Melanie Phillips stokes the homophobic fire, then objects to people getting burnt.
This blog is my response to the opinion piece "Liberal high priests pursue another heretic" by Melanie Phillips, published in the Times on 7 April 2014.Melanie Phillips is an intelligent and articulate writer, and I find myself in agreement with her on a number of social and political issues, including the serious dangers posed by a nuclear Iran and the widespread injustice and misrepresentation suffered by Israel. It is for this reason that I feel such dismay when I see her writing in such a facile, superficial and half-baked manner about the lives and the rights of gay and lesbian people. For those without a Times subscription who are unable to read her article, I hope I have referred enough to its content below to convey its essence and make my objections intelligible.
The great irony is that Melanie, with her very unenlightened and rather offensive attitude towards gay people and gay relationships, is herself guilty of the “ideological intolerance” that she is attributing to others. She has seen fit to lump support for “gay rights” together with divorce, “elective fatherlessness” and domestic abuse of women by unmarried partners. Without the hard-won “gay rights” she disparages, gay and lesbian people would still be living in fear and shame, having to keep any relationship hidden from others, with discrimination at work and the possibility of prosecution hanging overhead like the Sword of Damocles.
It is when people such as Melanie write about gay people in such an unconscionable manner that the kind of overreaction happens that led to the dismissal of Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO who was recently forced to step down because of his opposition to equal marriage: and it happens because ignorant homophobia has already caused so much suffering in the lives of gay and lesbian people, that a sea of anger is often just under the surface, and further instances of homophobia hit a hot button. Melanie has contributed to this polarisation by demonstrating such a lack of moderation, good judgment and forgiveness in her own writing about gay people.
Just look at this paragraph:
“Some gay activists have professed shock that gay rights have been used in this way to destroy other rights. Such avowals of outraged liberalism cut no ice. Having hijacked the institution of marriage, stamped all over religious beliefs and smeared objectors as bigots, such activists can scarcely pose now as principled defenders of freedom.”
So her polarisation and demonisation of those supporting what she calls “the gay agenda” is such that those gay activists, including myself, who regard it as wrong that Brendan Eich was forced out of his job, have our views discounted because we dared to support equal marriage. Not only that, but apparently, being supporters of “the gay agenda”, what we express about this issue is not real shock, but “professed shock”, and “cuts no ice”. Why? Because apparently we have “hijacked the institution of marriage.” Perhaps, while she is at it, Melanie would like to rail against women for hijacking the institution of democracy when they got the vote. And it is hardly a “hijacking” when a good majority of the heterosexual population supported gay people being able to marry. As for “stamp(ing) all over religious beliefs”, she may feel her own religious beliefs have been stamped over, but she should realise that very many people with religious beliefs support equal marriage. Furthermore, there are plenty of “religious beliefs” that thoroughly deserve to be stamped over. Being a “religious belief” does not mean it has an absolute entitlement not to be criticised or rejected. Quite apart from that, civil marriage is not a religious institution; and if a number of religious adherents see a conflict between their personal religious beliefs and the right of LGBT people to marry, they should be modest enough to remember that while they have the right to hold any religious belief they like, they do not have the right to impose it on others who disagree with it, (who incidentally, in the case of equal marriage, constitute the majority of the UK population).
When she accuses us of “smearing objectors as bigots,” she needs to realise that a good number of those who objected to equal marriage are indeed bigots. This is, however, not necessarily the case: but when the fires of homophobia are stoked in the way demonstrated by her article, many of those who have already suffered a great deal at the hands of homophobes over their lifetime are going to react with anger. It is when this happens that injustices such as that suffered by Brendan Eich occur.
Marriage is a socially conservative institution. It seems to be something that Melanie strongly supports. How bizarre, then, that she opposes same-sex couples wanting to make the same kind of commitment as their heterosexual counterparts, especially as an increasing number of gay couples are bringing up children, who have as much right to be raised in a stable family with married parents as their peers who have heterosexual parents.
Melanie rails that “conscientious objectors to gay rights are (treated as) the equivalent of racists.” It is surely noteworthy that there were “conscientious objectors” to interracial marriage under Segregation and Apartheid, and that these were people who derived their views from their interpretations of the Bible. They may have been very nice and simply misguided people, but their views were still racist in exactly the same way as the views of those who opposed gay marriage are homophobic. People suffer because of ignorance and discrimination, whether it happens on the basis of race or sexuality.
The J. L. Talmon reference to “a dictatorship based on ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses” so aptly describes those dogmatic religious countries today where freedom and liberalism are crushed. Yet it also aptly describes the oppression suffered by gay and lesbian people here in the UK before the 1960s and for some time beyond then. Melanie is absolutely right to call for a more thoughtful, flexible, liberal and forgiving approach to those who express dissenting views of the kind shared by Brendan Eich. Yet by so dramatically failing to model such behaviour herself, she will unfortunately continue to generate the anger and create the polarisation that lead to the heavy-handedness, lack of tolerance, and blinkered thinking that she deplores. Or at least: that she deplores in carefully selected others.
© Gary Powell, 2014
