Paranoid Homophobia

I was very struck by two recent reports where some good old fashioned fear mongering seemed to be going on.

The one is from the Roman Catholic Bishop of Glasgow, the other from a prominent State level politician in the US. Similarities are striking.

First Representative Sally Kern from Oaklahoma (or should that be Oaklahomo).

She thought she was speaking before 50 people only but in fact her words were captured by You Tube.

Here's a flavour:

There's a great conspiracy out there where gay people are a greater danger to the US than terrorism and (apparently) history demonstrates that any country that embraces equality for gay people will eventually meet its end.

You can see the actual talk on You Tube and its really worth watching if you want a laugh.

There's quite a few of them that have different presentations. Some have been put to music, made into a poem, one has a version where the word gay is replaced with the word 'troll' for effect and so on.

Here are the links to a selection.

Victory Fund version (with excerpts from the talk in its full paranoid glory and pictures and captions from the Victory Fund).

Troll version. Very funny, you'll love this one.

The Ballad of Sally Kern - a worthy effort at poetry. It ends with some references to Hitler and the Nazi time. A helpful and sobering reminder to where can head when some people are referred to as a cancer and the greatest threat to our society by their mere existence.

Ellen de Generes does a good turn on her show - it's quite funny and she tries to contact Sally to try to put her right on a few issues.....

Finally 'Stop Hate' which links up the words of hate that Sally Kern uses to the strings of murders of LGBT people in recent times in the US.

The second example is that of Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Devine. He's also seeing a plot, a conspiracy perpetrated by gays to do untold harm to society and our common values. Here's Pink News' report.

Gays even sink so low as to want to remember the gay people held in concentration camps in Hitler's Germany. Apparently. Really it verges on a form of selective holocaust denial.

There is a common thread to all of this and I think that some of the references to Hitler are apposite, if a little stretched.

We are seeing a phenomenon of denial of the humanity of one section of the community. We know where this leads if unchallenged.

Thankfully there are people who are willing to stand up. Some of them are to be seen in the You Tube links above.

I include in this Pastor Wright, longtime preacher at Barack Obama whose sermons are a little surprising in their anti-American content.

(It's easy to decry his sermons except for the fact that he is actually slap bang in the middle of the Old Testament prophetic tradition of lambasting your cultural safety zones. And - it is reported - that he also supported equality for LGBT people and preached this within the milieu of the Christian Church).

The last word is a very eloquent, unadorned You Tube piece on the dangers of Homophobia in Government.

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House of Commons Free Vote on Embryology

Just a quick link to Lou's Blog where there is plenty of information about the decision of the Government to allow a free vote on several aspects of the embryology and human fertilisation bill. DoH site for the Bill here.

I think that the Bill has been very widely debated and scrutinised, including extensive pre-legislative scrutiny by a committee of both Houses. Plus I think that there have been some rather cheap shots and distortions of the aims of the Bill and what it will allow which I do not feel reflect grown up poitics or a political intervention of honesty - but then we saw that with the exaggerated debate over the Sexual Orientation Regulations, so there is nothing new in the use of such irresponsible scare tactics (we also saw the use of such tactics by more responsible organisations in the campaigning against the Mental Health Act - we must now get used to this form of campaigning as a means of igniting the media).

Thinking Anglicans also carries some interesting links and reactions, including this one:

Wow, the slimy, slippery slope - from carefully planned empirical research
- with ethical and methodological restraints or parameters - to outright
cannabalism.

Goodness knows, if conservative religious beliefs didn't stand
vigorously in the way, we might have got up to any number of other slippery
slope downhill things - like torturing our neighbors for their beliefs (or
unbeliefs), stealing their property when they died from our rough
interrogations, and generally claiming that we always know best because we know
God and God especially loves us for being so strict that a pagan cannot wedge a
lost penny under our tight knickers.

Alas, too often these conversations across the divides take on the character of near-parody. I will parody your understandings, if only you will firmly promise to parody mine. As for divorcing sex/childbirth from marriage, in many cultures the links are hardly the simplistic westernized conservative religious ones an either/or reference in passing might suggest to a casual reader.

Is adopting a strict, closed conservative religious view really, really, really, really the only possible way to value and engage in the value of human life? If we categorically cannot - cannot be allowed to? - empirically and ethically distinguish between embryonic tissues in a petri dish over a two week cycle of experimentation, and the
full-blown human being who just happens to be a queer citizen, partnered and
parenting, who just moved into the empty house next door - we might indeed
wonder if our ethical and empirical tools were too heavy and too blunt to serve
as anything better than a thrashing tool?

Blood donation

Just a few words about the rather long running issue of complaint by gay and bisexual men who feel excluded by not being able to donate blood.

This is one of the issues that has been campaigned on by the NUS LGBT Campaign - I think it's a great campaigning opportunity for student LGBT groups because it allows for greater LGBT visibility on campus and highlights different ways in which LGBT people may be treated differently within society.

But it is important for us not to miss the wider picture of rights.

It has also been debated at UNISON LGBT Conference, UNISON National Delegate Conference and UNISON's Health Conference and the TUC LGBT Conference and has gained recent prominence in reporting by the BBC and Pink News.

In my view the approach taken by UNISON's National Delegate Conference is a sensible balanced one, demonstrating the need for decisions on who may and may not be able to give blood to based on medical evidence relating to the risk posed. I think that's the right approach.

It's an important issue - donor selection should not be without scrutiny and there can be a damaging impact from banning a whole section of the community from donating blood.

Obviously a set of criteria based on sexual activity is far preferable than one based on belonging to a group (in this case men who have had oral or anal sex with other men - gay men per se are permitted to give blood and many men who self define as gay or bi may not have engaged in oral or anal sex - equally there are many heterosexual men who have engaged in oral or anal sex with men).

So if possible I would prefer for us to move away from a lifetime blanket ban, provided it is supported by scientific evidence.

This would enhance gay and bisexual men's sense of citizenship and inclusion in society - an important goal in itself. It would tend to reinforce messages of safer sex (I stress the word safer because anal and oral sex are still risky activities and even use of condoms does not eliminate that risk entirely).

Whilst equitable treatment of potential donors is important the rights of recipients take precedence. They must do, if they clash in any way. Blood donation isn't for the good and well being of the donors - it's for the recipients. The right to life is more important than the right not to feel rejected.

So where are we now?

Australia has removed its lifetime ban and replaced it with a 12 month deferral for anyone who has had "male to male" sex. It seems like a sensible policy, but it's one that the UK, Canada, the US and Sweden have declined to follow. Recent statistical modelling has indicated even the Australian model would lead to an increase of risk of infected blood within the blood supply. This does of course remain to be seen in practice. In a few years' time we'll have actual evidence of the quantity of infected blood in Australia and whether it's gone up, down or stayed the same.

Although all blood donations are screened for HIV and other infections, these tests aren't 100% effective - the tests aren't 100% accurate (i.e. they have error rates, though small), there is a window period - 3 month, though it may be much more reduced than that and there is human error in the lab. So there is still a risk and a good rationale for preventing donations through donor screening if it can effectively be done.

Currently between a half and a third of infected donations in the UK are given by men who have had sex with men and have in some instances given blood on a previous occasion. That is to say that a group compirisng about 3% of the polulation accounts for between 33% and 50% of infected donations even when there is a ban in place supposedly preventing them from donating. So clearly we are dealing with a high risk group for HIV (we'd all prefer it wasn't the case but the figures are there and can't be argued with - by these figures between 10 and 20 times higher than the general population that is not otherwise in a high risk group).

So, yes, it would be great if we could adopt the Australian model. Only time will tell if it is effective. I hope it is.

But any such move in the UK should be evidence based and not based purely on write ins, petitions and popular opinion, which don't always take account of the bigger picture of the need to safeguard a supply of blood for those who need transfusions.

Right to remain

Very interesting Leader in the Times of the 14th March titled "Right to Remain".

It congratulates the Government for changing its mind on the call for asylum to be granted for Mehdi Kazemi stating:

The Government swiftly drew back yesterday from a monstrous injustice.
Within hours of receiving a letter from more than 60 members of the House of
Lords, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, announced that the Government would
reconsider its refusal to grant asylum to a 19-year-old Iranian homosexual, who
fears he will be hanged if he is sent back to Iran.

It is good to see there is a high level recognition in the wider media of the dangers of sending LGB people back to Iran and therefore a wider recognition that facing persecution on the grounds of one's sexuality is as good a claim for genuine asylum as a claim based on religion or political views.

This also opens up the need for the UK, EU and other countries (such as the US) to be very clear about LGBT human rights in the international sphere (e.g. at the UN and human rights treaty bodies).

The fight goes on and shows the vital importance of having organisations such as ILGA working at the international level.

One to watch

Norway has announced the introduction of legislation to equalise the marriage law.

This is significant because Norway was one of the 1st countries to intoriduce civil partnerships within a Scandinavian bloc and it is known that Sweden is also considering equalising its marriage law.

This is also of significance because Scandinavian countires tend to be overwhelmingly Lutheran and their Churches are in Communion with the Anglican Church via the Porvoo Agreement. Evidence from the Swedish Lutheran Church is of an attitude of pragmatism if not yet acceptance of same sex relationships and certainly not the hysteria that exists in the Church of England and Anglican Communion.

Wikipedia has an interesting article here. No doubt it will be updated as the Bill progresses.

365gay news report here

Congratulations to the French socialists

Although the French Parti Socialiste had been working hard to give voters the impression that it was hopelessly divided and anti-EU it is currently managing a bit of a Phoenix operation in the French municipal elections.

Coming so soon - less than a year - after losing the 3rd Presidential election in a row they have managed to do really well in gaining many town halls across France.

Dearest to my heart is the gain of Strasbourg again with a particularly pleasing absolute majority, but gains all over France of many cities including those that are traditionally right wing.

Bertrand Delanoe did well in his re-election in Paris and is being touted as a possible leader of the French socialists in opposition to Segolene Royal.

Last year I must admit I felt quite hopeless about the left in France - and its fragmentation and internal divisions continues to be a worry. Clearly though, Sarkozy is not proviong as popoular as people may have thought and there is a significant potential in future national elections.

Analysis aside - just the sheer joy that Strasbourg is socialist again!

3rd reading of the Lisbon Treaty

Just catching up on some blogging to mention the excellent debate in the House of Commons to give the Lisbon Treaty Bill a 3rd Reading (11th March)

Previously the House debated a proposal to submit the Bill to a referendum and defeated it - rightly in my view.

There is nothing that has been brought to my attention that would come anywhere near warranting a referendum, which in general is a bad way to make major political decisions, given we are a Parliamentary democracy with the idea that a parliamentary majority is the way all our major decisions are made.

There is of course a role for referendums, notably where the governing party is divided and cannot sustain its majority or because of a fundamental change such as adopting the euro or where a proposed change is (paradoxically) of less importance and you want to give people a choice at a local level (such as elected mayors, regional assemblies).

The only case for a referendum on the now defunct Constitution (which in itself was not that ambitious and represented incremental change) was that it had the symbolism of a Constitution and it was that kind of symbolics which suggested a referendum was of value.

At the time I must say I was not convinced. Europe isn't for most people a misty eyed thing that you embrace and fall in love with. For me it's a pragmatic mechanism that as a matter of simple fact the UK decided to join the EU because it felt it was in its overall interests and for that reason stays and works to improve it.

Going out there and persuading people to love the EU is daft - for good or ill (usually for ill, but there we have it) we Brits are congenitally sceptical of anything and love nothing better than poking fun at them there foreigners with their strange ways that are so clearly inferior to ours.

(This was the reason that we joined the EU late - 1972 as opposed to 1958 when it was first set up. We just couldn't believe that something run by our continental 'cousins' would work. We wanted to be "in Europe, but not run by Europe" a vast "area of free trading sovereign nations" .... so we set up EFTA as an alternative but seeing that the EU worked quite well we decided - that is to say the elected majority in Parliament decided - to join the EU - of course the Labour government did hold a referendum because it was so hopelessly divided it had to do so to maintain its majority and stay in office, but not for any other reason).

All those wonky banana stories are just too good to not print if you are a tabloid editor - though the determination of our culture to prick pomposity and lampoon any bureaucracy is not a totally bad trait either.

And all of these traits have helped to form the Lisbon Traety which makes the EU work at 27 as opposed to 15 (with surely the thought that there are quite a few countries yet to come in, albeit smaller e.g. the Balkan states) but addressing all of the negotiating points identified by eurosceptics over the years. Subsidiarity is in the Treaty and is defined along with a principal of conferral (the EU only has power explicitly conbferred on it, for example. Britain has oodles of 'opt ins', that is areas where the UK can opt in if it wants to but doesn't have to and there is explicit recognition of the role of the National Parliaments, giving them a veto over extensions of qualified majority voting.

Of course there's a lot of content that's the same as the defunct Constitution, but that's because there is widespread agreement on some relatively minor changes, like ending the rather silly rotating presidency (rotating every 6 months), extending QMV in some areas (mostly technical) and improving the votes' weighting system - increasing the UK's share of the vote.

In summary:

- Yes to the EU and our continued membership
- Yes to the Treaty of Lisbon as a good amending Treaty
- No to a referendum because we are a Parliamentary democracy
- Yes (hopefully) to an end to euro-institutional navel gazing
- No to any more EU treaties (amending or otherwise) for the next 20 years........

The link to the Hansard debate at 3rd reading is here

The link to the Parliament web for the Bill is here

For information on who voted which way see here

The Government majority was 140, which is very solid.

More good news - blasphemy's gone

Only just found out almost by accident that the House of Lords has accepted a Government amendment to remove the law on blasphemy.

This is good news, although the passage of the Human Rights Act ensures the law on blasphemy can never be used in any case and the Government was clear it was a dead letter - an attempt to bring a case against Jerry Springer the Opera was described as "bordering on the vexatious" by the judge hearing the case. The law on incitement to religious hatred is another reason given for making the move - we have a law protecting believers of different faiths rather than protecting one religion.

The official line from bishops was that they accepted the change and wouldn't vote against it (though some did) but felt that it wasn't the right time to make the change......

Other Lords (some of whom are well known from other debates - e.g. Baroness O'Cathain, who's somewhat of a regular speaker on such matters) opposed the move, some of them refering to the risk there would be a deluge of anti-Christian attacks.

The House of Lords debate is well worth reading as some of the speeches are very well informed.

The blasphemy law was of course famously used against Gay News for inclusion of a thought provoking poem called 'The Love that dare not speak its Name', which lead to the closure of Gay News.

The text of the poem is here (first time I've ever been able to read it, though on doing so I must admit to having some sympathy with the original trial judge on the matter and I definitely think it is outrageous in the offence it will have caused to many believers and straightway we're back onto the territory of thinking about the Danish cartoons and the reaction that had caused).

The whole House of Lords debate can be seen here.

Baroness Andrews' introduction and summing up.

Baroness O'Cathain here


Commentary from the Guardian - When blasphemy bit the dust.


Although a little used law, it's good to get it off the Statute Book before people start using it again.

Spanish elections

Good news for Spanish socialists who have been re-elected with a slight increase in their number of seats, but with the right also making gains. Near final results see PSOE with 169 seats out of 350, with the opposition PP on 154, though the socialists do have allies they can rely on.

This is interesting for many reasons including the fact that the socialist government has legislated for same sex marriage including adoption with a ferocious opposition from the Roman Catholic Church on this and a number of other issues.

And yet it seems the election result this time is almost a replay of the election last time.

One other thing is that the decision on same sex marriage did not seem to be the major part of the campaign where the focus seemed to have been on terrorism, separatism and the economy.

So there are big implications for the Catholic Church in how it 'comments' on elections.

Interesting opinion poll here from Angus Reid website (www.angus-reid.com - great for any kind of opinion poll) showing 75% of Spaniards supporting the law on same sex marriage, with 18% opposed to the law.

Commentary here from 365gay.com.

Other good news - in the French municipal elections the Parti Socialiste seems to be in a good position to retake a number of towns including Strasbourg where I lived when the socialists retook it in 1989 amidst posters from the right proclaiming "Strasbourg ne sera jamais socialiste".

Always good to see socialists winning.....

Tribunal award against bishop of Hereford

News recently put out that the Bishop of Hereford has been on the wrong end of an award of £47,500 for his act of discrimination and an expectation from the Tribunal that he undertake equality training.

No wonder the Archbishop wants parallel courts rather than those offered by the State.....

Archbishop of Canterbury tempts me back to my blogging

Of course Sharia courts of some description may have some place in resolving property disputes where this is mutually preferred by the parties - maybe this is what the Archbishop meant, but this is quite non-controversial and really not worth the bother of stating as though it were a great truth.

The Archbishop's remarks have however rightly been described as muddled and unhelpful.

The kernel of the Archbishop's thinking was stated in his reaction to the furore about the sexual orientation regulations and the issue of the campaign for an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies.

His thinking was that in a state that makes space for religious belief the state shouldn't claim total allegience of religious adherents and there should be a plethora of arrangements, special laws, separate courts, conscience clauses to make religious believers feel happy within a secualr state.

Now this idea isn't one of religious fundamentalism, where the sect seeks a kind of imposition of religious belief upon non-believers, but it is far from satisfactory nonetheless.

It inevitably leads to fears of individuals in faith communities setting themselves apart from and above the law and this is particularly dangerous where the laws are ones protecting human rights and outlawing discrimination - and here we basically end up with a self awarded right to be above the law of the land.

The Archbishop made a mistake in other ways as well. Muslims didn't ask him to make huimself their spokesperson and I don't think the reaction has spread awareness and understanding of different commun ities. Plus I don't think that he is that much of an expert on the subject of Sharia.

A much stronger argument might have been that we need to find ways of allowing the devlopment of Sharia in different countries that can incorporate human rights and considerations of freedom and equality in a way that could challenge the less enlightened forms in many of the countries where it is practised. This wasn't, however, the point he was trying to make.

And this might have led to a reflection (in that very involved and intellectual way beloved of the Archbishop) to a reflection on the interaction between Christianity, the law and rights and protections of others, though the results would have been opposite to the veiw he espoused when he proposed making religious believers exempt from discrimination law.

Ultimately therefore a very big mistake - in timing, content, argumentation and political nouse (or lack thereof).


He's been roundly condemned because his idea's a dud, whichever way you look at it.

Singapore retains criminalisation of homsexuality

Report on the BBC.

A petition had been presented to Parliament to include same sex acts in the repeal of heterosexual sodomy laws but the Parliament voted to retain the current legislation.

This is just one country amongst many where sex between men is still made into a criminal offence and shows how much progress there is to be made.

Meanwhile the report on 365gay.com details the many restrictions to freedom of association and expression which are occuring in Singapore under the current laws.

See also the letter from IGLHRC to Singapore's Prime Minister on this subject.

Great news from Poland

As everyone is no doubt aware the rather unpleasant right wing homophobic government in Poland has been roundly defeated in a 'snap' election by a much less but still right wing party and its ally. Especially gratifying that the more extreme smaller League of Polish Families (and coalition member) has gone from 18% to 3% and is no longer in the Parliament.

Together the two parties have an absolute majority of 20 seats in the lower house, though it is anticipated that the President who is in office until 2010 may oppose much of the government's legislation.

This is great news for LGBT people living in Poland and hopefully will demonstrate that homophobic governance cannot be relied upon to garner votes come election time. Hopefully it will allow further progress to be made in Poland as well as being an object lesson to the rest of the EU.

Guardian Editorial

Ekklesia - which describes the result as being a "defeat for extreme Catholic nationalism" according to 'analysts'.

BBC coverage

Pink News article

This report by the Polish Campaign Against Homophobia on the general situation of LGBT people in Poland is also interesting, though doesn't refer to the election.

Rees Mogg is at it again

Article in today's Times by Rees-Mogg - one of many to come I should think - basically a thinking person's way of saying Gordon Brown is dishonouring the war dead of many centuries with cartoons of spitfires and war graves (you need the Sun for that).

Just a brief reminder of where Rees-Mogg (he is actually a person and not a cat) is that he is opposed to anything connected to the EU, and actually took the then Conservative Government to Court as far back as 1993 arguing that the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty was unconstitutional. He lost......

He won't have any difficulty accomodating himself to today's Europhobic Tories however.

I support the Reform Treaty

Not only do I support it, I hope it is ratified through the Parliamentary mechanism after extensive debate and line by line scrutiny, which is in accordance with the UK parliamentary tradition that the Tories are trying to overthrow.

I must say that in this regard I disagree with the handfull of euro-sceptic Labour MP's wanting a referendum. There should only be a referendum when we are choosing to go into something like the euro, or creating radically new arrangements or institutions (e.g. devolved Parliaments) or where the governing party is hopelessly divided like Wilson's Labour government in the early 1970's.

Although there's a lot of bluster from the Tories I think they are making a big mistake putting so much effort into being anti-European and think they'll suffer from it in the longer run.

And an excellent article on why we should support the Reform Treaty from some time back in the Guardian.

Craig's back

After a long absence to allow me to rest I am now back at blogging and apologise for the interuption of service....

Well, I am back - but Ming is gone. As someone said to me recently - Gordon Brown makes the mistake and Ming is the one that has to go.....

I think all the excitement of having a new PM, preparign for a General Election, then having the election cancelled, then all the stress of Ming resigning - well it's all too much!!

Blindel's Blunder

I'm a little late on this one which has stirred a certain reaction in some qaurters.

Julie Bindel's original article appeared in the Guardian and can be read here.

She also argued her case on Radio 4's hecklers programme (a lot tamer than the title suggests and very little actual heckling, which in this case is a pity).

Julie Bindel makes a number of points but boils down to (you'll have to forgive me for not reproducing her views in extenso - I can't be bothered) feminist theory puts a lot of stress on gender roles being socially constructed and therefore anyone who has gender reassignment is buying in to the idea that gender is a given thing and therefore reinforces this concept of gender which according to feminism (or at least one version of feminism) reinforces the oppression of women.

So many logical fallacies and so little time to deconstruct them.

Julie Bindel has also gone on to look criticially at the whole gender reassignment thing and has some major critiques of hte whole thing from which she deduces it's all some kind of antifeminist plot by the medical profession. Again som many fallacies, so little time.

The first thing to state is that Julie Bindle is a bit of a 'Jonny come lately' to the argument about gender reassignment and the argument has been taking placeover many years within the trans community and is at the root of the original use of the term transgender which originally referred to people who did not wish for gender reassignment (as an example see this article), a fact she conveniently fails to mention in order to make her own critique appear more powerful than it is.

Many of her criticisms around the way gender reassignment works have some validity - yes of course it should not be rushed into, there should the provision of therapy and counselling for those who wish for it both pre and post and of course there is no guarantee that people are happy after surgery - hence the need for counselling and support. Yes there needs to space to encourage more freedom of gender expression apart from gender reassignment.

The promotion of the concepts of gender expression and gender variance is something that's being promoted by trans communities who are alot more political and diverse than Julie Bindle portrays them as - it's always easier to combat people when you portray them as unified and monolithic where no internal debate or dissension occurs (the gay community thinks etc).

But it does in the end come down to whether you think gender reassignment is the right thing under some circumstances. Clearly there are many people who are happy after transitioning and who were very unhappy prior to this.

Of course I can also see that people should have the widest choices available to them and that it takes a political community of people who have made some of those choices to make them possible and the medical community is not often able to reflect or offer that.

Before wrapping up I should state that I don't think that gender is completely a matter of social conditioning (though of course it is in large part - or at leat how it plays out). If people have a clear sexual orientation of being attracted to one gender that means to me that I can have a gender identity myself and that gender means something - though is maybe more varied than the binary male/female divide we are trained to think in.

I think Julie Bindel does raise some interesting points but the manner of attacking people's freedom to make decisions about their lives in the name of a doctrine (albeit secular as opposed to religious) is unfortunate and unhelpful.

Rather than be opposed gender reassignment provision needs to be improved.

Channel 4's 40 years after 1967 season....

Channel 4's season commemorating 40 years after the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 is nearly over.

So far we have had A Very British Sex Scandal. An excellent and very well done recounting of the sensational trial of Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu showing the impact that criminalisation had on gay life (people being wary of telling each other their names, burning their letters to each other so they wouldn't risk being incriminated against for example) in conjunction with reconstructions of hearings of the Wolfendon Committee.

The most poignant moment is during the trial where Peter Wildeblood admits to being a homosexual and starts to turn the tide of public attitudes leading to the setting up of the Wolfendon Committee which, ten years later led to decriminalisation (over 21 and in private - prosecutions actually went up after the 1967 Act).

I found How Gay Sex Changed the World to be incredibly old hat and tedious but with some interesting moments in the telling. Certainly didn't talk about the World though, which was a shame.

Most controversy attached to Clapham Junction. It's well worth watching but from the reaction and commentary I have seen appears to have been understood by very few people at all, with most people's reaction being "This doesn't represent gay life" as though the purpose of drama is to give a faithful representation of something - it isn't. Drama is there to give insights not representations; as though we all need showing what the gay life is really like; as though Romeo and Juliette is a faithful representation of what heterosexuality is like.

Put simply what Clapham Junction portrays (so far as I can tell) is how prejudices from a previous era are disrupting the lives of people today born into a world where there are Civil Partnerships, openly gay people in high ranking professions and so on.

Their lives are disrupted by the threat of violence - often through being in the worng place at the wrong time - the young gay man in murdered after using a toilet frequented by gay men but not doing anything himself and then getting chased into the common. No matter. He's not being bashed because of his having sex (he wasn't) but because the nexus of homophobia from when there weren't Civil Partnerships is ready and waiting as well as affecting the way people construct their relationships, through isolation, lack of role models and so on.

It is quite simply about the legacy of discirmination that still weighs heavily upon gay people and in some ways on all of us. To test this out would be very simple - have two men walk hand in hand throught he streets of most UK cities and I think it would be clear what the result would be.

Finally and most retro of all, the "discussion" programme chaired by David Aronovitch (whose writing I really like). This was utterly tedious, worthy and for the most part unwatchable garbage, starting off with the complete failure to understand the meaning of Clapham Junction but failed to achieve any sense of lift off or purpose with David Aronovitvh trying depsreately hard to be a hip with it heteresexual and completely at ease with the vacuous non-discussions around him - even descending at one point to talking as a cultural authority on account of his gay friends..... In the words of Sir Alan Sugar "What a load of old tut!", though I think Catherine Tate's Nan Taylor would have said it better.......

Hullo? Homosexuality still a criminal offence in around 90 countries of the world? Stonewall's recent report on the failure of schools to provide any kind of protection from homophobic bullying (which one of the commentators - no less than Mark Simpson - (who?) describes as being an expression of "homo-unease" which shouldn't worry us unduly....... I see, so that's all right then.

So two cheers for Channel 4 who have actually covered the bloody thing (shame on the BBC) and made an attempt and for two really good and challenging programmes, even though the utter lack of sophistication when reviewing the drama could have been ameliorated by a kind of interpretative 'key' to help well meaning heteresexuals (who were mercilessly parodied in Clapham Junciton by the way - deservedly so in my view) make any sense of it all.

Cash for honours....

Surprise surprise the CPS has abandoned any intention of a prosection (much to the chagrin of the Metropolitan Police who after several high profile cases have gone wrong - Burrell, Who wants to be a Millionnaire - were aching for something that would come somewhere near justifying more than a million quid being spent on such a hopeless case).

The people of London must be fortunate indeed to have so little real crime that they have a couple of millions to spend on various wild goose chases initiated in this case by the SNP, who may well have won the Scottish election as a result.

Of course there is a statistical correlation between being a donor and receiving an honour - this is well known under both parties - a case for reform not criminal sanction. I for one think that people who donate to political parties and other good causes should be eligible for honours (though not positions in Parliament) - provided all is out in the open. And there are numberous bodies that can investigate including the Electoral Commission itself.

(I've previously blogged on the need for an entirely elected Upper Chamber).

Anyway - it is clearly illegal for honours to be sold to the highest bidder, like on ebay and there's a strong case for an elected chamber to remove any such considerations in the case of becoming a member of the Upper Chamber. Similarly there's a case for more state funding of political arties, especially in the field of political education and policy work as well as things like a limit on spending and so on.

But if we don't have state funding we have funding by individuals and I think that to say that you can be given an honour up until the point where you make a donation is ludicrous.

Yes we need reform of party funding as well as of the House of Lords - but these are political issues and arguments and should not be driven by a politicised police force using leaks via the tabloid press and certainly seeking to prejudice the public in a way that would be unacceptable in any other investigation.

Richard Rorty has died

After Derrida in 2004 Richard Rorty died on June 8th 2007.

The wikipedia article on Rorty can be found here.

Obituaries from the Times, Guardian and one form Jurgen Habermas.

Hi most accessible book is easily Philosophy and Social Hope.