None so blind . . .

There’s some nice impartial reporting by Britain’s right-wing tabloid Mail in evidence today when it talks of a £50,000-a-year teacher who complained that a visiting speaker wanted to make a point about how ideas of sexuality are embedded in our minds.

At least that’s what I think the speaker was trying to get over when she asked the assembled teachers she was speaking to why they thought heterosexuality was the norm.

But she was not prepared for Kwabena Peat, a self-confessed Christian at Park View Academy, a large secondary comprehensive in Tottenham, which he joined three years ago.

He thought Sue Sanders – founder of the long-established gay teachers’ organisation Schools Out – was going too far, and wrote a letter to some colleagues. But they thought he was going too far in that they felt harassed and intimidated, and he was suspended.

Without seeing his letter or hearing just what was said in that seminar, it’s hard to know who’s right and who’s wrong – if, indeed, it can be expressed in such black-or-white terms.

But it seems that Sanders, who’s an out lesbian, was speaking during an In-Service Education and Training (INSET) day, during which staff were required to attend a session on child-protection issues. These issues, as you would expect, concern, inter alia, bullying.

And what sort of bullying do we get in schools? Homophobic bullying, of course (among other types of unacceptable behaviour). The £850 training session, says the Mail on Sunday, was organised by Chrysalis, a training team that specialises in diversity.

Sanders, aged 62, who founded Schools Out in 1974, asked why people thought heterosexuality was the norm. Reasonable question, one would have thought, because it would get people thinking and examining their own entrenched views. Perhaps they hadn’t thought of it before, and maybe such a question would cause them to look at themselves. It’s by carrying out exercises like this that we can get into the minds of others (bullies, perhaps?) and question why they do what they do.

After all, open-mindedness is about examining things that you might hold dear, and daring to ask whether there are aspects of them that you have hitherto not addressed. If you don’t open your mind, you don’t stand a chance of seeing into the mind of the aggressor whose behaviour you are trying to understand and, ultimately, curb. But there are, as the saying goes, none so blind as those who don’t want to see.

The Mail on Sunday says:

Mr Peat said he had expected her merely to provide information to help teachers handle homophobic bullying, but she had gone much further.

“She started promoting homosexual lifestyles and suggesting those who had objections should sort out their prejudices. She said, ‘What makes you all think that to be heterosexual is natural?’ It was at that point I walked out.”

In a statement last night, headteacher Alex Atherton said: “An allegation of intimidation and harassment is currently being investigated.”

Ms Sanders said her training sessions were designed to “raise awareness”.

And that, dear reader, is all the Mail on Sunday thinks is worth giving of Sanders’s point of view, which is why I use the world impartial ironically in my intro. Had she refused to talk to the paper? If she had, they would have said so. Indeed, they would have rejoiced in the fact: Gay-promoting lesbian refuses to talk to media, shock, horror! So we can only assume there were quotes aplenty, or opportunity aplenty to gather them, but that the paper didn’t bother to use them or get them in the first place.

And note the point at which Peat decided to leave the seminar: “She [Sanders] said, ‘What makes you all think that to be heterosexual is natural?’ It was at that point I walked out.”

Oh, dear! Perhaps he perceived that his manhood would be put into question if he actually dared to open himself up to the idea that maybe he should consider that neither homo- nor heterosexuality is the norm, but both are natural.

I’m not suggesting he’s a closet or repressed gay, only that he maybe feels that merely owning to believing that neither version of sexuality is “right” could in some way compromise his image of himself.

Then we get this: Peat, says the Mail on Sunday, was one of “several Christian staff” (my emphasis) who walked out of this session, “after an invited speaker questioned why people thought heterosexuality was natural”.

And not just a Christian in Peat’s case, but an Afro-Caribbean Christian – and they tend to belong to fundamentalist churches that hate gays. Does he belong to such a church? Dunno, but my money’s on it.

So either his manhood or his delusions were perceived to be under threat if he dared to rethink his entrenched attitudes towards homosexuality. It doesn’t matter which. It amounts to bigotry.

Peat is being supported by the Christian Legal Centre, which is a right-wing, rabidly homophobic outfit that takes up cases of homophobes who fall foul of more enlightened views.

Whether with its services or just its moral support, it can usually be found speaking up for bigots such as Gary McFarlane and Lillian Ladele, a counsellor and registrar, respectively, who found their prejudices got in the way of their doing the job they were being paid to do.

Freedom of speech? In the West? Don't make me laugh!

Incursions into our freedom of speech and expression don’t happen all at once. They come in ones, sometimes in bits, building into a whole. They come at irregular intervals. Sometimes they’re overshadowed by other news that the media deem more important. Sometimes they're spun by shoddy, dishonest politicians of the NuLabour variety as something that is good for us.

But suddenly we realise that they're building up into a veritable Chieftain tank of oppression that surges through the streets of our culture, mowing down and crushing all that stands before it.

So I make no apologies for bringing your attention to an article in Australia’s Brisbane Times from a little while ago – 16 April – that brings a few of them together.

We often think we’re so, so free in the West to say what we like (with the usual caveats concerning defamation and shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre when there isn’t a wisp of smoke in sight).

But this article reminds us of such notorious infringements as the banning of the Dutch politician and filmmaker Geert Wilders from the UK and the police harassment of and threats against of a 15-year-old youth who dared to hold up a sign in London saying Scientology was a dangerous cult.

The article also cites Brigitte Bardot, who was

convicted last June of “inciting religious hatred” for a letter she wrote in 2006 to the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals.

If I, on a blog such as this, can say I have no problem with her criticising homosexuals, surely Muslims and those who seek to protect their overrated sensitivities can find it in themselves to accept criticism of religion.

Islam deserves to be criticised, and that’s why it gets it in the neck so often on blogs such as this one. Christianity, too, deserves to be criticised when it’s being particularly shitty, as it often is when wielded by Catholics and fundies and hate-filled Anglican bishops.

And Bardot’s conviction was for writing a letter to Sarkozy, not marching down the street baying for the blood of Muslims and gays and inciting people to do violence to them.

The article then talks of the UN resolution against “defaming” religion:

Emblematic of the assault is the effort to pass an international ban on religious defamation, supported by the United Nations General Assembly President, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. Brockmann is a suspended Roman Catholic priest who served as Nicaragua’s foreign minister in the 1980s under the Sandinista regime, the socialist government that had a penchant for crushing civil liberties.

The UN resolution is backed by countries such as Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive nations when it comes to the free exercise of religion. Blasphemers there are frequently executed. Most recently, the Government arrested the author Hamoud Bin Saleh simply for writing about his conversion to Christianity.

Islam again, of course. It’s a religion that still has its zits and its adolescent angst, and ought to grow up (or preferably just disappear).

And there’s more:

In May 2008, Dutch prosecutors arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot over a cartoon that caricatured a Christian fundamentalist and a Muslim fundamentalist as zombies who meet at an anti-gay rally and want to marry.

Last September, Italian prosecutors investigated the comedian Sabina Guzzanti for joking about Pope Benedict XVI: “In 20 years, [he] will be dead and will end up in hell, tormented by queer demons, and very active ones.”

Just what has got into the West and its authorities? Why is the Western world becoming so Orwellian?

It’s disturbing, and one day there will be bloodshed. Those who stamp on freedom of expression may just find themselves being denied one of their own freedoms – the freedom to live.

It’s not a scenario one wishes to see. But there’ll come a breaking point, and the first to suffer could well be those whom Draconian laws against “defaming” religion and against breaking the rules of political correctness seek to protect: religionists.

They will be the scapegoats, even if they’re innocent of any lawmaking. If Islam, for instance, is seen as the problem, then anyone with a dark skin will be targeted by the thugs of the far Right.

The fact that many who dislike the tenets of Islam are also racist will not help. Far too often even now, those who justifiably criticise Islam for its oppression of women, its treatment of homosexuals and the tendency of so many of its blind followers to moan and whinge and whine at every opportunity are accused of racism (usually by the likes of Islamophobiawatch, the risible, pathetic excuse for a blog – a blog that is too afraid to allow readers to leave comments).

But I digress – though only to draw your attention to one particularly obnoxious blog that seems to be campaigning against freedom of speech in the West.

Have a gander at the Brisbane Times article (which is reproduced from the Washington Post), written by Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.

Under the headline In turning against free speech, Western nations turn against their citizens, it makes sobering reading.

Rolling in the aisles

It’s good when figures in the community do odd things. There’s this vicar from Bowden, near Altrincham, Cheshire, who put on a pair of rollerblades in his church and sallied forth up the aisle to make the congregation stare in goggle-eyed astonishment.

According to a story in the Telegraph, the Rev. Roger Preece did it to cause the sort of astonishment that would have been on the faces of those who witnessed Jesus’s purported resurrection.

But it’s just a stunt. It doesn’t get people thinking about how astonished they’d be if they saw a corpse walking: it just gets them thinking how astonished they are to see a vicar on rollerblades.

He tells the Telegraph of a parishioner who stopped him while he was walking in the park and said, “Why are you walking? You should be on your roller skates!” Preece adds, “It’s got everyone in the area talking.”

Yes, about a vicar on rollerblades.

It won’t have people going about saying, “Ooh, I know how the Marys felt now when they saw His Nibs strolling about. I know how Doubting Thomas felt now when the Big Man convinced him he’d actually risen from the dead.”

No, they’ll be going about saying, “I saw the vicar on rollerblades.”

OK, Roger, it’s was a nice stunt; raised a laugh; got a few people talking (about a vicar on rollerblades); got some publicity for your church. But come on! Don’t try to tell us people will think of some divine zombie, because they won’t.

They’ll think of a vicar on rollerblades.

Human rights or Islamic sensitivities?

So much for some human-rights activists, it seems, if this piece by Wayne Besen is anything to go by.

Readers of our print issues of Gay & Lesbian Humanist (for the online issues, see the sidebar) will remember Wayne Besen as the author of a book called Anything But Straight, and you can see his websites here and here, and read his own G&LH article about the “ex-gay” movement here.

In a disturbing article in the online Falls Church News Press, Besen takes to task one Scott Long, director of the LGBT programme at Human Rights Watch, who seems to think that gays should rein in their natural desires and their universal human right to be what they are in order to appease Muslim sensitivities.

After writing about all kinds of disturbing and atrocious stuff concerning the treatment of gays in Burundi, Iraq, Uganda, Nigeria and others, Besen says:

Unfortunately, the GLBT community is not currently up to meeting the new global challenges. Passive and overly cautious bureaucrats staff some of our leading human rights organizations. They are good at reporting violence, but not very effective at countering it.

Even more disturbing, they sometimes serve as apologists in the name of cultural and religious sensitivity. Exhibit A is Scott Long, director of the GLBT program at Human Rights Watch. In the publication Contemporary Politics he lashed out at some of the world’s top gay activists and chided them for demanding that Muslims actually respect the right of GLBT people to exist.

“The incessant insistence that Muslim communities accede to the political agenda of LGBT identities actually forecloses politics altogether,” Long wrote. “It fences off the arena of shared interests . . .”

So, in other words, GLBT people should put their human rights on the backburner to assuage the grievances of religious people. We should also not act on our own behalf until all of the world’s problems are solved.

Quite. This puts me in mind of marching in the seventies and with us were some members of this or that Left-wing organisation (Workers for This or That, or the Socialist Something or Other), one of whose (prominent) members said of gay rights, more or less, “Wait till the revolution, brothers.” No, not the exact wording, but you get the drift. Let’s put gay rights on the backburner for now because, come the revolution, we’ll sweep away all oppression.

Oh, yeah?

Now, if Besen is reporting accurately – and he’s an experienced journalist who’s been reporting on gay matters for years, so we’re apt to give him the benefit of any doubt – we get so-called human-rights activists saying that, when it comes to what should be universal human rights and dignity, all humans are equal, but some humans are more equal than others.

Besen is not entirely pessimistic, though:

Fortunately, there are a growing number of GLBT activists who will no longer allow culture, history or religion to be employed as a rationalization for homophobia. We do not believe that a state’s sovereignty enables it to brutalize and marginalize gay people within its borders.

Earlier in the article – while writing about gay rights in various countries – Besen has this to say of Burundi, where, in March, tens of thousands of people demonstrated to outlaw homosexuality:

This destitute nation is the kind of place that you may have seen in late-night infomercials where flies buzz around the lips of starving children. Eighty percent of Burundi’s population lives in poverty. Famines and food shortages have occurred and the World Food Program reports that 56.8 percent of children under age five suffer from chronic malnutrition. Yet, the good citizens of Burundi have time to chant and hold signs demanding the imprisonment of homosexuals.

He also talks of the reports from Iraq that we reported on yesterday. Do read the article. It’s worth five or ten minutes or your time.

Ex-gay? Can't be done, say shrinks

Some shrinks think that so-called “treatments” for being gay are a crock, according to this BBC story.

No surprise there, then.

A bunch of freaks who believe it’s possible to “cure” homosexuality are, as we reported earlier this week (see also here), holding their freak show, er, conference at the Emmanuel Centre in Marsham Street, London, which is expected to be picketed by gay-rights activists.

The Beeb story says:

The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) said there was no evidence that the treatment worked, and that it was likely to cause considerable distress.

An RCP spokesman said: “There is no sound scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.

“Furthermore, so-called treatments of homosexuality create a setting in which prejudice and discrimination can flourish.”

The Royal College said the American Psychiatric Association had concluded there was no scientific evidence that homosexuality was a disorder and removed it from its diagnostic glossary of mental disorders in 1973.

The World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases followed suit in 1992.

The event, says the BBC, “will hear from prominent American psychologist Dr Joseph Nicolosi who said he had helped many people to become heterosexual”.

Yeah, and the Pope shags gay porn stars. It’s a bit like saying you can cure tallness by anything other than amputation at the knee.

__________

Related link: "The ex-gay movement"

Questions of interpretation

There’s some sense coming out of Scotland on the question of Christianity and sexuality.

Muriel Armstrong has for 15 months been acting editor of the official magazine of the Church of Scotland (or the “Kirk”), Life and Work. Her last editorial says the Kirk should accept homosexuality, and that homosexuality is not outlawed in the Bible.

The Scottish newspaper the Herald says:

Accusing such believers of being selective in their readings, she writes: “What is clear to the lay-person is that not everything Biblical is Christ-like. Every student of the Bible is a selective literalist.

“Those who swear by the anti-homosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus wouldn’t publicly advocate slavery or stoning women taken in adultery.

They presumably no longer accept Biblical teaching on sexual matters such as polygamy and sex with slaves.”

There are some humanists who believe that a true Christian must take the Bible literally (in other words, if you're truly a Christian you're ipso facto a homophobe); others (humanists and religionists) will take a more pragmatic approach and say it’s a set of scriptures for guidance, and that matters of today must be seen in a different cultural, social and scientific light from how they were viewed several millennia ago.

But, if selective interpretation goes towards removing one of the main sources of homophobia – religion – then such articles as Armstrong's can be only a good thing.

“The matter has been brought to the fore by the case of a popular Aberdeen clergyman who is the subject of a bitter divide in church leaders’ thinking,” says the Herald.

He’s the Rev. Scott Rennie, who’s open about his sexuality and has a male partner, and has been “overwhelmingly backed by the congregation of Queen’s Cross Aberdeen to be their minister”.

The story continues, “The Presbytery then sustained the appointment by a majority of 60 votes to 20, but dissenters have taken their case to the General Assembly.”

And that vote could be deeply divisive. But Armstrong writes, “Maybe it’s time for the Kirk to lead the way, to be true to its reforming character, as it has done over many issues over decades and centuries.

However, it’s notable that the Kirk says the magazine is its own baby and does its own thing, and a senior spokesman has distanced the Kirk from Armstrong’s words.

The Rev. Ian Galloway, convener of the Kirk’s Church and Society Council, tells the paper, “Life and Work is an editorially independent magazine and the views that are expressed by the editor are hers.

“They don’t represent any official line of the Church. The Church does not have a particular view, and there are different views within the Church of Scotland.”

Which sounds like me to be a way of saying Armstrong can say what she wants, but we don’t like poofs, thank you very much, Muriel, and goodbye.

Homophobic depravity in Iraq

This is very disturbing. Well, all persecution of sexual minorities is disturbing, but you’ll need a strong stomach for this.

An article on the American gay site Queerty.com tells how homophobic, sadistic Iraqi militant scum are gluing gay men’s arseholes together and then forcing them to take a diarrhoea-inducing drink, leading to their deaths.

The website had already bemoaned the fact that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quiet on the subject of Iraqi gays. The figures there make disquieting reading: 600 documented murders of Iraqi gays since 2005.

“And yet,” says first-linked article above, “while the US spends billions every month on Iraqi operations, there’s no attention, let alone resources, going toward defending these folks.”

The site translates a piece from Al Arabiya, which says:

A prominent Iraqi human rights activist says that Iraqi militia have deployed a painful form of torture against homosexuals by closing their anuses using “Iranian gum.” . . . Yina Mohammad told Alarabiya.net that, “Iraqi militias have deployed an unprecedented form of torture against homosexuals by using a very strong glue that will close their anus.”

According to her, the new substance “is known as the American hum [sic], which is an Iranian-manufactured glue that if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. After they glue the anuses of homosexuals, they give them a drink that causes diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhea causes death.

“Videos of this form of torture are being distributed on mobile cellphones in Iraq.”

According to this human rights activist, for the past 3 weeks a crackdown on homosexuals has been going on based on a religious decree that demands their death; dozens have been targeted. She says that the persecution of homosexuals is not confined to the Shiite clerics. Some Sunni leaders have also declared the death penalty for sodomy on satellite channels.

As you see, not just homophobic, sadistic Iraqi militant scum, but homophobic, sadistic Iraqi militant scum doing it in the name of religion.

Queerty.com says on another page, “President Barack Obama and Sec. of State Hillary Clinton have made no indication these atrocities are even on their radar. But our radar is blip-bloop-BLEEPING with this shit.”

It then goes on to present an interview with Ali Hili, leader of the UK-based organisation Iraqi LGBT.

There’s plenty to read on that site. I’ve given three links above, but each story has several more.

Protesting too much, methinks

Connecticut Senate could vote today to ratify a State Supreme Court ruling overturning a state ban on same-sex marriage. In other words, same-sex marriage could soon become legal there.

What it would do is simply codify the court’s ruling that laws preventing same-sex marriage are in breach of the state’s Constitution. So far, so good.

But the religious types, predictably, don’t want that.

However, just take a look at their “argument”, as set out in a piece on the state’s Theday.com website:

In full-page newspaper ads, phone-call campaigns to legislators and letters read to parishioners in churches across the state, opponents of the bill – already approved by the Judiciary Committee and awaiting action on the Senate calendar – have charged that it would infringe on the religious freedom of those who oppose letting gay and lesbian couples wed.

Let’s just get this right: it would curb the freedom of nutters to curb the freedom of same-sex couple who wish to marry? Have I understood this?

The bigots say the law doesn’t have exemptions to allow other bigots – if they happen to be, say, florists, banqueting facilities, that sort of thing – to refuse services to same-sex couples.

Yet these people are presumably allowed to practise their trade on the basis of fairness to all, within the law. If same-sex marriage is within the law – which it’s thought it will be – why should they be allowed to discriminate? They would soon be hauled before some court or other if a white trader refused to serve a black person, or vice versa.

There’s also the fear expressed by a bishop, Michael Cote, that the legislation “repeals the provision in current law that protects our children from government indoctrination in sexual lifestyles . . . that are contrary to our beliefs”.

What sort of “indoctrination” does he have in mind? Does the state government plan full-page ads in boys’ comics saying, “Hey, guys, get yourself a boyfriend – it’s cool!”? Or ads on TV asking eight-year-old girls if they fancy a bit of muff diving?

The bill already exempts clergy from officiating at gay marriages, if their twisted beliefs tell them they mustn’t perform such an evil act. What more do the bigots want?

Well I’ll tell you what they want. They want no same-sex marriage at all. They want no one to have homosexual desires. If anyone should have such desires, they want them to be prevented from expressing them, be that a kiss in the privacy of their own homes or a declaration of their orientation through a publicly recognised marriage.

Democrat Senator Andrew McDonald, from Stamford, is the co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a co-sponsor of the legislation, and he reckons that the church has a disproportionate focus on gay-rights issues, noting that there had not been similar efforts to mobilise the Deluded Herd behind less controversial measures.

Well, quite. The religious right and others of a fascistic persuasion among the religious (I’m thinking of Catholics and Muslims, but there are others) are obsessed by what people do with their naughty bits – totally obsessed.

Protesting too much? Yes, that question always comes to mind, doesn’t it?

Gay marriage = gun crime

It’s loony time again. Go on, have a laugh, and read this.

This story in Pink News says this chap Robert Peters, president an anti-porn group called Morality in Media, has worked out that the rise in the success of the so-called sexual revolution is inversely proportional to a decrease in morality.

His thesis? More gay marriage = more gun crime.

He’s in the United States, so you can make some allowances, because the Christian Right there is so – well, on the Right.

Predictably, he links the decline in morality with that of “the faith that so often undergirds it”.

So let’s see if we have this right. Faith down = morality down = sexual revolution up = gay marriage up = gun crime up.

Simple, really. Why didn’t I think of that before?

Therapists in need of therapy – or are they laughing all the way to the bank?

“I found that reparative therapy and ex-gay ministry caused me more harm than good.”

So says Peter Toscano, who’s had some experience of the so-called ex-gay therapies that will be discussed at the conference this weekend that we blogged about yesterday.

There’s an interview with him in the online Pink News, in which he says:

When someone elects to go into one of these programs or treatments, typically they have lots of stuff going on in their lives that needs attention – depression, addiction issues, low self-esteem, family problems, unresolved abuse or trauma.

None of these things have to do with being gay, but in our society, and particularly in many churches, they teach that being gay is the cause of all these things. They are wrong, but still this is powerful message to a young impressionable mind.

Overall, I found reparative therapy to be destructive to my psyche, my spirituality, my career, relationships within my family, my finances and even my physical health.

I suspect regular readers of this blog will need no convincing that the “psychologist” and “psychiatrists” who believe in this stuff are in need of some help from saner colleagues in the same profession.

But perhaps these people don’t believe. They know that the world is so fucked up that there are a lot of desperate people who are made to feel so ashamed of themselves for being gay that they’ll part with hard-earned pounds and dollars for this crock of crap.

These charlatans and snake-oil pedlars are probably laughing all the way to the bank.

School’s out – again!

No wonder kids grow up dumb, can’t spell and use crap grammar. As if there weren’t enough days off for religious reasons, the Great and the Good now want to add more.

According to this Daily Mail story, festivals such as Eid, Ramadan and Diwali are an excuse for some local authorities to shut the schools for a day or more.

Staff won’t get the day off, because training days will be rearranged to coincide with these newly enforced holidays. But what of the staff who would wish to have time off for these festivals – Muslims, Sikhs and members of other variants of the Deluded Herd? Would they be forced to do their training days then? Seems unlikely.

Already, says the story, “Parents are legally entitled to take their children out of school for non-Christian festivals”.

Why? Why should they be allowed to take their children out of school for anything but emergencies, given that schooling is compulsory (something you may or may not agree with, but, for the moment, it’s there) for all kids?

Under this nonsense,

local authorities including Manchester, Oldham and Tower Hamlets in East London are granting schools permission to close for up to three days to cover holy days such as the Islamic festivals of Eid al Fitr and Eid ul Adha.

In guidance likely to be finalised in the summer, schools in some areas are being told they can consider closing for the day if 40 per cent of pupils are likely to be absent to observe a religious festival.

So the other 60 per cent of kids just get a day off? Or are the “holy” days to be “given back” by the pupils, who will have their summer holidays shortened? Doubt it.

More education lost, it seems – and all for religion. Yet another case for keeping it out of schools – indeed out of the public square – altogether. If kids are taken out of school for some religious festival, they should be deemed to be playing truant. If their parents are to blame, they should face the legal consequences.

Which may seem unfair, since Christians get time off for their bits of nonsense. However, that, while not being ideal, is historical, and our school system has been built around it.

If overnight we ceased to recognise the religious significance (for those who believe) of Easter and Christmas, those breaks from routine would no doubt continue (although it’s about time the Easter, or spring, break was held at the same time each year – say around the spring equinox).

So, given that we do need holidays at certain times of the year, what are now Christmas as a midwinter festival and Easter as a spring festival are as good times as any to celebrate and have some time off.

You may argue that two weeks or more at Christmas and Easter amount to too much time off for teachers and pupils, when they get six or seven weeks off in the summer, but that’s another argument.

The fact is that councils continue to arrange things around people’s superstitions, and there’s no telling where it will all end.

How to cure the heinous sin of homosexuality

Here’s one to picket, if you’re in London this coming weekend. Here’s the description of a conference called “Sex and the City”, subtitled “A Judaeo-Christian conference for all”. The venue was being kept a secret, but read on.

Ideal for clergy, rabbis, psychologists, therapists, educators and others concerned about the plethora of sexual issues confronting us in today’s society, including mentoring the sexually broken, the sexualization of culture, pornography, the Bible and sex, and marriage, the family and sex. There will be a special focus on how religious professionals and friends/relatives can respond biblically and pastorally to those struggling with unwanted SSA (same-sex attraction).

So the “conference for all” crap is just a blatant lie. It’s clearly for a twisted minority who think being gay is such a shitty thing to be that gay people should be forced to change.

Impossible, anyway: all they can do is suppress their desires – with all the shit that can bring into their lives. Lives that are already overflowing with guilt if they even consider that they need to subject themselves to the ministrations of monsters who believe in “ex-gay”.

One of the speakers is Joseph Nicolosi, whom Wikipedia describes thus:

Nicolosi has advocated and practiced reparative therapy, which claims to help people overcome or reduce unwanted homosexual feelings – the therapy is highly controversial as the American Psychiatric Association wrote in a 1998 position statement that it “opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as “reparative” or “conversion” therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder, or based upon a prior assumption that the patient should change his/her homosexual orientation.”

Another speaker is Jeffrey Satinover. This is what Wiki says of him:

Copies of his best-selling 1996 Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth were distributed to all bishops attending the 1998 Lambeth Anglican Communion Conference and his work is widely used and cited, and equally widely criticized, as one of the main modern sources supporting the view that homosexuality is a changeable, non-innate condition, though not a matter of choice.

A third speaker is Arthur Goldberg, whom the website announcement of the conference by a group called Anglican Mainstream describes as “author of the just-released Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change”.

No balance, then? And this is a “conference”? Nope, it’s just a lot of people reinforcing each other’s idea that sexuality is fluid and can be tortured from one orientation to another. The website continues:

We are very worried about the continued progress of the gay – and in fact, the LGBT – agenda across the board in the UK. Social, cultural, political and religious sectors are all being targeted and most of them are capitulating. The ramifications for gay living are not confined to even these realms, however. As various gay commentators observe, gays have been the pioneers for new models of doing relationships and sex for the rest of us, especially among the young. Did you know? Though slightly optimistic, Channel 4’s 2007 How Gay Sex Changed the World is essentially correct. The LGBT contingent is but the first manifestation of a profound sexual sea change occurring today which will make the 1960s sexual revolution look tame. Given the present cultural endorsement and legal protection of these “orientations”, we will soon be in a situation where there is no turning back: the damage will be complete.

What “damage”? Where is the “damage”? Why are these debased, poisonous, vile people worried? Is it going to affect their lives? Are they going to find they’re forced into shagging others of the same sex? Are they going to be turned into paedophiles (something that so many raving idiots conflate with homosexuals)?

Are gays and lesbians going to take over the world and banish heterosexuality, just as these pernicious, malicious freaks want to banish homosexuality?

Just what is it to these grotesque individuals what others do with their choice portions and dangly bits? What they do with their relationships? How they conduct their lives?

In case you wish to spread the word and organise a picket, it’s on Friday and Saturday, 24 and 25 April, from 9.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. The website says it’s at a “central London venue”, but we now know it’s at the Emmanuel Centre in Marsham Street, London SW1P 3DW.

“We are not publicizing this [venue] because we have no desire to have the conference ruined by unhappy gay activists etc.,” a conference coordinator, Lisa Nolland, said in an email to a UK Gay News reader, who passed it on to the online outlet.

Byron the beak buggers off

We reported more than a year ago on the Welsh magistrate who said gays were paedophiles, and agreed not to sit while an inquiry was held into his publicly proclaimed views.

Now, I’m glad to report, the bigoted twit has resigned.

The magistrate, Byron Butler, was stopped in the street the by former Steps singer Ian (“H”) Watkins, who was making a programme for an edition of BBC Wales’s Week In, Week Out about his experiences while growing up gay in the Welsh Valleys.

When this arsehole was asked by “H” about his views, he said, “I think probably it’s a suspicion of the mainstream that they [gays] perhaps will interfere with young people and so on, and that’s historically been the case.

“That is the danger. Paedophiles, not necessarily, but they do, don’t they? That’s the reality.”

The community is better off without pillocks like Mr Byron bloody Butler, thank you very much.

Quiet Voice raised against McSpringer

Satisfying to see that the nutters who can’t tell their art from their arseholes didn’t so much as cause a dent in the impact of a Scottish showing of Jerry Springer: The Opera last night.

The Tayside and Fife newspaper the Courier tells us that a few – around twenty – members of that fine, rational, freethinking body Christian Voice (which is fronted by Stephen “Birdshit” Green) held a “peaceful protest” at St Andrews, where a student drama group are staging the musical.

That was nineteen better than the protest on the opening night: just one lonely member of Christian Voice turned up.

He was Dr Charles Ferguson, a lecturer, who handed out leaflets and told anyone willing to listen, “This show degrades Jesus and it is offensive and blasphemous. The Lord’s name is taken in vain and it degrades his person.”

A bit like those people who complained about what a character said in Coronation Street, these people feel that characters in dramas have the same clout as real people – and, even if they did, so what? We all have opinions and are entitled to express them. And Jerry is even further removed from reality in that, not only do characters do the “blaspheming”, but they do so at an even further remove: said characters are in a dream sequence, not the main plot of the piece.

But thank goodness for these Christian Voice types. Such dipshits give us such entertainment.

(Hat tip: Freethinker.)

Bangle wrangle – counting the cost

The bangle wrangle we were reporting on last year has cost the British school at the centre of it a cool two hundred grand. That’s the price of religion when it gets uppity and claims special status.

As you can see from this story from last autumn – and those linked to in it – a Sikh girl at a Welsh school insisted on her “right” to wear a bangle when the school’s policy was against it.

That school policy, which allowed only ear studs and watches, affected all pupils, not just this one. But, you see, this was a religious piece of jewellery – and the High Court ruled in favour of the pupil, thereby ruling in favour of superstitious nonsense. The girl does not have to wear a bangle, simple as that.

Now the Express tells us that, as well as the £200,000 legal bill,

education bosses have been ordered to pay the student banned from wearing the Sikh Kara bangle damages believed to be at least five figures.

Aberdare Girls’ School, in Aberdare, Wales, is reeling from the bill, which includes an invoice from human rights group Liberty, who brought the case on behalf of Sarika Watkins-Singh, 15.

The school’s own legal fees top £76,000.

The row began when Watkins-Singh was excluded from the school earlier in the year for refusing to remove the bangle. The school denied any racial discrimination.

Well that was because there was no racial discrimination. The bangle seems to be something that followers of a particular belief system insist that they have to wear.

All the more reason for kicking religion out of the public square – and that means schools – except as something to learn about, as a valid academic subject. It just causes problems – and costs money.

A TaxPayers’ Alliance spokesman, Mark Wallace, is quoted in the Express story as saying, “This case means a headache for the taxpayer, who will ultimately be forced to stump up.

“This just emphasises the need for schools to be given full control of their rules and regimes without risk of politically correct enforcement. The problem in this case arose because of interference from other parties.”

Other parties that used their political correctness in pursuit of a policy of appeasing the Deluded Herd.

Rolling back rampant Islam? At what price?

A month ago, my blog colleague Diesel B dared to hope that the tide was turning against rampant Islam, when the British High Court acknowledged that a campaign by two pushy Muslim governors to give Islam a greater presence in a state school had played a key part in forcing a successful head teacher from her job.

Now we learn that the teacher, Erica Connor, 57, the former head of the New Monument primary school in Woking, Surrey – who was forced to leave the school because of stress after she was scapegoated and accused of “Islamophobia” and won a compensation payout of over £400,000 because her employers failed to back her in the row – says she is unlikely to ever teach again.

Connor told BBC’s Radio 5 Live that the school had been faltering when she took over. She improved it and made it the second-most improved school in the country.

And this is the thanks she got.

The BBC website story tells us:

But from late 2003 her relationship with the school’s governors started to deteriorate.

Two Muslim governors claimed tensions existed between the school and the community, and Mrs Connor went on to face accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

At one point, a petition was circulated in the area against her. It contained, she said, “a very personal, vitriolic attack”.

“It was exceptionally distressing,” she said.

When she was accused of racism and “Islamophobia” – whatever that is – it attacked “the core of me: my values, my beliefs”.

So her county council – out pf political correctness, no doubt – bows to Islam by failing to give her support (ho hum, how many times have we seen this happening?) and what seems like a perfectly good teacher, doing a good job and making a silk purse from the proverbial sow’s ear finds herself on the scrapheap.

Because of what appears to be kowtowing instead of showing some testicular fortitude against the creeping menace, a woman has lost the job she loved and education has lost a good teacher.

This has come about because she’s lost confidence in her own ability.

The council has lodged an application to appeal against the High Court judge’s decision.

Is Tony Blair a Catholic?

So Tony Blair’s criticism of Ratzinger and his Holy Mafia has not gone down too well in the Reichstag in Rome. Surprise, surprise!

The former UK Prime Minister, who converted to Catholicism after his resignation, said the Vatican needed to rethink “entrenched” attitudes towards homosexuality, which, he said, are out of step with the feelings of most Catholics.

An article in the Catholics’ weekly mag, the Tablet, says that, once the news broke of Blair’s conversion to Catholicism, “it did not take long for some in the Church to raise doubts about whether Mr Blair could keep the promise he had made in the declaration of faith: ‘I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.’ ”

And this is why the Catholic Church is either full of liars or full of Nazis. Well, the truth lies somewhere in between. Not all stick to these “rules”, clearly, and those who do cannot call themselves human beings in the sense of displaying human qualities of kindness and compassion. Indeed, they often display the morality of the sewer.

Those who don’t stick to them can’t call themselves Catholics, because they’ve broken the very promise that made them Catholics in the first place.

The Tablet piece says, “The question marks were caused by Mr Blair’s liberal views and his parliamentary record of voting well outside the boundaries of Catholic teaching on abortion, stem-cell research and civil partnerships, not to mention the invasion of Iraq.”

Well, as one of Ratzinger’s generals, Monsignor Andrew Faley, assistant general secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said, the profession of faith “does not mean we have to go over his past actions and ask him to explain them all again. The future starts here.”

OK, so Blair has now ceased to be a Catholic. Should he be excommunicated?`

After all, the mother of that little girl referred to in our “morality of the sewer” link above was excommunicated, and so were a group of medical staff, because they were complicit in, or performed, an abortion on a nine-year-old girl who was carrying twins and could have died if she’d gone to full term with the pregnancy.

Abortion is seen as a venal sin, and so is homosexuality. What’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, shouldn’t it?

Fitna Mark II

Geert Wilders is going to make another film about Islam.

Thanks to Muslim moans, his previous one, Fitna, was guaranteed worldwide audiences, and the film has been placed on numerous blogs, including this one.

Fitna concentrated on the Islamic hate manual, the Koran. The new movie – which the Dutch politician hopes to complete next year – is expected to focus on the threat of Islam and the impact Islamisation has had on Europe and the United States.

It will also focus on the principle of free speech. As we’ve seen, our own NuLabour masters have shown their supine, gutless, pusillanimous spinelessness by banning Wilders from the UK when he was to have shown his film here – at the invitation of a member of the House of Lords (see also here).

The Islam guide to bringing up your children

How do you ensure your kids become “good” Muslims? You beat the shit out of them, of course.

How do you deal with a recalcitrant daughter who chooses to wear skirts that show – oh, horror of horrors! – her knees?

You hire a killer to take her out.

OK, so not all Muslims act like this. But what makes those who choose to do it do it in the name of Islam?

Singer’s song of common sense

[S]uppressing the freedom of speech of Islam’s critics merely gives rise to the suspicion that evidence and sound argument cannot show their arguments to be mistaken.

Thus spake Peter Singer, author of the seminal work Animal Liberation, in the Guardian.

He makes as good a case as I have read for our right to criticise religion – to the point of defaming it, if necessary.

Religion itself cannot, of course, claim an infringement of human rights, because it isn’t a human being. To protect it under the heading of human rights is a nonsense. Provided no individual person is being defamed – such that libel or slander can be proven – then ideas are fair game.

It was, of course, the Muslims who wanted their benighted belief system protected. But, as Singer astutely points out with the quotation above, if they have nothing to hide, why try to stop their critics?

He goes on to say that, if they can prove that criticisms levelled at them are untrue, then that, and not suppressing free expression, is the way to refute such criticisms. This is how he puts it:

For example, the OIC [Organisation of Islamic Conference] said in its statement [to the UN] that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” Are those associations wrong? If the OIC wishes to change many people’s perception that Islam violates human rights, suppressing freedom of speech is hardly the best way to go about it. The way to change such a perception would be to marshal evidence against it, and to make the case that human rights – including the rights of women – are as well protected in Islamic countries as they are in non-Islamic countries.

Hard to argue with that. But demanding, whining, whingeing, complaining Muslims (and that is not, let me state now, all of them) will continue to be appeased by the politically correct brigade and the shoddy and shabby politicians for whom there are votes to be had by keeping Muslims sweet.