimination against LGBT people is fairly easy to justify," a number of organizations argued in a joint memo. Attorneys at the ACLU, HRC and Lambda are haunted by the Court's devastating 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case that upheld sodomy laws until 2003. Yet it was under Bush and with the starkly conservative current crop of Supreme Court justices that sodomy laws were struck down. By contrast, these mainstream groups argue for continuing a gradualist, state-by-state strategy that could take as long as 20 years to gain equal rights.
No doubt, Justice Antonin Scalia's written dissent to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case overturning sodomy laws is certainly cause for concern. "Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive." The fact that such a cultural fossil sits on the nation's highest court at all calls the institution itself--and the 98 Senators who heartily voted to confirm him--into question. One rather controversy of Perry is that Olson and Boies plan to argue their case partially on the dubious claim that sexual orientation is immutable, and therefore gays and lesbians should be treated as a "suspect class"--that is, in the same manner as racial minorities and religious groups. Their right-wing opponents have curiously taken up the traditional position of Marxists and queer theorists who insist that sexuality is fluid and exists along a continuum--in order to advance the reactionary notion that gays and lesbians don't deserve protection from the courts.
It's a problem that Olson and Boies would choose to promote an unproven biological determinist argument to gain civil rights for LGBT people. Religion is indisputably mutable, and yet nobody challenges legal protections for religious minorities. Millions have experienced shifts in their own sexual orientation or preference--and many have not. Yet civil rights should simply be a question of equal treatment under the law, regardless of the debate over the nature of sexuality. A brouhaha has ensued over whether or not the bench trial in California--a judge will decide the case, not a jury--should be televised. Judge Vaugn Walker, who is hearing the case, has ruled that the proceedings should be taped for YouTube and made widely accessible. This is a victory against the conservatives who wanted to keep the trial closeted. "Those who want to ban gay marriage spent millions of dollars to reach the public with misleading ads, rallies and news conferences during the campaign to pass Prop. 8," said Chad Griffin, board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which has amassed a multimillion-dollar war chest to fund Olson and Boies. "We are curious why they now fear the publicity they once craved."
There is reason to be optimistic. Opinion has shifted positively over the past years, not least due to the outpouring of dissent since Prop 8's passage. According to a Pew poll, 57 percent of Americans overall approve of at least civil unions, if not marriage, for gays and lesbians. The very fact that two prominent, white-shoe lawyers perceive this case to be winnable is notable. Even the conservative Cato Institute wrote a moral and legal defense of equal marriage in the pages of the New York Daily News. Judge Walker pursued an encouraging line of questioning in the pretrial hearings when he probed the ridiculous contention by anti-LGBT lawyers that marriage is centrally about procreation. He asked, "The last marriage I performed...involved a groom who was 95, and the bride was 83. I did not demand that they prove that they intended to engage in procreative activity. Now was I missing something?"
Activists who have mobilized in massive numbers since the passage of Prop 8 should not wait passively as the case winds its way through the courts. As much as the judicial system attempts to appear above the political fray, it is clear that demands for equality expressed through protest and other organizing efforts have forced a fundamental shift in public--and as the Lawrence decision overturning sodomy laws shows, judicial--opinion.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Fascists pose threat to gay rights
The BNP has consistently taken a homophobic stance. Its spokesman told LGBT website, PinkNews.co.uk, that "people should stick to being gay in their own homes", and described LGBT people as having "deviant lifestyles" for which counselling should be offered, or they would be "asked" to "become celibate". (6 September 2006) The BNP supports the reintroduction of the Tories' Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), which made honest teaching about homosexuality in schools unlawful. Presumably, if in power, the BNP would seek to drive the LGBT community underground. When divisive ideas such as these are spread they encourage hate crimes against LGBT people ranging from physical attacks in the street to the 1999 nail bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub by former BNP member David Copeland. It is not only the BNP which has put forward anti-LGBT policies. On the same day as the European elections, Peter Davies, a candidate from the small English Democrats Party, was elected mayor of Doncaster. Davies was the beneficiary of revulsion with the establishment parties locally, in particular New Labour, which has been dogged by corruption scandals, with 23 Doncaster councillors being convicted and five jailed for fraud. His first move was to announce that he would end funding to Doncaster Pride saying, "I don't think councils should be spending money on them parading through town advertising their sexuality".
After protests and ridicule Davies backed down. Despite this, the episode shows that we cannot take the advances that LGBT people have made in recent years for granted. Like any reform in capitalist society, LGBT rights have to be defended constantly if they are to survive. Many LGBT people will be looking for an effective campaign that can defend their rights, defeat the BNP and cut across the growth of the far-right. They will not find it from the mainstream parties. All three of the big parties have pro-market policies and push through the cuts in jobs and services that allow the far-right to target minority groups by claiming, for example, that cuts happen because LGBT groups get preferential treatment when public money is being allocated. Further, all the establishment parties are in favour of handing public services over to the private sector or voluntary groups including so-called 'faith-based initiatives' (religious groups). The record of the churches, mosques, temples and so on over LGBT rights is not exactly confidence inspiring. Public services could be handed straight over to people who believe that being gay is a sin and who want to 'cure' homosexuality.
With the Tories looking likely to form the next government, their approach to LGBT rights deserves to come under the spotlight. Tory leader David Cameron claims to be in favour of gay rights and has praised civil partnerships as part of his 'modernisation' of the Tory party. A few high profile gay or lesbian candidates have been adopted for the next general election. But has the Tory party really left its past behind? The signs are not good. After the European election the Tories left the main centre-right grouping in the European parliament due to it being too pro-EU for their liking. Their new group includes the Polish Law and Justice Party, which is notoriously homophobic and has banned LGBT Pride demonstrations when holding power. Its chairman told the Polish media: "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilisation. We can't agree to it". No party which claims to support LGBT rights should be giving the Law and Justice Party the time of day let alone jumping into bed with it. The voting record of Tories in parliament indicates the prospects should they enter government. Including Cameron, 92% of Tory MPs voted for an amendment that would have made it harder for lesbians to obtain IVF treatment; 97% voted to water down protections against incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation; and 75% voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. The Tory leadership, again including Cameron, almost to a man voted against abolishing Section 28.
It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the Tories will try to repeal major advances such as civil partnerships or anti-discrimination laws, although they may try to water them down. Attacks are more likely to come elsewhere and originate from the backbenches, as did Section 28. The Tory MP for Shipley, Philip Davies (the son of Doncaster's new mayor), recently opposed LGBT History Month, especially school students being taught about gay relationships, and demanded a debate in parliament on 'political correctness'. He won the support of the Daily Mail. After the next election there will be a lot more of Davies's like in parliament, with the right-wing press spurring them on. One of Cameron's pledges is that Tory MPs will have a free vote on any issue that is not in the Tory manifesto. Although such pledges are often made in opposition and then forgotten about or fudged once in government, this raises the possibility of an anti-LGBT measure being introduced by a backbencher and becoming law on a free vote as Tory MPs get their 'red meat' - the description of Section 28 by a Tory whip at the time it was introduced - while Cameron can claim to have clean hands.
The idea that politics matters is dismissed by some in the LGBT community. The idea is put forward that the 'pink pound' will buy liberation. LGBT people should set up their own businesses, spending their money with other LGBT businesses and living an affluent lifestyle, buying their way out of oppression. Any 'campaigning' is to be done by a few self-selected leaders lobbying in Whitehall on behalf of a desirable bloc of swing voters waiting passively to be delivered to the leaders of the capitalist parties. The pink pound is a myth for all but a very small section of the community. You cannot buy your way out of a low-wage job or, unless you are very rich, move from an estate to go to live in a gay condominium development. The flimsiness of 'anti-politics' is shown starkly when there are political threats, even more so in a recession. Political leaders are not graciously waiting for the chance to show how pro-gay they are. The conditions that have created the growth of the far-right have also diminished the number of pounds in circulation, whether pink or otherwise; no doubt this is why big corporations such as Ford and British Airways are not sponsoring Pride London.
This discontent is not confined to the LGBT community. Unity can be built between LGBT people and other oppressed sections of society and, above all, with organised workers in trade unions. For this, a new workers' party is vital to bring together those who want to fight capitalism and its effects. Such a party could shift the centre of gravity in British politics to the left and, particularly if the unions' LGBT groups organised assertively and skilfully, transform LGBT politics. This could provide the many who are currently looking for a lead the chance to defeat prejudice, for once and for all, by a socialist transformation of society. A cartoon in the Pink Paper showed an unhappy voter faced with a ballot paper offering the three choices: 'swindler', 'bigot' and 'fascist'. Many are looking to fight against reaction and the social conditions that allow it to develop. This discontent is not confined to the LGBT community. Unity can be built between LGBT people and other oppressed sections of society and, above all, with organised workers in trade unions. For this, a new workers' party is vital to bring together those who want to fight capitalism and its effects. Such a party could shift the centre of gravity in British politics to the left and, particularly if the unions' LGBT groups organised assertively and skilfully, transform LGBT politics. This could provide the many who are currently looking for a lead the chance to defeat prejudice, for once and for all, by a socialist transformation of society.
After protests and ridicule Davies backed down. Despite this, the episode shows that we cannot take the advances that LGBT people have made in recent years for granted. Like any reform in capitalist society, LGBT rights have to be defended constantly if they are to survive. Many LGBT people will be looking for an effective campaign that can defend their rights, defeat the BNP and cut across the growth of the far-right. They will not find it from the mainstream parties. All three of the big parties have pro-market policies and push through the cuts in jobs and services that allow the far-right to target minority groups by claiming, for example, that cuts happen because LGBT groups get preferential treatment when public money is being allocated. Further, all the establishment parties are in favour of handing public services over to the private sector or voluntary groups including so-called 'faith-based initiatives' (religious groups). The record of the churches, mosques, temples and so on over LGBT rights is not exactly confidence inspiring. Public services could be handed straight over to people who believe that being gay is a sin and who want to 'cure' homosexuality.
With the Tories looking likely to form the next government, their approach to LGBT rights deserves to come under the spotlight. Tory leader David Cameron claims to be in favour of gay rights and has praised civil partnerships as part of his 'modernisation' of the Tory party. A few high profile gay or lesbian candidates have been adopted for the next general election. But has the Tory party really left its past behind? The signs are not good. After the European election the Tories left the main centre-right grouping in the European parliament due to it being too pro-EU for their liking. Their new group includes the Polish Law and Justice Party, which is notoriously homophobic and has banned LGBT Pride demonstrations when holding power. Its chairman told the Polish media: "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilisation. We can't agree to it". No party which claims to support LGBT rights should be giving the Law and Justice Party the time of day let alone jumping into bed with it. The voting record of Tories in parliament indicates the prospects should they enter government. Including Cameron, 92% of Tory MPs voted for an amendment that would have made it harder for lesbians to obtain IVF treatment; 97% voted to water down protections against incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation; and 75% voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. The Tory leadership, again including Cameron, almost to a man voted against abolishing Section 28.
It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the Tories will try to repeal major advances such as civil partnerships or anti-discrimination laws, although they may try to water them down. Attacks are more likely to come elsewhere and originate from the backbenches, as did Section 28. The Tory MP for Shipley, Philip Davies (the son of Doncaster's new mayor), recently opposed LGBT History Month, especially school students being taught about gay relationships, and demanded a debate in parliament on 'political correctness'. He won the support of the Daily Mail. After the next election there will be a lot more of Davies's like in parliament, with the right-wing press spurring them on. One of Cameron's pledges is that Tory MPs will have a free vote on any issue that is not in the Tory manifesto. Although such pledges are often made in opposition and then forgotten about or fudged once in government, this raises the possibility of an anti-LGBT measure being introduced by a backbencher and becoming law on a free vote as Tory MPs get their 'red meat' - the description of Section 28 by a Tory whip at the time it was introduced - while Cameron can claim to have clean hands.
The idea that politics matters is dismissed by some in the LGBT community. The idea is put forward that the 'pink pound' will buy liberation. LGBT people should set up their own businesses, spending their money with other LGBT businesses and living an affluent lifestyle, buying their way out of oppression. Any 'campaigning' is to be done by a few self-selected leaders lobbying in Whitehall on behalf of a desirable bloc of swing voters waiting passively to be delivered to the leaders of the capitalist parties. The pink pound is a myth for all but a very small section of the community. You cannot buy your way out of a low-wage job or, unless you are very rich, move from an estate to go to live in a gay condominium development. The flimsiness of 'anti-politics' is shown starkly when there are political threats, even more so in a recession. Political leaders are not graciously waiting for the chance to show how pro-gay they are. The conditions that have created the growth of the far-right have also diminished the number of pounds in circulation, whether pink or otherwise; no doubt this is why big corporations such as Ford and British Airways are not sponsoring Pride London.
This discontent is not confined to the LGBT community. Unity can be built between LGBT people and other oppressed sections of society and, above all, with organised workers in trade unions. For this, a new workers' party is vital to bring together those who want to fight capitalism and its effects. Such a party could shift the centre of gravity in British politics to the left and, particularly if the unions' LGBT groups organised assertively and skilfully, transform LGBT politics. This could provide the many who are currently looking for a lead the chance to defeat prejudice, for once and for all, by a socialist transformation of society. A cartoon in the Pink Paper showed an unhappy voter faced with a ballot paper offering the three choices: 'swindler', 'bigot' and 'fascist'. Many are looking to fight against reaction and the social conditions that allow it to develop. This discontent is not confined to the LGBT community. Unity can be built between LGBT people and other oppressed sections of society and, above all, with organised workers in trade unions. For this, a new workers' party is vital to bring together those who want to fight capitalism and its effects. Such a party could shift the centre of gravity in British politics to the left and, particularly if the unions' LGBT groups organised assertively and skilfully, transform LGBT politics. This could provide the many who are currently looking for a lead the chance to defeat prejudice, for once and for all, by a socialist transformation of society.
Thursday, 4 February 2010
LGBT struggle for liberty must continue
In recent months thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have come together to hold vigils and show their anger at the rise in homophobic violence. The brutal murder of Ian Baynham in Trafalgar Square and the assault on James Parkes in Liverpool sent shockwaves through the LGBT community. Reported homophobic attacks have risen by 20 percent in London, 32 percent in Glasgow, 40 percent in Liverpool and 63 percent in Greater Manchester over the past year - and the mood was fuelled by the appearance of Nazi British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s Question Time, where he described seeing two men kissing as “creepy”. Economic crises are often accompanied by increased scapegoating of minorities, and the current crisis is the worst since the 1930s. Advances that at one time seemed secure can be reversed as the ruling class, desperate to cling to power and privilege, tries to make minorities, whether LGBT, black people, Muslims or migrant workers, bear the brunt of the system’s failures; fascist parties such as the BNP seek to capitalise on this.
In the most chilling example, the Holocaust, the Nazis slaughtered 11 million people, including six million Jews. This was not merely the act of a sick group of individuals but a carefully constructed ideological assault on German society. Sections of the ruling class thought Germany was getting out of control in the early 20th century. They saw the flourishing gay lifestyle in Berlin as a sign of a decadent society that had been brought to its knees by trade unionists and communists. Germany had seen the first homosexual rights movement, in response to the introduction of Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which made acts of sodomy illegal. Magnus Hirschfeld, father of the movement, established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 - it aimed at changing attitudes to homosexuality and scrapping the law. The campaign drew widespread support, particularly from socialists in the German Social Democratic Party. Between 1898 and 1914 over 100,000 books and pamphlets on sexuality were produced in the country.
Many believed that the proclamation of the German Republic after a revolution in 1918 would see the fall of Paragraph 175. This feeling had been bolstered by the 1917 revolution in Russia, which saw the complete legalisation of homosexuality and full rights for women and other minorities. Hirschfeld was so optimistic that he declared the newly founded Institute for Sexual Science, “the child of the revolution”. And the Golden Twenties that followed did usher in massive changes – from science and technology to rights for women, LGBT people and workers. A homosexual subculture flourished in Berlin as gay clubs and cabaret bars sprung up - anyone who saw the film Cabaret have a certain sees of the sexual liberation felt at that time. Although the law had not been repealed for gay men – as it had been for lesbian acts – there was little if any persecution of homosexuals. But while the work of the Institute continued, it remained relatively detached from political life at a time when German society was becoming increasingly polarised. Hirschfeld argued, “The royalist must be just as welcome a helper as the socialist republican...the communist as the bourgeois democrat.”
The lack of politics in the gay movement – the focus on the bar culture and lifestyle – meant that when the time came the movement had no role to play in helping shape the outcome of Germany’s political battles. As the economy slumped from 1929, a new militant right wing movement, led by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, grew rapidly in Germany. The mood had changed from an ambient solidarity within society, to one of hatred, division, intolerance and fear, propagated by the fabrications and propaganda the Nazis indoctrinated the masses with. Elements of the ruling and middle classes, alongside a layer of the top military personnel and government bureaucrats, turned to the fascists as they feared for their social and political positions. Although the Nazi Party vote increased dramatically – from 2.6 percent in 1928 to 37.3 percent in 1932 – the Nazis were still not in a position to take power on their own. Joseph Goebbels, architect of the attacks on German Jews, wrote in his journal that the forecast for the Nazis was gloomy. Why? Because the combined vote of the Communists and the Social Democrats outstripped that of the Nazis. Yet the call for left unity against fascism was never achieved - and the cost was greater than imagination would allow.
History often omits the slaughter of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, yet it was a central part of Hitler’s strategy to purge Germany of “undesirables” – Jews, the left, trade unionists, gypsies, the mentally ill and disabled people. Many gay and lesbian people inaccurately believed that they would be saved from persecution due to the prevalence of soldiers and other staff in the upper hierarchy of the party. Indeed one of Hitler’s closest allies, Ernest Rohm, was gay, and the Hitler Youth was dubbed the “homo youth”. This false sense of security was smashed when Hitler began his reign of terror. It started with the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute – which the Nazis declared “an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth”. Books, articles and information were carried out and thrown onto bonfires. A bust of Hirschfeld was removed, later to be publicly paraded and burnt. The extent to which Hitler was prepared to go to attack homosexuals was made apparent in June 1934. As part of a wider purge, homosexuals were removed from the party, and Rohm and dozens of officers were executed. Paragraph 175 was amended to list nine punishable acts, including embracing, kissing and even fantasies. Around 50,000 people were convicted, many ending up in the death camps.
Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, took up anti-homosexual work with a fanatical passion. He chillingly called for “an extinction of an abnormal life. It has to be removed just as we pull up stinging nettles, toss them on a heap and burn them.” The entire Nazi ideology was founded on the notion of the “master race” and the pseudoscience of eugenics – the creation of the model family raising model children. Motherhood and childbirth were rewarded. There was no place for homosexuals. Himmler said, “Germany stands and falls with the purity of the race.” Gays and lesbians were interned in concentration camps, marked out with pink triangles for men and black triangles for lesbians (as with prostitutes). Lesbians were forced to work in the camp brothels, the logic being that repeated rape would act as a “cure”, and “Project Pink” was a strategy for slowly working gay men to death. In the words of one survivor, “That meant less food, more work, stricter supervision. If a prisoner with a pink triangle became sick, it spelled his doom. Admission to the clinic was forbidden.” The first authentic account of the experience of concentration camp internment for homosexuals appeared in 1954, when LD Classen von Neudegg wrote an account detailing his fear of entering the death mill at Klinker; he wrote of how gay men were rounded up and forced to drag corpses as they were marched into the camp and their deaths. Estimates are that 220,000 gays and lesbians were killed during the Holocaust – although this is thought to be a conservative figure.
The Holocaust could have been prevented. The period after the First World War was one of immense possibilities for liberation. Empires fell in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Workers’ councils ruled for a short period in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow and Petrograd. Britain was wracked with some of the biggest strikes the country had ever seen. Ireland was in the throes of civil war and national liberation movements swept across India and China. But the potential of these movements was not fulfilled - they ended with capitalism intact. Only in Russia did workers, briefly, take and hold power. The world was plunged into an economic crisis and the Second World War. Today the recession is again driving a rise in fascism and homophobia. The political vacuum created by the failings of the system could be filled by the right if the left and all those who want a world free from oppression don’t stand together and act. Unity is vital. We cannot and must not fall for the trick of blaming one another. Any division – gay against straight, black against white, Christian against Muslim – will make us all victims. The saying "United we stand, divided we fall" is intrinsically accurate, and we must not blame or scapegoat others for our own faults and issues. The appalling history of Nazi Germany is a chilling reminder of what happens when the ruling class fears for its future. The coming together of thousands of LGBT people and their supporters in the past few weeks shows that we are not giving up. We have a duty to make sure that history is not forgotten, and we can only do so united in solidarity. Fascism, and the death and destruction it brings, must never take hold again.
2007 saw the fortieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales - it took over a decade for Scotland and Northern Ireland to catch-up. Gay people had won the right to have sex: as long as you were both over 21, the curtains were shut, the doors closed, there was nobody else in the house and you weren't in the armed forces. Oddly enough heterosexuals have never had to fight for this very limited privilege. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act was the first victory for a nascent gay rights movement, but there were still many battles to be fought. Gay people could still, perfectly legally be refused service in a pub or shop, kicked out of their house by the landlord, refused a hotel room or turned down for a job on the grounds of their sexuality. What's more, gay people faced abuse and violence if they were ever to be open about their sexuality and lack of interest by the police if they were to ever report problems. These are all issues that have been faced by countless minority groups throughout history. All of them have won change by organising and fighting for their rights, and where they have achieved most success is when working with the labour movement.
This is where we see the history of the struggle for gay rights is markedly different from other civil rights movements. The Black Civil Rights movement in the USA won the most concessions from the ruling class by mass organising for strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience. This was a tactic not really open to the gay rights movement as gay people were not born into their own communities as racial minorities are, and therefore don't have a majority in any area in which they can exercise economic power. So the movement quickly got entrenched in holding pride marches: a tactic that held some power but that could not really effect genuine change on its own. Without the option of exercising their collective labour power to improve their legal rights, the gay rights movement never had an obvious reason to make meaningful links with trade unions. There are some examples where gay rights have been furthered by links with the labour movement, such as implementation of sex education including of sexual minorities by the Greater London Council in the 1980s (a policy that was quickly scrapped by Thatcher's section 28). But in general the lack of links, due to both the circumstances that the gay rights movement had to work within and the homophobia present in the left, was of detriment to the struggle for gay rights.
Although the government has made several key steps towards legal equality, in the shape of equalising the age of consent, civil partnerships and equal rights in work and in providing goods and services, it still fails to tackle the key places where homophobia takes place and often ruins people's lives. While parliament preaches about equality and respect working class gay people suffer continual discrimination and harassment in their local community, at work, at school, in the pub or even in their own houses. It is a horrible thing to have to worry about strangers' reactions when you are walking down the road with another man or woman, or to have to grin-and-bear homophobic comments at school, work or just out at the cinema or in the pub. These are huge problems facing gay people today. The gay rights organisation Stonewall has said that homophobic bullying is "endemic" in Britain's school, and although some well-meaning teachers try to combat it through education, schools tend to turn a blind eye to it. Little is done by schools and very little by the politicians. The bare truth of the matter is that bigotry serves to divide working class communities.
The constant presence of homophobia can easily create a feeling of isolation and fear, even if there is no direct threat or harassment. This can lead gay people into almost segregated lives in which their main social interactions, apart from work, are with other gay and lesbian people in gay pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants. Self-imposed social isolation of this type breeds further divisions and resentment among working class people, which only creates further hatred and perpetuates this cycle. The labour movement is becoming increasingly aware of issues effecting LGBT workers, with several unions including UNISON sponsoring pride marches, the TUC highlighting the issue of discrimination at work, and most importantly, fighting for the rights of gay workers. The most notable case of which was UNISON and AMICUS among others lodging legal action against the government over pension rights for gay couples. Discrimination because of someone's sexuality, as because of their race, gender or nationality, can only divide the working class and play into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Gay and lesbian people must organise their own fight for rights, but this can only be successful as part of a labour movement fighting for a socialist transformation of society. And only with socialism can come the complete disappearance of homophobia and realisation of full and equal rights for gay people.
In the most chilling example, the Holocaust, the Nazis slaughtered 11 million people, including six million Jews. This was not merely the act of a sick group of individuals but a carefully constructed ideological assault on German society. Sections of the ruling class thought Germany was getting out of control in the early 20th century. They saw the flourishing gay lifestyle in Berlin as a sign of a decadent society that had been brought to its knees by trade unionists and communists. Germany had seen the first homosexual rights movement, in response to the introduction of Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which made acts of sodomy illegal. Magnus Hirschfeld, father of the movement, established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 - it aimed at changing attitudes to homosexuality and scrapping the law. The campaign drew widespread support, particularly from socialists in the German Social Democratic Party. Between 1898 and 1914 over 100,000 books and pamphlets on sexuality were produced in the country.
Many believed that the proclamation of the German Republic after a revolution in 1918 would see the fall of Paragraph 175. This feeling had been bolstered by the 1917 revolution in Russia, which saw the complete legalisation of homosexuality and full rights for women and other minorities. Hirschfeld was so optimistic that he declared the newly founded Institute for Sexual Science, “the child of the revolution”. And the Golden Twenties that followed did usher in massive changes – from science and technology to rights for women, LGBT people and workers. A homosexual subculture flourished in Berlin as gay clubs and cabaret bars sprung up - anyone who saw the film Cabaret have a certain sees of the sexual liberation felt at that time. Although the law had not been repealed for gay men – as it had been for lesbian acts – there was little if any persecution of homosexuals. But while the work of the Institute continued, it remained relatively detached from political life at a time when German society was becoming increasingly polarised. Hirschfeld argued, “The royalist must be just as welcome a helper as the socialist republican...the communist as the bourgeois democrat.”
The lack of politics in the gay movement – the focus on the bar culture and lifestyle – meant that when the time came the movement had no role to play in helping shape the outcome of Germany’s political battles. As the economy slumped from 1929, a new militant right wing movement, led by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, grew rapidly in Germany. The mood had changed from an ambient solidarity within society, to one of hatred, division, intolerance and fear, propagated by the fabrications and propaganda the Nazis indoctrinated the masses with. Elements of the ruling and middle classes, alongside a layer of the top military personnel and government bureaucrats, turned to the fascists as they feared for their social and political positions. Although the Nazi Party vote increased dramatically – from 2.6 percent in 1928 to 37.3 percent in 1932 – the Nazis were still not in a position to take power on their own. Joseph Goebbels, architect of the attacks on German Jews, wrote in his journal that the forecast for the Nazis was gloomy. Why? Because the combined vote of the Communists and the Social Democrats outstripped that of the Nazis. Yet the call for left unity against fascism was never achieved - and the cost was greater than imagination would allow.
History often omits the slaughter of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, yet it was a central part of Hitler’s strategy to purge Germany of “undesirables” – Jews, the left, trade unionists, gypsies, the mentally ill and disabled people. Many gay and lesbian people inaccurately believed that they would be saved from persecution due to the prevalence of soldiers and other staff in the upper hierarchy of the party. Indeed one of Hitler’s closest allies, Ernest Rohm, was gay, and the Hitler Youth was dubbed the “homo youth”. This false sense of security was smashed when Hitler began his reign of terror. It started with the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute – which the Nazis declared “an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth”. Books, articles and information were carried out and thrown onto bonfires. A bust of Hirschfeld was removed, later to be publicly paraded and burnt. The extent to which Hitler was prepared to go to attack homosexuals was made apparent in June 1934. As part of a wider purge, homosexuals were removed from the party, and Rohm and dozens of officers were executed. Paragraph 175 was amended to list nine punishable acts, including embracing, kissing and even fantasies. Around 50,000 people were convicted, many ending up in the death camps.
Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, took up anti-homosexual work with a fanatical passion. He chillingly called for “an extinction of an abnormal life. It has to be removed just as we pull up stinging nettles, toss them on a heap and burn them.” The entire Nazi ideology was founded on the notion of the “master race” and the pseudoscience of eugenics – the creation of the model family raising model children. Motherhood and childbirth were rewarded. There was no place for homosexuals. Himmler said, “Germany stands and falls with the purity of the race.” Gays and lesbians were interned in concentration camps, marked out with pink triangles for men and black triangles for lesbians (as with prostitutes). Lesbians were forced to work in the camp brothels, the logic being that repeated rape would act as a “cure”, and “Project Pink” was a strategy for slowly working gay men to death. In the words of one survivor, “That meant less food, more work, stricter supervision. If a prisoner with a pink triangle became sick, it spelled his doom. Admission to the clinic was forbidden.” The first authentic account of the experience of concentration camp internment for homosexuals appeared in 1954, when LD Classen von Neudegg wrote an account detailing his fear of entering the death mill at Klinker; he wrote of how gay men were rounded up and forced to drag corpses as they were marched into the camp and their deaths. Estimates are that 220,000 gays and lesbians were killed during the Holocaust – although this is thought to be a conservative figure.
The Holocaust could have been prevented. The period after the First World War was one of immense possibilities for liberation. Empires fell in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Workers’ councils ruled for a short period in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow and Petrograd. Britain was wracked with some of the biggest strikes the country had ever seen. Ireland was in the throes of civil war and national liberation movements swept across India and China. But the potential of these movements was not fulfilled - they ended with capitalism intact. Only in Russia did workers, briefly, take and hold power. The world was plunged into an economic crisis and the Second World War. Today the recession is again driving a rise in fascism and homophobia. The political vacuum created by the failings of the system could be filled by the right if the left and all those who want a world free from oppression don’t stand together and act. Unity is vital. We cannot and must not fall for the trick of blaming one another. Any division – gay against straight, black against white, Christian against Muslim – will make us all victims. The saying "United we stand, divided we fall" is intrinsically accurate, and we must not blame or scapegoat others for our own faults and issues. The appalling history of Nazi Germany is a chilling reminder of what happens when the ruling class fears for its future. The coming together of thousands of LGBT people and their supporters in the past few weeks shows that we are not giving up. We have a duty to make sure that history is not forgotten, and we can only do so united in solidarity. Fascism, and the death and destruction it brings, must never take hold again.
2007 saw the fortieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales - it took over a decade for Scotland and Northern Ireland to catch-up. Gay people had won the right to have sex: as long as you were both over 21, the curtains were shut, the doors closed, there was nobody else in the house and you weren't in the armed forces. Oddly enough heterosexuals have never had to fight for this very limited privilege. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act was the first victory for a nascent gay rights movement, but there were still many battles to be fought. Gay people could still, perfectly legally be refused service in a pub or shop, kicked out of their house by the landlord, refused a hotel room or turned down for a job on the grounds of their sexuality. What's more, gay people faced abuse and violence if they were ever to be open about their sexuality and lack of interest by the police if they were to ever report problems. These are all issues that have been faced by countless minority groups throughout history. All of them have won change by organising and fighting for their rights, and where they have achieved most success is when working with the labour movement.
This is where we see the history of the struggle for gay rights is markedly different from other civil rights movements. The Black Civil Rights movement in the USA won the most concessions from the ruling class by mass organising for strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience. This was a tactic not really open to the gay rights movement as gay people were not born into their own communities as racial minorities are, and therefore don't have a majority in any area in which they can exercise economic power. So the movement quickly got entrenched in holding pride marches: a tactic that held some power but that could not really effect genuine change on its own. Without the option of exercising their collective labour power to improve their legal rights, the gay rights movement never had an obvious reason to make meaningful links with trade unions. There are some examples where gay rights have been furthered by links with the labour movement, such as implementation of sex education including of sexual minorities by the Greater London Council in the 1980s (a policy that was quickly scrapped by Thatcher's section 28). But in general the lack of links, due to both the circumstances that the gay rights movement had to work within and the homophobia present in the left, was of detriment to the struggle for gay rights.
Although the government has made several key steps towards legal equality, in the shape of equalising the age of consent, civil partnerships and equal rights in work and in providing goods and services, it still fails to tackle the key places where homophobia takes place and often ruins people's lives. While parliament preaches about equality and respect working class gay people suffer continual discrimination and harassment in their local community, at work, at school, in the pub or even in their own houses. It is a horrible thing to have to worry about strangers' reactions when you are walking down the road with another man or woman, or to have to grin-and-bear homophobic comments at school, work or just out at the cinema or in the pub. These are huge problems facing gay people today. The gay rights organisation Stonewall has said that homophobic bullying is "endemic" in Britain's school, and although some well-meaning teachers try to combat it through education, schools tend to turn a blind eye to it. Little is done by schools and very little by the politicians. The bare truth of the matter is that bigotry serves to divide working class communities.
The constant presence of homophobia can easily create a feeling of isolation and fear, even if there is no direct threat or harassment. This can lead gay people into almost segregated lives in which their main social interactions, apart from work, are with other gay and lesbian people in gay pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants. Self-imposed social isolation of this type breeds further divisions and resentment among working class people, which only creates further hatred and perpetuates this cycle. The labour movement is becoming increasingly aware of issues effecting LGBT workers, with several unions including UNISON sponsoring pride marches, the TUC highlighting the issue of discrimination at work, and most importantly, fighting for the rights of gay workers. The most notable case of which was UNISON and AMICUS among others lodging legal action against the government over pension rights for gay couples. Discrimination because of someone's sexuality, as because of their race, gender or nationality, can only divide the working class and play into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Gay and lesbian people must organise their own fight for rights, but this can only be successful as part of a labour movement fighting for a socialist transformation of society. And only with socialism can come the complete disappearance of homophobia and realisation of full and equal rights for gay people.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Papal visit invites intolerance
Pope Benedict XVI has criticised the Equality Bill today for violating "natural law". The former Hitler Youth member was thought to be referring to provisions in the bill which would have forced churches to employ gay staff, which were defeated by the House of Lords last week. The pontiff may also have been referring to laws which banned religious adoption agencies from refusing to serve gay couples. They were asked to abide by the new laws or close. In a message to 35 Catholic bishops in England and Wales, he said: “Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society." "Yet as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed." He urged bishops to defend the church's "moral teachings", saying that as the church offered the "truth", it could not be accused of restricting the freedom of others.
Today, the National Secular Society announced it was planning protests over the Pontiff's state-funded visit to the UK in September. NSS president Terry Sanderson estimated that the cost of his visit to taxpayers would be £20 million. He said: "If the Catholic Church wishes its leader to come here, it should pay for the visit itself. I am sure many others feel the same resentment as we do at the NSS at funding the presence of someone who wishes to impose a reactionary agenda of social change on us.” Gay groups, women's groups and pro-choice campaigners are expected to get involved with the protest. Recently, the Pope criticised Portugal's new gay marriage law, calling it an "attack" on the natural differences between men and women. In an end-of year address in 2008, he said that the existence of gay people threatens humanity as much as the destruction of the rainforests does and that "blurring" genders through acceptance of transgender people would kill off the human race. He has also attacked the use of condoms to tackle HIV, saying they may make the problem worse. This is the big problem with religion, or maybe with monotheistic religion – its adherents aren't content to just worship their god on a convenient day, they think their moral standards are superior to any other moral standard, which in turn gives them what they believe is the right to tell other people how to live. Pathetic. But it's precisely *why* we actually need an equality bill in the first place.
His predecessor beat himself with a belt and slept naked on the floor; his bishops have covered up the molestation of thousands, possibly millions of children; he wears white watered silk dresses, Belgian lace dusters, and Prada pumps. What gives this caricature of a human being any right to lecture the masses on moral principals or civil liberties? It is worth pointing out that the majority of Brits are not religious (66%) and only 10% go to church regularly (see vexen.co.uk/UK/religion.html). Between 1980 and 2000 the Church of England's attendance went down 29%. They are, like the Conservatives, begging to any 'traditional' minority to radicalise . Oh, and don't forget the 53 million South Americans killed by the Catholic Church. And the millions of AIDS-ridden civilians worldwide being told condoms make it worse, and that abstinence (which is proven to be ineffective) is the way forwards. Surely advocating celibacy and banning marriage of heterosexuals is the attack on "creation and the natural order". I'm talking about the Catholic priesthood. Apparently African Catholic priests often ignore this and just get married. Some Irish ones too. Since gay sex is, by definition, physically possible, and in most cases (like most straight sex) physically harmless, it is "natural" in the broader sense. This tells us next to nothing about whether sexual or emotional relationships are desirable. Common sense suggests that this has rather more to do with the way two people treat each other than it has with their gender.
The argument against gay relationships holds only if you believe that reproduction is the sole legitimate aim of sex, and then you would have to rail against all non vaginal sex (married or not) as well as sex between the elderly or infertile, married or not. And whatever you're views about the merits of gay relationships then if you profess to believe that sex is better in a loving and committed relationship, then attacking gay people for alleged promiscuity, while denying them the stability of marriage, is the greatest hypocrisy of all. Besides which, the Pope himself is on especially shaky ground given his vow of celibacy. After all, whichever way you look at it, leaving your sexual organs totally unused, is the most "unnatural" behaviour of all. This is the same pope who publicly supported a priest claiming who thinks Hurricane Katrina was "divine retribution" on New Orleans for being tolerant towards gay and lesbian people - and was subsequently made a bishop! Things like this occur and they wonder why their churches sit half empty across the globe. People are turning away from this kind of hatred and bigotry. The church will need to start a war soon to cleanse out those with any common sense. If we had no religion, this world would be a much better place. More people die in this world because of someones religous belief than all than any other cause known to man.
Respected medical journal The Lancet has criticised Pope Benedict XVI over his recent comments on condoms and AIDS and demanded he make a retraction. On a recent visit to Africa, the pontiff claimed the use of condoms "aggravates" the spread of the disease. In an editorial, the journal said: "By saying that condoms exacerbate the problem of HIV/AIDS, the Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue. Whether the Pope's error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. But the comment still stands, and the Vatican's attempts to tweak the Pope's words, further tampering with the truth, is not the way forward." When any influential person, be it a religious or political figure, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.
The Pope's intervention over the Government's Equality Bill is unhelpful. Moreover, His suggestions to visiting English and Welsh Catholic bishops that the Bill “violates the natural law”, and that they resist it with “missionary zeal”, will do little to win over public opinion. The Bill is a sprawling piece of legislation aimed at tidying up dozens of equality laws tackling discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, sexual orientation and age. However, it will also push further; at issue are clauses that relate to churches' hiring practices. The Church of England, for example, has claimed that the new law could prevent church schools from hiring a practising Christian as headteacher. Yet critics of the Bill on these grounds are misinformed. Ministers have made clear that the law will not affect faith schools, which are covered by separate legislation. It will also not affect churches' hiring for religious posts, such as vicars. But it would extend anti-discrimination rights to non-religious jobs, and that is fair: there is no reason why, say, a gay church cleaner should not have the same protection as a cleaner in an office.
The Pope's intervention is more a reflection of previous battles, notably the 2007 anti-discrimination legislation from which ministers refused to exempt Catholic adoption agencies on the basis that they discriminated against gays. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that issue, the churches should have nothing to fear from the new Bill. And few people will welcome the spectacle of the leader of what is, in England and Wales, a small religious minority throwing his weight around to alter laws being voted on by the nation's elected representatives. Pious, inonsistent and obnoxious as ever, he will incite a lot of division on his arrival - and will revel in it. His frail exterior hides the dark beating heart of a monster who attempted to cover up systematic child abuse in Catholic institutions whilst daring to keep in his presence, the moral high ground. I am alarmed and incensed by this - we had banned the hateful religious rednecks at the Westoboro Baptist Church in America, and yet the Fred Phelps in a frock claiming to be the saviour of humanity, or at least the "superiors" in his jaded eyes is allowed to spread his perilous message across Britain. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get a few used condoms to throw at him in celebration of his visit.
Today, the National Secular Society announced it was planning protests over the Pontiff's state-funded visit to the UK in September. NSS president Terry Sanderson estimated that the cost of his visit to taxpayers would be £20 million. He said: "If the Catholic Church wishes its leader to come here, it should pay for the visit itself. I am sure many others feel the same resentment as we do at the NSS at funding the presence of someone who wishes to impose a reactionary agenda of social change on us.” Gay groups, women's groups and pro-choice campaigners are expected to get involved with the protest. Recently, the Pope criticised Portugal's new gay marriage law, calling it an "attack" on the natural differences between men and women. In an end-of year address in 2008, he said that the existence of gay people threatens humanity as much as the destruction of the rainforests does and that "blurring" genders through acceptance of transgender people would kill off the human race. He has also attacked the use of condoms to tackle HIV, saying they may make the problem worse. This is the big problem with religion, or maybe with monotheistic religion – its adherents aren't content to just worship their god on a convenient day, they think their moral standards are superior to any other moral standard, which in turn gives them what they believe is the right to tell other people how to live. Pathetic. But it's precisely *why* we actually need an equality bill in the first place.
His predecessor beat himself with a belt and slept naked on the floor; his bishops have covered up the molestation of thousands, possibly millions of children; he wears white watered silk dresses, Belgian lace dusters, and Prada pumps. What gives this caricature of a human being any right to lecture the masses on moral principals or civil liberties? It is worth pointing out that the majority of Brits are not religious (66%) and only 10% go to church regularly (see vexen.co.uk/UK/religion.html). Between 1980 and 2000 the Church of England's attendance went down 29%. They are, like the Conservatives, begging to any 'traditional' minority to radicalise . Oh, and don't forget the 53 million South Americans killed by the Catholic Church. And the millions of AIDS-ridden civilians worldwide being told condoms make it worse, and that abstinence (which is proven to be ineffective) is the way forwards. Surely advocating celibacy and banning marriage of heterosexuals is the attack on "creation and the natural order". I'm talking about the Catholic priesthood. Apparently African Catholic priests often ignore this and just get married. Some Irish ones too. Since gay sex is, by definition, physically possible, and in most cases (like most straight sex) physically harmless, it is "natural" in the broader sense. This tells us next to nothing about whether sexual or emotional relationships are desirable. Common sense suggests that this has rather more to do with the way two people treat each other than it has with their gender.
The argument against gay relationships holds only if you believe that reproduction is the sole legitimate aim of sex, and then you would have to rail against all non vaginal sex (married or not) as well as sex between the elderly or infertile, married or not. And whatever you're views about the merits of gay relationships then if you profess to believe that sex is better in a loving and committed relationship, then attacking gay people for alleged promiscuity, while denying them the stability of marriage, is the greatest hypocrisy of all. Besides which, the Pope himself is on especially shaky ground given his vow of celibacy. After all, whichever way you look at it, leaving your sexual organs totally unused, is the most "unnatural" behaviour of all. This is the same pope who publicly supported a priest claiming who thinks Hurricane Katrina was "divine retribution" on New Orleans for being tolerant towards gay and lesbian people - and was subsequently made a bishop! Things like this occur and they wonder why their churches sit half empty across the globe. People are turning away from this kind of hatred and bigotry. The church will need to start a war soon to cleanse out those with any common sense. If we had no religion, this world would be a much better place. More people die in this world because of someones religous belief than all than any other cause known to man.
Respected medical journal The Lancet has criticised Pope Benedict XVI over his recent comments on condoms and AIDS and demanded he make a retraction. On a recent visit to Africa, the pontiff claimed the use of condoms "aggravates" the spread of the disease. In an editorial, the journal said: "By saying that condoms exacerbate the problem of HIV/AIDS, the Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue. Whether the Pope's error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. But the comment still stands, and the Vatican's attempts to tweak the Pope's words, further tampering with the truth, is not the way forward." When any influential person, be it a religious or political figure, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.
The Pope's intervention over the Government's Equality Bill is unhelpful. Moreover, His suggestions to visiting English and Welsh Catholic bishops that the Bill “violates the natural law”, and that they resist it with “missionary zeal”, will do little to win over public opinion. The Bill is a sprawling piece of legislation aimed at tidying up dozens of equality laws tackling discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, sexual orientation and age. However, it will also push further; at issue are clauses that relate to churches' hiring practices. The Church of England, for example, has claimed that the new law could prevent church schools from hiring a practising Christian as headteacher. Yet critics of the Bill on these grounds are misinformed. Ministers have made clear that the law will not affect faith schools, which are covered by separate legislation. It will also not affect churches' hiring for religious posts, such as vicars. But it would extend anti-discrimination rights to non-religious jobs, and that is fair: there is no reason why, say, a gay church cleaner should not have the same protection as a cleaner in an office.
The Pope's intervention is more a reflection of previous battles, notably the 2007 anti-discrimination legislation from which ministers refused to exempt Catholic adoption agencies on the basis that they discriminated against gays. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that issue, the churches should have nothing to fear from the new Bill. And few people will welcome the spectacle of the leader of what is, in England and Wales, a small religious minority throwing his weight around to alter laws being voted on by the nation's elected representatives. Pious, inonsistent and obnoxious as ever, he will incite a lot of division on his arrival - and will revel in it. His frail exterior hides the dark beating heart of a monster who attempted to cover up systematic child abuse in Catholic institutions whilst daring to keep in his presence, the moral high ground. I am alarmed and incensed by this - we had banned the hateful religious rednecks at the Westoboro Baptist Church in America, and yet the Fred Phelps in a frock claiming to be the saviour of humanity, or at least the "superiors" in his jaded eyes is allowed to spread his perilous message across Britain. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get a few used condoms to throw at him in celebration of his visit.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Why not fight religious bigotry?
Monday night's parliamentary debate on the equality bill was one of the poorest and most ill-informed I have ever heard in the House of Lords. Despite Lord Lester's eloquent explanation of the bill, and its duty to conform to the European framework directive from which it sprang, there seemed to be a determination among the Christian peers and bishops (of which there was a surfeit) to ignore our obligations to the EU as a member state. Indeed, Lord Tebbit put it most baldly when he said: "We have a choice tonight – whether we walk in fear of the law of the Lord or the law of Brussels. I know which way I am going.""Religious freedom" seems to give these Christians an absolute right to ignore the law if they dislike it. The bishops were particularly culpable on this. As they argued for the removal of the need for a proportionate balancing of freedoms when freedoms collide (as they do with religion and gay rights), Lord Lester told them "Amendments 98 and 99 would remove the principle of proportionality. That is a general principle of European law by which the United Kingdom is bound. The amendments would remove that principle as regards differences of treatment made to comply with the doctrines of a religion. As has been said, there are a number of exemptions for religious requirements in paragraph 2 of Schedule 9 relating to sex, marriage, sexual orientation and so on. For example, in certain circumstances it is permissible, for the purposes of religious employment, for a difference of treatment to be made in accordance with a requirement either not to be of a particular sex or relating to sexual orientation – quite right, too."
Under the bill, these exemptions must be applied in a manner that is a proportionate means of complying with the doctrines of religion. Removing proportionality here, as these amendments seek to do, would mean that any religious organisation could implement the requirements without a sense of proportion and in breach of the general principle of European law. In other words, the organisation could lawfully use its powers in a way that was excessive. That would inevitably lead to complex and costly litigation, as happened in the Amicus case, in our and the European courts, the outcome of which would be to require the principle of proportionality to be applied as part of the law of the land, whatever the movers of these amendments and the seven Bishops now present may say. It is the law under European law and it is the law of the land. Proportionality is required whether they like it or not. The right for religious bodies to discriminate against gay employees is already written into the equality bill. The government was simply seeking to define the limits (ie you can demand a priest be of the faith, but not caretakers, cleaners, secretaries etc). It insisted that there was no change in the law as it had been written into the sexual orientation regulations of 2003, just a clarification.
According to a reasoned opinion (a sort of legal warning that they had not implemented the directive correctly) issued by the European commission, the government has already gone too far in trying to accommodate religious demands. The European commissioner warned the government that if it didn't narrow the exemptions given to religious groups, it might end up in the European court of justice. A complaint from the National Secular Society had led to this warning and we intend to press the commission to carry out that threat. But this debate had followed an intensive lobbying by the newly-burgeoning religious right in this country. The Christian Institute and Christian Concern for Our Nation, as well as the Church of England and the Catholic bishops conference, have mounted between them a formidable campaign claiming that the human rights of religious people are under threat. "Religious liberty" in this instance seems to mean the freedom to visit injustice and discrimination upon those who do not abide by the doctrines of your religion. To most people this would seem reasonable. "If you aren't a Christian, why do you want to work for the church?" they ask. "And why shouldn't the church restrict employment to those who agree with its teachings? You wouldn't have a Tory working for the Labour party."
The church is a major employer, often using public money to run things like nursing homes or day centres. Why shouldn't it be obliged to obey the law that every other employer does in relation to treating employees fairly? I believe that the decision last night was made on the basis of misinformation and panic-mongering. The religious lobby had made claims that the Catholic church would have to accept women priests; the Archbishop of York said he would no longer qualify as a clergyman under the terms of the bill; the bishop of Winchester even claimed that saying "God bless you" could result in Christians being prosecuted for harassment. But, if figures in the British social attitudes survey (published tomorrow) are to be believed, only 7% of people in this country consider themselves to be "very religious" and 67% think that religious leaders should stay out of political decision-making. On that basis, the government needs to give serious consideration to getting rid of the bishops' bench. Meanwhile, it seems the tactics used so successfully by the religious right in the US have now been introduced into this country. After all, the Christian Institute's strap line is "Christian influence in a secular world" and, after many false starts and humiliating defeats, it seems to have scored a significant success that may prove to be a turning point in its fortunes. If Christian influence is really a licence to practice bigotry at public expense, then it is time for all those armchair secularists to start manning the barricades.
Under the bill, these exemptions must be applied in a manner that is a proportionate means of complying with the doctrines of religion. Removing proportionality here, as these amendments seek to do, would mean that any religious organisation could implement the requirements without a sense of proportion and in breach of the general principle of European law. In other words, the organisation could lawfully use its powers in a way that was excessive. That would inevitably lead to complex and costly litigation, as happened in the Amicus case, in our and the European courts, the outcome of which would be to require the principle of proportionality to be applied as part of the law of the land, whatever the movers of these amendments and the seven Bishops now present may say. It is the law under European law and it is the law of the land. Proportionality is required whether they like it or not. The right for religious bodies to discriminate against gay employees is already written into the equality bill. The government was simply seeking to define the limits (ie you can demand a priest be of the faith, but not caretakers, cleaners, secretaries etc). It insisted that there was no change in the law as it had been written into the sexual orientation regulations of 2003, just a clarification.
According to a reasoned opinion (a sort of legal warning that they had not implemented the directive correctly) issued by the European commission, the government has already gone too far in trying to accommodate religious demands. The European commissioner warned the government that if it didn't narrow the exemptions given to religious groups, it might end up in the European court of justice. A complaint from the National Secular Society had led to this warning and we intend to press the commission to carry out that threat. But this debate had followed an intensive lobbying by the newly-burgeoning religious right in this country. The Christian Institute and Christian Concern for Our Nation, as well as the Church of England and the Catholic bishops conference, have mounted between them a formidable campaign claiming that the human rights of religious people are under threat. "Religious liberty" in this instance seems to mean the freedom to visit injustice and discrimination upon those who do not abide by the doctrines of your religion. To most people this would seem reasonable. "If you aren't a Christian, why do you want to work for the church?" they ask. "And why shouldn't the church restrict employment to those who agree with its teachings? You wouldn't have a Tory working for the Labour party."
The church is a major employer, often using public money to run things like nursing homes or day centres. Why shouldn't it be obliged to obey the law that every other employer does in relation to treating employees fairly? I believe that the decision last night was made on the basis of misinformation and panic-mongering. The religious lobby had made claims that the Catholic church would have to accept women priests; the Archbishop of York said he would no longer qualify as a clergyman under the terms of the bill; the bishop of Winchester even claimed that saying "God bless you" could result in Christians being prosecuted for harassment. But, if figures in the British social attitudes survey (published tomorrow) are to be believed, only 7% of people in this country consider themselves to be "very religious" and 67% think that religious leaders should stay out of political decision-making. On that basis, the government needs to give serious consideration to getting rid of the bishops' bench. Meanwhile, it seems the tactics used so successfully by the religious right in the US have now been introduced into this country. After all, the Christian Institute's strap line is "Christian influence in a secular world" and, after many false starts and humiliating defeats, it seems to have scored a significant success that may prove to be a turning point in its fortunes. If Christian influence is really a licence to practice bigotry at public expense, then it is time for all those armchair secularists to start manning the barricades.
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Tory Britain bad news for LGBT voters
Nearly a third of David Cameron's shadow cabinet voted against gay rights legislation at some point over the last two parliaments, demonstrating their "shameful" record in tackling discrimination, according to the Liberal Democrats. They have compiled research on four examples of legislation where many Tories voted against equal rights laws. Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, said progress on gay rights would "grind to a halt" if the Conservatives won the election. "The Tory record on supporting gay rights is nothing short of shameful," he said. The Lib Dem research shows Ten out of 32 members of the shadow cabinet voted against at least one piece of gay rights legislation. The shadow Europe minister, Mark Francois, voted against all four. David Cameron, Kenneth Clarke, Mark Francois, Chris Grayling, William Hague, Francis Maude, Patrick McLoughlin, Andrew Mitchell, George Osborne and Sir George Young voted against legislation to repeal section 28, which had banned local authorities and schools from "promoting" homosexuality, in 2003. Nineteen members of the shadow cabinet joined the attempt to block the equality bill, which included a requirement for all publicly funded bodies to promote equality.
Four of the shadow cabinet voted against powers which passed through the house in March 2007 giving the secretary of state the ability to bring in regulations with a new definition of discrimination and harassment on grounds of sexual orientation. Thirty-five Tory MPs voted to allow only heterosexual married couples to adopt in 2002 and a third also voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations in March 2007, allowing the government to make regulations defining discrimination and harassment on grounds of sexual orientation. This week Nick Clegg has made a claim for some of the UK's sizeable "pink vote" with an interview in Attitude magazine. The Lib Dem leader is working hard to distinguish himself from the Conservatives after Cameron used his new year message to appeal to Lib Dems and claim he has turned the Tory party into the natural home for "liberal Conservatives". Clegg proposed a series of measures including reversing the ban on gay men being allowed to give blood; a requirement that faith schools implement "anti-homophobia bullying policies" and teach that homosexuality is "normal and harmless"; a change in the law to allow civil partnerships to be regarded as marriage; and a guarantee of asylum to refugees who have fled a country because of persecution over their sexual orientation.
The Conservative Party's election manifesto promises that married couples and gay couples in civil partnerships will receive tax breaks within the first five years of parliament. Tory leader David Cameron has been careful to include civil partners in remarks about the proposed benefits. The Daily Mail reports that the manifesto, to be released on Friday, contains a "cast-iron pledge" to give financial benefits to gay and straight couples who stay together. Cameron was forced to admit he "messed up" over the plans, when he said in an interview recently he "hoped" to implement the tax break changes after promising he would. However, he has not given clear details of how the scheme will work, such as what would happen in the case of a couple who divorced or had their civil partnership dissolved. Labour has attacked the plans, saying they make other types of families, such as separated ones, "second class". Other critics have queried whether a small financial incentive would persuade couples to stay together. Unlike other European countries such as Spain and Portugal, gays cannot marry in the UK. Instead, they can have civil partnerships, which grant them all the rights and benefits of marriage without the name.
Forgive me for being a cynical homosexual, but a leapord doesn't change its spots; chances are the Tories will rush to destroy the civil liberties of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people with the greatest of swift ease. Something tells me (perhaps queer instinct) that a grovelling apology for Section 28 by the same man who aonly a few years previously wanted to keep it in, is nothing more than an opportunistic grab at the voters. Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has said "a deep strain of homophobia still exists on the Conservative benches". Mr Bradshaw, one of three gay men currently in the cabinet, made the comments as a new poll suggested more gay people were turning to the Tories. Chris Bryant, another gay minister, said: "If gays vote Tory they will rue the day very soon." Of course they profusely denied saying, David Cameron and the Conservative Party have made clear they do not believe that anybody should be disadvantaged on the grounds of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation. But what is the truth about our Conservative party in regards to LGBT equality? Are they our friend or foe in the gay world? And though Labour has dedicated massive efforts for LGBT equality progress, will the Tories be the same - or perhaps better?
Roger Helmer, Conservative MEP for the East Midlands, wrote on his blog: “‘Homophobia’ is merely a propaganda device designed to denigrate and stigmatise those holding conventional opinions, which have been held by most people through most of recorded history. It is frightening evidence of the way in which political correctness is threatening our freedom.” Helmer, who is honorary chairman of the right-wing Freedom Association, added: “It is creating ‘thought crimes’, where merely to hold a conventional opinion is seen, in itself, to be unacceptable and reprehensible. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. I imagined being verbally and physically abused for being gay. Becoming self-loathing, depressed and suicidal was a figment of my imagination, and I'm actually part of a pseudo-communist conspiracy to take over the world. I admit that not only did this enrage and sadden me, it also made me feel sorry for the sheer idiocy of this individual. Nobody is born with prejudice, they learn it, so why should we put up with the preachings of a silly Tory toff anyway? It seems alarmingly close to the far-right views on homosexuality; now THAT is something worth concern.
David Cameron has insisted the Tories' fascist Polish allies in the European Parliament are not homophobic, even though they oppose gay marriage. Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, who has been accused of homophobia, has said he would consider supporting civil partnerships and will attend Conservative Pride next year. Kaminski, who is a politician for the Law and Justice Party, is the president of the Tories' new bloc in Europe. On the accusation that he used the word 'fags' in a television interview in 2000, Kaminski told interviewer Iain Dale: "I used a word that is un-transferable into English, which homosexual people feel is offensive. So I said that I would never use it again, but it was in common usage at the time – even by the leftist politicians in Poland. We just discovered that the leftwing leader of the Polish parliament during an inquiry meeting used the same word about homosexuals. "Today, we know more about homosexuals, and because they felt offended I said I would never repeat such words, and I think we have to respect people who feel that the language we are using is somehow offensive, and respect their right to be treated with civility."
Cameron also strongly hinted that Ian Duncan Smith would be families and social justice minister if Tories win the next election. This is the same IDS that voted to restore the discriminatory Section 28 policy in, and also strongly opposed gay rights including protection against discrimination. Mr Duncan Smith's backing for the clause, in a free vote, was immediately condemned by modernising Tory MPs and gay rights groups. Stonewall accused him of joining the "bigots" and of being a member of "a small, sad and isolated axis of prejudice". John Bercow, the leading Tory moderniser who voted against the amendment to bring back Section 28, described Mr Duncan Smith's vote as "a desperately backward step". He said: "It's very sad and rather shocking that Iain voted to reinstate a thoroughly offensive piece of legislation. I applauded Iain when he said that the Conservative party should review its stance on Section 28 because Section 28 sent out a message to gay people that Conservatives disliked them. That was true then and it is true now." The Conservative leader was one of 77 MPs most of them Tories to back the restoration of Section 28 to Welsh and English law. The move was defeated by a coal-ition of Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs.
The frontbench Tories, Michael Howard and Michael Ancram were among those to vote with the party leader for an amendment to the local government bill tabled by the former Home Office Minister Ann Widdecombe. During a heated debate, Conservative MPs openly clashed in the chamber. Edward Leigh, the chairman of the public accounts committee, said that Section 28 should be restored because homosexuality was "wrong". "The reason I have put down an amendment to retain Section 28 is that I believe it is right and it represents the views of a majority of the British people," he said. Miss Widdecombe, who has been a staunch opponent of liberalising the law on homosexual rights, was backed in the debate by Julian Brazier, the frontbench Tory MP for Canterbury and Andrew Selous, the MP for South-West Bedfordshire. The Tory frontbench, including David Davis, the former party chairman, attempted to unite the divided party ranks with a "compromise amendment" which would reform sex education in schools. The amendment would have made it a legal obligation to give parents a right to a ballot on the materials used in their children's sex education. Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrat local government spokesman, attacked the Tory plan for ballots as a 'recipe for homophobic behaviour on a grand scale'.
A Tory leader who branded a £400,000 grant to a Bristol gay youth group as an “outrageous waste of money” has ignored calls for his resignation. Critics of a provincial Progressive Conservative party promise to publicly fund religious schools say the plan will only further entrench homophobia. I've probably given you, dear reader, enough evidence to show that the Tories are bigoted, regressive old farts - business as usual in their dreamy world of elitist superiority. In 2007 they attempted to blockade a gay adoption law. Is he opposing it because his party doesn't agree with homosexuality, or is it because he feels it isn't the child's best interests? Or are those two views equal anyway? It is always going to be better for a child to be brought up by a loving couple than in "care". Let's face it, there are not enough heterosexual couples coming forward to adopt (why don't people adopt instead of having a fourth or fifth child of their own?). So, if gay couples are keen to help bring up unwanted children then this should be welcomed. Obviously the old-fashioned CONservatives are still trotting out their prejudices to deny equal civil liberties to minorities. All I can say is God help us all if these knuckle-dragging apes get into power in May. And God help everyone who believed the Tories had started to listen and take note.
Four of the shadow cabinet voted against powers which passed through the house in March 2007 giving the secretary of state the ability to bring in regulations with a new definition of discrimination and harassment on grounds of sexual orientation. Thirty-five Tory MPs voted to allow only heterosexual married couples to adopt in 2002 and a third also voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations in March 2007, allowing the government to make regulations defining discrimination and harassment on grounds of sexual orientation. This week Nick Clegg has made a claim for some of the UK's sizeable "pink vote" with an interview in Attitude magazine. The Lib Dem leader is working hard to distinguish himself from the Conservatives after Cameron used his new year message to appeal to Lib Dems and claim he has turned the Tory party into the natural home for "liberal Conservatives". Clegg proposed a series of measures including reversing the ban on gay men being allowed to give blood; a requirement that faith schools implement "anti-homophobia bullying policies" and teach that homosexuality is "normal and harmless"; a change in the law to allow civil partnerships to be regarded as marriage; and a guarantee of asylum to refugees who have fled a country because of persecution over their sexual orientation.
The Conservative Party's election manifesto promises that married couples and gay couples in civil partnerships will receive tax breaks within the first five years of parliament. Tory leader David Cameron has been careful to include civil partners in remarks about the proposed benefits. The Daily Mail reports that the manifesto, to be released on Friday, contains a "cast-iron pledge" to give financial benefits to gay and straight couples who stay together. Cameron was forced to admit he "messed up" over the plans, when he said in an interview recently he "hoped" to implement the tax break changes after promising he would. However, he has not given clear details of how the scheme will work, such as what would happen in the case of a couple who divorced or had their civil partnership dissolved. Labour has attacked the plans, saying they make other types of families, such as separated ones, "second class". Other critics have queried whether a small financial incentive would persuade couples to stay together. Unlike other European countries such as Spain and Portugal, gays cannot marry in the UK. Instead, they can have civil partnerships, which grant them all the rights and benefits of marriage without the name.
Forgive me for being a cynical homosexual, but a leapord doesn't change its spots; chances are the Tories will rush to destroy the civil liberties of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people with the greatest of swift ease. Something tells me (perhaps queer instinct) that a grovelling apology for Section 28 by the same man who aonly a few years previously wanted to keep it in, is nothing more than an opportunistic grab at the voters. Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has said "a deep strain of homophobia still exists on the Conservative benches". Mr Bradshaw, one of three gay men currently in the cabinet, made the comments as a new poll suggested more gay people were turning to the Tories. Chris Bryant, another gay minister, said: "If gays vote Tory they will rue the day very soon." Of course they profusely denied saying, David Cameron and the Conservative Party have made clear they do not believe that anybody should be disadvantaged on the grounds of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation. But what is the truth about our Conservative party in regards to LGBT equality? Are they our friend or foe in the gay world? And though Labour has dedicated massive efforts for LGBT equality progress, will the Tories be the same - or perhaps better?
Roger Helmer, Conservative MEP for the East Midlands, wrote on his blog: “‘Homophobia’ is merely a propaganda device designed to denigrate and stigmatise those holding conventional opinions, which have been held by most people through most of recorded history. It is frightening evidence of the way in which political correctness is threatening our freedom.” Helmer, who is honorary chairman of the right-wing Freedom Association, added: “It is creating ‘thought crimes’, where merely to hold a conventional opinion is seen, in itself, to be unacceptable and reprehensible. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. I imagined being verbally and physically abused for being gay. Becoming self-loathing, depressed and suicidal was a figment of my imagination, and I'm actually part of a pseudo-communist conspiracy to take over the world. I admit that not only did this enrage and sadden me, it also made me feel sorry for the sheer idiocy of this individual. Nobody is born with prejudice, they learn it, so why should we put up with the preachings of a silly Tory toff anyway? It seems alarmingly close to the far-right views on homosexuality; now THAT is something worth concern.
David Cameron has insisted the Tories' fascist Polish allies in the European Parliament are not homophobic, even though they oppose gay marriage. Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, who has been accused of homophobia, has said he would consider supporting civil partnerships and will attend Conservative Pride next year. Kaminski, who is a politician for the Law and Justice Party, is the president of the Tories' new bloc in Europe. On the accusation that he used the word 'fags' in a television interview in 2000, Kaminski told interviewer Iain Dale: "I used a word that is un-transferable into English, which homosexual people feel is offensive. So I said that I would never use it again, but it was in common usage at the time – even by the leftist politicians in Poland. We just discovered that the leftwing leader of the Polish parliament during an inquiry meeting used the same word about homosexuals. "Today, we know more about homosexuals, and because they felt offended I said I would never repeat such words, and I think we have to respect people who feel that the language we are using is somehow offensive, and respect their right to be treated with civility."
Cameron also strongly hinted that Ian Duncan Smith would be families and social justice minister if Tories win the next election. This is the same IDS that voted to restore the discriminatory Section 28 policy in, and also strongly opposed gay rights including protection against discrimination. Mr Duncan Smith's backing for the clause, in a free vote, was immediately condemned by modernising Tory MPs and gay rights groups. Stonewall accused him of joining the "bigots" and of being a member of "a small, sad and isolated axis of prejudice". John Bercow, the leading Tory moderniser who voted against the amendment to bring back Section 28, described Mr Duncan Smith's vote as "a desperately backward step". He said: "It's very sad and rather shocking that Iain voted to reinstate a thoroughly offensive piece of legislation. I applauded Iain when he said that the Conservative party should review its stance on Section 28 because Section 28 sent out a message to gay people that Conservatives disliked them. That was true then and it is true now." The Conservative leader was one of 77 MPs most of them Tories to back the restoration of Section 28 to Welsh and English law. The move was defeated by a coal-ition of Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs.
The frontbench Tories, Michael Howard and Michael Ancram were among those to vote with the party leader for an amendment to the local government bill tabled by the former Home Office Minister Ann Widdecombe. During a heated debate, Conservative MPs openly clashed in the chamber. Edward Leigh, the chairman of the public accounts committee, said that Section 28 should be restored because homosexuality was "wrong". "The reason I have put down an amendment to retain Section 28 is that I believe it is right and it represents the views of a majority of the British people," he said. Miss Widdecombe, who has been a staunch opponent of liberalising the law on homosexual rights, was backed in the debate by Julian Brazier, the frontbench Tory MP for Canterbury and Andrew Selous, the MP for South-West Bedfordshire. The Tory frontbench, including David Davis, the former party chairman, attempted to unite the divided party ranks with a "compromise amendment" which would reform sex education in schools. The amendment would have made it a legal obligation to give parents a right to a ballot on the materials used in their children's sex education. Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrat local government spokesman, attacked the Tory plan for ballots as a 'recipe for homophobic behaviour on a grand scale'.
A Tory leader who branded a £400,000 grant to a Bristol gay youth group as an “outrageous waste of money” has ignored calls for his resignation. Critics of a provincial Progressive Conservative party promise to publicly fund religious schools say the plan will only further entrench homophobia. I've probably given you, dear reader, enough evidence to show that the Tories are bigoted, regressive old farts - business as usual in their dreamy world of elitist superiority. In 2007 they attempted to blockade a gay adoption law. Is he opposing it because his party doesn't agree with homosexuality, or is it because he feels it isn't the child's best interests? Or are those two views equal anyway? It is always going to be better for a child to be brought up by a loving couple than in "care". Let's face it, there are not enough heterosexual couples coming forward to adopt (why don't people adopt instead of having a fourth or fifth child of their own?). So, if gay couples are keen to help bring up unwanted children then this should be welcomed. Obviously the old-fashioned CONservatives are still trotting out their prejudices to deny equal civil liberties to minorities. All I can say is God help us all if these knuckle-dragging apes get into power in May. And God help everyone who believed the Tories had started to listen and take note.
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