Apologies for the spree of posts, I’ve again picked up on whatever it is that motivates me to write and I’m running with it. This post is about this story. I know it’s an old story but I’ve only just discovered it. The jist of it is that there’s a law in place to protect homosexuals from hate and this law has been used against homophobes. There’s some argument about free speech which is redundant as a homophobe’s freedom stops where a homosexual’s starts. An individual is only free up to the point that his freedom does not impinge upon the freedom of others.
The example given for that story was Pauline Howe a 67 year old pensioner who went to a gay pride march and distributed homophobic christian literature. She was verbally abused by the marchers, there’s no record of exactly what they said. Following this event she wrote a letter to Norwich Council in which she decried that homosexuality contributed to the downfall of every empire and was responsible for the spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections. She also claimed that homosexuals were sodomites and that the march was a public indecency and offensive to God.
The letter was passed on to the police who reviewed it and sent two officers round to Ms Howe’s house to warn her that such remarks were offensive and that she was committing hate crime.
Furthermore Ms Howe’s case was taken up by the Christian Institute, a fundamentalist religious lobby who campaign against gay rights. They also took up the case of Helen and Joe Roberts who did something similar.
Those are the facts, now here’s my opinion: the homophobes are standing as defiant defenders of the old order. They want it to be like the 50s where racism was acceptable and political correctness was unheard of (in Britain anyway). They fail to understand that people fought for their rights and we now live in a new better society where we are tolerant and inclusive. Today every child in every state school is taught these values of tolerance, this is thanks to our Labour government. But we should not be tolerant of the racists and homophobes of our society. They should re-educated, or if necessary stamped out, marginalised and excluded until they learn that their opinions are unacceptable.
It’s one of the rare occasions where I agree with the police response, they did the right thing. They brought the law down on those decadent elements of society that they may be crushed. What I find shocking is that others agree with Ms Howe’s disgusting views. She is not a random idiot picked from a crowd, there’s a faction of people who advocate that homosexuality is unnatural and wrong. They claim that homosexuality is a disease, but they ignore that they themselves are a disease of society.
End of rant.
Leave a comment