Equality zealots make a mockery of liberal values
LAST year my wife and I moved into the first flat we have bought together. It is our ‘dream home’. To celebrate we held a Christmas party. One of those ‘dos’ that is supposed to be between two o’clock and six in the afternoon and ended up going on until three in the morning with a few stragglers not making it home and staying overnight.
It was a seriously good ‘do’ and we plan to do it again this year.
Our first preparation will be the guest list. On it there will be no straight people. Nor indeed any gays. Protestants and catholics won’t make it onto the list, nor muslims, jews, atheists or agnostics. That is before we get to the question of race. Whites, blacks? Not happening.
We will instead invite friends. People who can tick some of those boxes but who are not defined by them. Just folk. With all their opinions, foibles, glories and failings.
Equality is something – thankfully – that was drummed into me from childhood. It ought to be a given.
The first political march I ever went on was against Clause 28 for a very simple reason. I never had any choice in my sexual orientation therefore I presume no one else has in theirs and therefore it is wrong to discriminate against people.
Then again I was taught two things in that old, discredited, unfashionable institution the church – ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ and ‘treat your neighbour as yourself’.
SO, for example, if Vicki and Lisa turn up to our party this Christmas they are not our ‘lesbian friends’. They are people we like who happen to be in a relationship. That isn’t some kind of denial of who they are. I am just not going to use my pals as proof of my liberalism because it is not.
Equally, I don’t want my wife and I to go to their house and be introduced as ‘the bald, fat middleaged bloke who is punching above his weight’, because somehow it’s a sign of their coolness to have a pal who meets that description.
Yet wearing friends like badges seems to be a thing.
We live in a world where righteous causes are becoming grievance industries. This week the National Trust decreed that their public facing staff would have to wear ribbons showing they support LGBT rights. If not, they don’t get to deal with the public. That is absurd. Offensive.
I agree with, and indeed have campaigned for, LGBT rights. I will wear a badge to that effect if I choose to, not because I am forced to.
The iron orthodoxy of religion used to discriminate against gay people. It is not victory to replace it with another iron orthodoxy.
I am not about to say ‘political correctness gone mad’, or ‘you couldn’t make it up’. Believe me, when it comes to ‘bedwetting liberals’ I am definitely on the damp side. But this is not equality. In times gone by those who weren’t seen as being the ‘norm’ were compartmentalised and discriminated against.
I thought the cause of equality was to normalise the way we all live, not exceptionalise it. Yet the grievance industry has gone past breaking down barriers and is building new compartments.
You do not have to be gay to celebrate the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The torture of someone like Alan Turing, who the state tried to ‘cure’ of his orientation, was a crime against social justice. All of us.
But to listen to some LGBT campaigners that is a history we are not liberated from but an arsenal of grievance they solely own and which they can fire from.
Somehow, heterosexuals of today are responsible for the crimes of the past and should hang our heads in shame.
By the logic of their argument you can only be against apartheid if you are black, or abhor antisemitism if you are jewish.
That is the fragmentation of social justice. It suggests you can only truly oppose a crime if you have been a victim of it.
IF that was the case I should have been kicked off that anti-Clause 28 march all those years ago for being straight. Now that really is perverse. Wrongs are righted when we all see the need for justice not just the oppressed. Yet for some lobbyists whose good cause has become an industry they have to find another grievance because their mortgage payment depends upon it. They divide.
It masks reality. Now that supporting LGBT rights is a passport to decency, politicians use the equality agenda to cover-up their own failings. David Cameron may have recklessly called the Brexit referendum which he lost, potentially leading to economic disaster, but hey, he brought in gay marriage in the rest of the UK.
Our schools may be failing, our economy flagging and our health service falling apart but hey, Nicola Sturgeon did the same in Scotland.
We now have the equal right to be badly educated, poor and sick – regardless of our colour, creed or sexual orientation. Forgive me for not saying amen.
There is something that unites us – it is called the human condition. We all suffer from it regardless of background. I don’t think, for example, that getting divorced feels much different whether you are gay or straight, black or white.
But some who think they are championing equal rights are just building new barriers of their own sort. That is not equality.
When the Scottish parliament passed gay marriage I asked a married, heterosexual MSP why they had voted for it. ‘Everyone should have the right to suffer,’ they said.
Now that is someone who truly believes in equality.