‘Gay poster boy’ raises hackles

Bishop Gene Robinson is to speak at the Greenbelt Festival at Cheltenham Racecourse – a sort of Christian Pop Festival for young Christians who don’t feel at home in established and somewhat reactionary Churches (who does?)

Oh dear – and gay groups OuterSpace and Journey will also be leading worship at the festival which takes place on 28—31 Aug 2009.

That’s much too gay, say the conservative wing of the Anglicans.

Hardline conservatives, in Anglicanism and elsewhere, are concerned that many other evangelicals are now adopting an affirming position towards lesbian and gay people , arguing that the Bible and tradition cannot be legitimately used to support discrimination and bigotry, writes Ekklesia.

In other words, as I have written before, they know they are losing the argument, and don’t like that one little bit.

Kissed off in El Paso

Five gay men who kissed each other in a restaurant in El Paso got sworn at by a security guard and then police threatened to charge them with a law which has already been deleted as unconstitutional. Later, an El Paso police spokesman thought the restaurant can refuse service to anyone and the men could have been charged with criminal trespass, reports the El Paso Times.

One of the men submitted a complaint to the El Paso Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division. Police, meanwhile, have admitted handling the situation poorly. The restaurant owners and security company, All American International Security, have remained silent on the matter.

Go somewhere where you are welcome!

Looks okay from this distance…

Lords kick the boot in yet again

Peers today defeated the Government’s attempt to overturn a “free speech” defence to the law on homophobic hatred, reports The Independent. Tory former Home Secretary Lord Waddington’s motion to uphold the provision was passed by 186 votes to 133, which is a majority of 53. Tory and Liberal Democrat peers were given a free vote.

Don’t scribble the tree pink then

Labour’s Chris Bryant has responded in the Guardian to Tory Nick Herbert’s claims that the Conservatives are cuddly and love gays and lesbians. Like me he is somewhat sceptical and goes more by the evidence of not what they say, but what they have done, and what they continue to do.

And then of course there’s the equality bill. Herbert and Alan Duncan didn’t turn up to the vote for its second reading; however, hundreds of Conservative MPs remembered to turn up to oppose equality. That includes almost the entire Conservative frontbench, including Michael Gove, Phillip Hammond, Dominic Grieve and Chris Grayling.

And in Europe, Conservative MEPs failed to support an anti-discrimination directive in April this year. Cameron has pulled Tory MEPs from the centre of European debate into the outer margins of the right. How is this change?

You can tell there is an election coming soon, can’t you.

A long road indeed

Peter Bradshaw writing in the Guardian after seeing the new Bruno film, compares the Britain of today with the Britain of the 1970s and the Mary Whitehouse inspired prosecution of Gay News for blasphemy.

Ah yes, I remember it well. All that fuss over a little poem I read and thought very little of.

But oh God, how awful the Gay News trial was: one of the meanest, nastiest, pettiest things ever to have occurred in British public life, and one of the unfunniest things about that remarkably unfunny decade. Francis Wheen wrote that if the 60s were a wild weekend, and the 80s were a hectic day in the office, then the 70s were a long Sunday afternoon and evening: filled with boredom and vague, nagging dread. The Gay News row epitomised the sheer loathesomeness of the time, a Life On Mars that was no Life at all.

Yes indeed – I remember it very well – a time in which we lived in limbo, neither legal or illegal, in a grey shadow world. I never want to go back.

Catholic adoption charity can appeal

Catholic Care has been granted leave to appeal to the High Court against seven out of fourteen points of the Charity Tribunal’s recent decision not to allow it to discriminate against gay people, reports Charity Finance. The seven points that are allowed collectively raise the same point of law, namely that the Tribunal erred in its interpretation of the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 and its interpretation of regulation 18 in particular.

If this is ‘public interest’, I’m a banana

Brighton and Hove council has denied it halted plans to place a ten-year-old boy with gay foster parents after his Catholic mother objected, writes Pink News.

Instead, it appears that the gay couple decided to pull out after negative stories in the national media about them.

The Daily Mail is alleged to have published an article about this particular foster case in which ‘Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell used the case to attack gay people as inferior parents.

“It appears that social services, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe that all relationships are equal when it comes to raising children,” she wrote.

“Indeed, in this case they seem to have decided that a gay relationship is preferable to a couple of opposite sex. This is simply not true.” ‘

What evidence to the contrary?

It may also have escaped the Daily Mail’s notice that the children being placed with gay foster parents have often been rejected by prospective heterosexual foster parents as being too much of a problem.

Gay Activist beleives that the care of children and in particular the selection of appropriate foster parents for them is a matter for professionals and the courts to decide, not writers who work for newspapers (or websites) and their editors.

In this case, ill-considered journalism may have led to children being denied the very best choice of foster parents that the professionals could have found for them.

Scribble the tree pink, then

‘A reputable new poll has found that 38% of gay men intend to vote Conservative at the next election – more than any other party, and a swing away from Labour of 14.2%.

It is this seeming ingratitude that Labour is unable to bear. It cannot comprehend that gay people might be as repelled by the government as everyone else. So now it resorts to pitiful efforts to scare them. “Don’t trust the Tories,” it says, while preposterously claiming that we’ll reverse all the progress towards gay equality that’s been made,’ writes Nick Herbert in the Guardian.

Well he would say that, wouldn’t he, as Mandy Rice-Davies would have put it; Nick Herbert is one of two openly gay MPs in the Conservative front bench.

He’s probably right. But I am old enough to remember Section 28 and I will take a lot of convincing!

Bishop roundly condemned

The Independent reports on the many organisations and people condemning Bishop Nazir-Ali of Rochester for his comments suggesting that all gay people should repent.

Labour MEP Michael Cashman accused the Bishop of Rochester of being “selective” about which parts of the Bible he upheld. “When he calls for the closure of all the banks, finance houses and credit card companies because of what it says in the Bible about usury, then I’ll take him seriously,” he said. “Until then, unless he can say anything good, he should shut up.”

In his comments, made to a Sunday newspaper, the bishop said homosexuals should be welcomed into the Church but that a person’s sexual nature could only be correctly expressed in a heterosexual union within marriage. His remarks reopened the row over homosexuality that has for years threatened to tear the Anglican Church apart.

Buckingham Palace have played down a statement from The Queen sent to the Bishop’s organisation representing it merely as an acknowledgement rather than a statement of support.

Forbes goes to India

Forbes has looked at what it is to be gay in India, newly liberated.

For urban, middle-class homosexuals, being gay in India is akin to being gay in the U.S. in the 1950s. The condition of homosexuals in small towns and rural India is far worse. Most gays in India remain in the closet for cultural and social reasons, irrespective of the law; many still feel that the Delhi court’s ruling will not really impact their day-to-day lives as long as social stigmas remain.

I don’t know the non-pejorative word for homosexual in Hindi, but “gandu”–the equivalent of bugger–and the word “homo” are routinely used colloquially as put downs and abuse. Many families have “the gay uncle” who “nobody talks about,” a semi-visible personage in the family pantheon.

This “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of blindness has only further emasculated the image of the gay person by making him invisible. It is not surprising that the law has remained untouched all these years after independence, undisturbed by any political will, cocooned by a culture that turned a blind eye.

Well worth reading.