Loud and proud gays want to take over rest of society
Increasingly, it seems as if the homosexual community has forgotten that it is the minority, writes Eamon Delaney
(Taken from The Independent. Comments, blindingly obvious though they may be, are my own.)
AS the cliche goes, some of my best friends are gay. I used to live in a very gay area, the West Village in New York. Indeed, enjoying their nightlife and cultural atmosphere, I was even accused of ‘trading’ off the fun, with my copycat denim jacket and tartan shirt, while not actually joining them.
Yep, and the joke behind the cliche that you maybe didn’t get is that when people say “some of my best friends are gay/black/jewish” they pretty much always follow it up with the word “however”, followed by something outlandishly homophobic/racist/antisemitic. Exactly as you’ve done, you witless tube.
However, like many, I’ve recently begun to get impatient with the endless trumpeting of gay ‘identity’, and the growing appetite for more and more rights and privileges.
Impatient? Sorry, did we forget to stop and thank all you generous heterosexuals for kindly deciding to stop killing us, experimenting on us and throwing us in prison?
I’m not being reactionary and I’m all for gay rights and an end to prejudice and discrimination, and always have, but at this stage it seems as if the tables have turned and a minority community — the gays — want to increasingly change mainstream culture to suit them.
Then let me make this simple for you. It’s about equality. It’s about wanting to know that gay people can’t and won’t be treated like second-class citizens just because of who they are. It is not about asking for any more than the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. It’s really, really not complicated, and if you were genuinely “all for gay rights and an end to prejudice and discrimination” you’d have figured that out long ago. Oh, and just for the record, saying you’re not homophobic isn’t the same as not being homophobic.
For example, why is civil partnership not enough, and why do gays also want marriage, a surely traditional heterosexual facility, which gays used to see as patriarchal, and ‘straight’?
The clue is in the question. It’s not an equal right; it’s a different right. And if it were all reversed tomorrow, so that gay people could have full marriage and straight people only had the option of civil partnership, there would be outcry. And rightly so.
(Personally I’d like to see everyone having the right to choose either, but also be completely free to do neither, if they prefer. But that’s going off-topic somewhat.)
Many gays also feel this way and resist the increasing politicisation and institutionalising of gay life. Last week, in the Guardian, a newspaper almost obsessed with things gay and ‘progressive’, columnist Suzanne Moore objected to gay marriage on the basis that it was a conservative ‘selling-out’. Being gay should be edgy and experimental, she said.
But isn’t this part of the problem? Many gays want to have it both ways. Thus gay magazines are full of ads endorsing late-night gyms, sex lines and a freewheeling sexual activity which would be dismissed as sleazy in heterosexual culture. But we also have articles that suggest a yearning for bourgeois respectability.
Some straight people yearn for the perfect marriage and the house with the white picket fence and the lawn mower. Some straight people yearn to spend every weekend off their faces on ketamine in some Berlin sling club being fisted by as many different people as possible. Some straight people yearn for both. Some straight people even get both. Your argument is invalid, Mr Delaney.
Likewise, travel books, such as the trendy Rough Guides, scold the mainstream ‘meat-market’ discos of foreign capitals but provide plenty of details for gay pick-up spots. Many red-blooded straight men might wish that society would endorse their own ambitions with such PC gusto.
Had you done your research properly you would have found what everyone else already knows, that straight opportunities for this kind of thing are abundantly available and abundantly availed of. Those who choose to go looking for it will probably find it, and without much trouble. Whatsyerfuckinproblem?
And as for endorsement, if two or more consenting heterosexual adults are up for a bit of no strings fun and no-one comes out any the worse for it, I’ll be the first to say they should be able to go for it without journalists or anyone else whining about how awful they are.
Also, on the issue of gays adopting, it makes many of us uneasy and impatient with the idea that raising a child with homosexual parents is totally equivalent to a child being raised by its natural heterosexual parents. It patently is not, and it is a crazy concession to PC culture to say that it is.
I watched a Frontline programme recently on the topic and I thought I was seeing things when I heard Ivana Bacik refusing to be happy with a societal acceptance of gay adoption but insisting on full equality with heterosexual parenting. David Quinn gave the other perspective, but he was almost falling over himself to be reasonable about it, just looking for that concession that the natural, or heterosexual, parents were not just the same as gay parents.
So biological parents are just better than non-biological parents? Extend this kind of logic to its natural conclusions and you’ve just tried your best to shoot all adoptive parenting down in flames. Nice work, arsepipe.
Those expressing opposition or even concerns were shouted down in the television studio. However, from where I was watching, in a local bar, the viewers were all of the contrary opinion, and were amazed by this departure in opinions but also blankly accepting of it as part of the growing gulf which now exists between mainstream society and the liberal elites and quango-led experts who want to change and improve our lives.
If people with similarly narrow-minded views to you drink in the same kind of bars as you (as I imagine they would) and you actually choose to call this up as evidence in support of your argument, your journalism is lazy to the extent that I’m amazed you can summon energy to write at all.
For example, the Guardian now has a feature called The Three of Us in its family section, a weekly diary by one of two gay men raising a child with their female friend, the natural mother. Two dads, one mum — one family is the sub headline.
I don’t know about you but this strikes me as strange.
Actually it does me too. Why didn’t they call it “The Four of Us”?
And the counter-argument that divorced kids often have three parents knocking around is fatuous and nonsense. A child has two parents, whether separated or not. However, it is one thing to have such a diary, but it also seems almost designed to offend and irritate those who do not agree with this new radical departure in parenting. Thus, last week, the writer Charlie Condou questioned the whole convention of women being seen as naturally connected to their children. (Not for nothing is the Irish Independent’s weekly supplement called Mothers and Babies.)
I can imagine a lot of single dads being infuriated with your unsupported assertion that their parent-child bond is second rate. It’s poor logic and I’m afraid all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Be it woman or man, gay or straight, single parenting, co-parenting, fostering or adoption; what is important is the bond between parent and child. This has been demonstrated time and time again.
But no, Charlie went to the Alternative Families show in the UK and saw all the gay dads with their children. It’s just the same for him, it seems, and, he “stood around and chatted about the absurdity and irrelevance of the ‘biological question’”. Oh, please. What about breastfeeding?
Therefore, not only should gay men be denied children, but so should any woman who is incapable of breastfeeding? You Sir, are a heinous bell-end.
And there are other things about the growing gay rights movement which make outsiders impatient and uneasy. Like, when did the gays and lesbian community become the ‘LGBT’, an acronym that also includes Bisexual and Transgender?
Sorry, but this is broadening the boundaries in a way that makes many of us understandably sceptical.
Then you ought to take responsibility for educating yourself and not wait for us to explain it to you.
Bisexual? Isn’t that reminiscent of the loose Seventies sexual experimentation? How many bisexuals are there? And will the plain people of Ireland be happy with legalising rights for, and spending money on, all of this?
You really do struggle with the idea of diversity don’t you? This paragraph in particular gave me a sense of your inner rage.
If gay people and straight people had proper equality of opportunity, how do you imagine further rights will be required for bisexual people? And even if they were required, what makes you believe recognising the human rights of a group of people who are slightly different to you is such an arduous and unappealing task?
The new Human Rights Commissioner for Northern Ireland, Michael O’Flaherty, is a gay rights advocate and says that he sees all of this as part of his rights agenda. Again, I raise all these things, not out of reactionary resistance but just to question the direction and motivation of the whole sexual rights agenda.
Really? Thanks then, but you needn’t have bothered.
There is also the danger surely that this insatiable demand for more and more recognition and identity (gay quotas?), will eventually alienate mainstream opinion and undo some of the valuable gains made in this country by, for example, David Norris and others, in eliminating prejudice and discrimination.
All of these arguments have been used for centuries in one form or another. Abolition of slavery, votes for women, anti-racism laws … the list goes on. The good news is that when bigots like you die they take their hatred with them. There may be, if you’re lucky, a slightly watered down replacement bigot in the next generation to take your place. And this might repeat for another generation or two, becoming evermore diluted, evermore intolerable and evermore ridiculous.
The bottom line? In the not too distant future, people like you are all going to be dead. You’ll be remembered as the witch-hunters and slave masters of your day; nothing but an awkward history lesson, an embarrassing reminder to humanity of how inhumane it once was. And people like me will be there, alongside everyone else, marvelling at what narrow-minded, twisted, joyless cockrags you all must have been.
