Halting progress

Protests outside parliament by religious groups tonight will represent an obscenity against human rights.
AC Grayling

January 9, 2007 02:30 PM | Printable version

There is only one printable phrase apt enough for religious groups seeking exemption from the requirement not to discriminate against gay people, and that is that their actions constitute an obscenity against human rights.

To obscenity add hypocrisy. Among the various items of deliberate misinformation being spread by religious groups about the anti-discrimination regulations is one that says primary schools will be obliged to promote gay civil partnerships on an equal footing with marriage. (Well, why not? Human affections and the commitments and comforts they generate are a great good.) As it happens the regulations do no such thing. Yet the law requires all schools to subject children to a "daily act of worship", aka stone-age superstition with a tendency at one of its extremes to end in suicide bombings. I look forward to the day we secularists rally outside parliament by torchlight against brainwashing children into the nonsense left over from the ignorance of humankind's infancy. In a choice between promoting civil partnerships for gays and obliging children to sacrifice a goat to Zeus, I'd go for the former every time.

One of the points being made in the debate over the anti-discrimination regulations is that people who run cafes and B&Bs who do not wish to serve gay people ("because it makes them condone gay sex" contrary to the morality devised in the sixth century BC) will be forced to quit their jobs and do something else. Tough. If they do not wish to treat other human beings equally, let them indeed do something else. That is exactly what we would say if they refused to serve black people, women, or Jews. The discrimination is the same, the unacceptability of discrimination is the same, the contempt one feels for them is the same.

And on the subject of Jews: what a disgrace that the stone-agers outside parliament tonight will include a Jewish group. If anyone should be against discrimination of any kind, it is a Jew. Alongside the Jews murdered in Auschwitz were homosexuals, wearing a pink patch where the Jews wore a Star of David. The despairing implication of the fact that Jews are joining Christian and Muslims - the usual standard bearers of intolerance and reaction - in this campaign is that too many people learn too little, never connect the dots, and repeat the ghastly errors of the past, when under the thought-inhibiting influence of such toxins as religious belief.

I write the above in anger. This effort to halt the fight against the evil of discrimination is a step too far by the religious, so ready to squeal like pigs when it is they who feel they are being discriminated against. They are trying to roll back the gains in civil liberties and the creation of an open society, which it has taken us centuries to achieve, from the time that Torquemada was burning people at the stake for incorrect versions of Christianity. Let people believe in fairies if they wish to: I would fight as hard to protect the right of the benighted to the stupidest beliefs as to protect the right of gays to equal treatment in all respects; but the condition is that they do not impose those beliefs on others, or the antediluvian morality that goes with it. And that is the line in the sand.

They're forcing the vicar/host to go gay for a day?