Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

According to the old wives tale, if you corner a rat it will go for your throat. And with this in mind, we move on to the subject of William Hague.

You will remember that soon after he was elected leader of the Conservative Party, the glabrous northerner promised that he would remodel the Tories into a party of tolerance and good will. There would be a place for everyone in Mr Hague’s new party, be they black, white, straight or gay.

Liberals applauded this volte face, but the unpleasant rump of the part – the arsehole of Little England, you might say – shook their blue-rinsed heads in disbelief. “What is this young whippersnapper saying?” they asked. “No more hanging or flogging? No more paki-bashing and homo-hating? This must be stopped.”

Sensing the unease, the traditional Tory rags The Mail and The Telegraph, swung ever further rightwards. The reactionaries reacted. Mr Hague was eventually left with no alternative but to listen to the baying voices of the hateful old bats who pay his wages, and the foaming journos who reflect their opinions.

And despite the pleas of gay Tories such as Ivan Massow, William Hague has turned from being a pussy cat into John Bull’s attack dog. Liberalism is once more a dirty word in Toryville and its inhabitants feel much better for it.

Of course, old-time Tories like Baronesses Young and Blatch have never wavered from the hate-is-a-family-value position. They never had truck with this new-fangled equality rubbish, knowing that in the end the Party would return to its roots.

So now that he has decided to swing to the Right, Willy is making a good job of it. He seems to read the reactionary papers from cover to cover and accept every word as law. Or, as David McKie in The Guardian put it: “Thrashing around for a lifeline, Hague has seemed increasingly ready in recent weeks to take his cue from the leader and letter writers and columnists of The Telegraph.”

First in the firing line were asylum-seekers. The Daily Mail and The Sun led the way, whipping up a storm of prejudice against them. Abetted by Anne Widdecombe, Mr Hague then came in to kick the filthy foreigners while they were down.

After he’d bashed the “bogus” asylum seekers he moved on to the issue of “self-defence”. A man who shot a 16-year old burglar in the back and was convicted of murder was more or less canonised by Mr Hague.

“Let my people go,” became his theme tune. It shouldn’t be the householder in prison but the burglar. Which is fine, except for the fact that the burglar in this instance is six-feet under. The delightful Ms Widdecombe then appeared to be promising to legalise something akin to lynch law.

Strict Willy received strong signals that the British people were right behind him in both campaigns. Fired up with the much-vaunted tolerance for which they are so famous, hundreds of thousands of them rang the The Sun’s hate-lines – sorry, hot-lines – to say that they thought Mr Hague was right. They also wrote in their thousands to tell him that he was right about keeping Section 28, another example of the new Tory Party’s right-wing populism.

Mr Hague was the only Party leader to accept an invitation to speak at the Spring Harvest Conference of evangelical Christians at Minehead this year. As The Church of England Newspaper reported: “Eighteen months of listening to Britain’s churches has convinced the Conservative leader that far from being dead, the church in Britain is very much alive and advancing in many parts of the country.”

You remember this is the same Mr Hague who once said he would rather got for a walk in the Yorkshire Dales than go to church. However, he now seems to be born-again (and again and again) and his speech was carefully crafted to fit the event. Many people at the Spring Harvest feel as violently antipathetic towards homosexuals as do the Tory rump, so naturally Mr Hague was pleased to make encouraging noises about the current Christian obsession with Section 28 (which has become a by-word for more generalised homo-hatred). Mr Hague told his pious 8,000 strong audience: “It is vital that parents have confidence in the values taught in schools. Section 28 should stay.”

Ruth Gledhill, the religious affairs correspondent of The Times, wondered if Mr Hague was trying to emulate the Republican tactic in the USA of affiliating with the religious right. Is he, in fact, trying to create a Bible-belt of his very own? She quoted the Archdeacon of Northolt, the Ven. Pete Broadbent, who admitted to being a card-carrying member of the Labour Party: “William Hague pressed all the right buttons. The evangelical movement is growing in confidence but some sections of it are also growing in arrogance.”

He questioned whether Mr Hague realised exactly what a dangerous lot he was courting in his desperation for votes. “Some of the stuff being produced by the conservative evangelicals at the moment is a bit over the top,” said the Ven. Pete. Anyone who has seen the anti-gay material being circulated by these groups will think that an understatement. Ruth Gledhill wonders how much longer other party leaders will be able to ignore the rapidly-expanding evangelical movement.

“A number of festivals similar to Spring Harvest take place throughout the year,” she revealed. In July, the black-led churches meet in Brighton in an event organised by the African-Caribbean Evangelical Alliance. The Methodists have their own Easter People get-together. House churches such as the Surrey-based Pioneer Group meet over the summer. American preachers are often flown over to address the crowds. Millions of people are involved At Spring Harvest alone, more than 50,000 committed Christians turn out over the three-week break.”

At all these events, gay-bashing is high on the agenda. The “committed Christians” have convinced themselves that gay people are their mortal enemies, a threat to their future and an insult to their God. They’ll go to almost any lengths to derail our push for equality and Mr Hague has shown that he is ready to help them. But although his rightward tilt might get him some easy headlines and appearances on the Nine o’Clock News, the populism he espouses is shallow and dangerous. Following the herd, particularly when it is stampeding, is not the mark of a sound politician. We want them to consider the issues fairly and thoroughly and then make informed decisions on our behalf.

Mr Hague and Ms Widdecombe will eventually realise that when people have considered all angles they will realise that nothing is quite as simple as the Tories make out. The instant a visiting Jehovah’s Witness is shot in mistake for a burglar is when the tide will turn. As Voltaire said: “Once people begin to reason, all is lost.”

Indeed, the backlash has already begun. Satirising Mr Hague as a Pokémon (or Toréman in this instance) Brian Reade in The Daily Mirror asks: “What exactly are these Toréman? What do they do? And how low will they stoop to win seats at the election? Well, I have recruited someone who is being targeted by Toréman. Someone who understands exactly what they are about. A man with the mental capacity of a seven-year old called The Bar-room Bigot.”

According to Mr Reade’s consultant: “Homosexuality will be banned. As all Toréman know, God gave us our backsides to talk through and nothing else.”

Meanwhile, Katherine Raymond of The Daily Express wrote of her contempt for Anne Widdecombe, who is on the telly almost the instant a suitable story breaks. “As soon as there is a groundswell of popular opinion about anything, out comes the instant press release, the knee jerk solution, the Widdecombe sound bite promising to change the law to suit the circumstances of a particular story. That is not how law should be made. You need to engage your brain first.”

Although the Tories have no chance of winning the next election (and they have admitted as much themselves in a leaked document) they can, like the cornered rat I spoke of at the beginning, do a lot of nasty damage on the way to defeat. Their rabble-rousing on gay issues is harmful, creating hatred and fear where there need be none and trading on lies and stereotypes.

So, what is the alternative? Now that Mr Blair has failed so dismally to deliver on his promises of reform, are we in for another decade or two of waiting and hoping? Mr Blair will never again be such a strong position in the House of Commons. At present he can do whatever he likes. As Tim Haines wrote in The Times: “The Government’s real obsession now is with a second term, not with sex.”

They cannot afford to upset the bigots anymore because even bigots have votes and they’ve already been pushed to their limits by the furore over the age of consent and Section 28 (and now gay adoption). But, asks Tim Haines, “What is the Labour Party for if not civil rights?” The answer seems to be self-preservation.

“Despite a huge Commons majority, the Government is terrified of what a partisan press might do to whip up public opinion,” Mr Haines comments, “it has been outflanked by the scorched-earth campaign particularly associated with The Daily Mail., the essence of which is that New Labour wants to hand out Gay News (sic) with the history homework. Tony Blair has condemned this as ‘hysterical’ but has been unwilling to confront The Daily Mail’s argument that homosexuals have already got equality, what they want now are ‘special rights’ which, in the elegant prose of the paper, are to be ‘vociferously promoted’ – at public expense – in the classroom.”

Mr Haines chides the Government for its gutlessness on the whole gay rights issue. “For all the fuss and fury over Section 28 and the age of consent, there is little chance that ministers will be recalled for the courageous manner in which they took on the press and the peers or reshaped public opinion. They will not have presided over a shift from qualified to unqualified equality. Mr Blair’s Government has taken very few risks and imposed little change – not much of an epitaph, really.”

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Reason has triumphed over bigotry! That’s what we thought last year when concerned citizens banded together to torpedo a proposed alliance between the Bank of Scotland and the bouffanted televangelist Pat Robertson.

The bigots are on the run, we imagined. But we’ve been rudely awakened from that pleasant dream by the protracted campaign of homophobia conducted by Cardinal Winning and Brian Souter, culminating in what was laughingly called a referendum.

Souter’s referendum in Scotland became a classic example of how rich men can buy the political process.

For weeks before the voting slips were distributed, Souter was decorating billboards around the country with messages of hate. Together with his Catholic cohort, Souter succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in creating a panic about Section 28 – not only in Scotland but in England, too, much to Tony Blair’s astonishment.

The so-called referendum on Section 28 was such a mess that it was easy for liberals to dismiss. As Magnus Link in The Times wrote: “The result suggests that anyone with enough money to fund a poll on this scale can pick their own subject – be it capital punishment or barring refugees – and effectively by-pass the democratic process.”

But, as Hugo Young said in The Guardian: “The Souter referendum may also set an example for a pattern that begins to gather pace. When Mori asked last year whether referendums should be obligatory on Parliament on the petition of, say, 1 million electors, 77 per cent of the British said yes.”

It’s easy to understand why. On the face of it, referenda seem like the perfect expression of the democratic will. With a referendum, the people truly speak and what the majority wants is what the law will become. What could be fairer than that? It doesn’t take much thought to see what dangers referenda pose to minorities. The Souter exercise was unofficial, illegitimate and unbalanced.

As Jenny Ferguson pointed out in The Daily Telegraph letters page: “Brian Souter’s opinion poll was not a referendum in the true sense of the word. In a true referendum there are strict limits on campaign spending to make sure it is fair and balanced… this poll was organised after three months of one-sided propaganda.”

But let us not delude ourselves. Even if the referendum had been officially recognised and properly conducted, it was unlikely to have gone our way. Repeated research has shown that if the country were to be ruled by referenda, gay rights would soon fly out of the window.

Magnus Link again, in The Times: “Tis, one might argue, the modern equivalent of mob rule, the masses pouring out into the streets shaking their pikestaffs and throwing their rocks…”

In America, some states frequently resort to referenda over contentious issues. In California, in March, Proposition 22, which rules that gay marriage can never be introduced in the state, was carried overwhelmingly after a vitriolic campaign by religious groups and the political Right.

Other referenda on gay issues have also ended up retarding our progress, sometimes quite drastically.  As the religious Right has found there, and is increasingly finding here, it is very easy to create the image of the sinister homo in a culture that is deeply ignorant on the topic.

There is no law to stop you saying whatever you want about gay people, however nasty and defamatory. Other minorities may have protection against hate-mongering. We have none. All that is needed is the money to disseminate propaganda, a few newspapers willing to frighten the punters and the referendum result is in the bag.

And each time a referendum on gay issues is lost, equality is pushed further from our grasp and our public image is irreparably damaged. Those citizens who had previously been on a “live and let live” frame of mind suddenly find themselves taking an active anti-gay stance.

They have become convinced – often by malevolent and dishonest advertising – that their children are at risk or that society is going to be damaged in some way by homosexual. Tolerance rarely figures in these campaigns.

Souter’s cohort, Cardinal Winning, was pushing his own nasty agenda throughout all this and was a willing accomplice in these weeks of consistent distortion, exaggeration and scare-mongering.

The Daily Record, too, became an organ of hostility, using its power to promulgate a totally one-sided version of the debate. Sham or not, before we dismiss Souter’s referendum, we should take a warning from it. For as Hugo Young informed us in The Guardian: “There are politicians who want to enrich and expand the referendum culture… Lord (David) Owen along with Lord Healey and Lord Prior, is promoting an amendment to make referendums obligatory before any measure of ‘first class constitutional importance’ can become law.”

They have since gained support from William Hague. These politicians do not make clear how this would work. They propose perhaps leaving it to the Speaker to decide what qualifies. Although the proposals are really an attempt to interfere with any further integration with Europe, it is a step in the direction of the referendum culture. You can be sure that if the Christian Institute or the Conservative Christian Fellowship have any say in it (and they seem to have an awful lot of say in Parliament these days) referenda will soon be extended from constitutional issues to those of social reform. Especially homosexuality.

But now, it seems, it’s money that talks. Souter has created a precedent in Britain that is well established in the USA. There, as Nick Cohen said in The Observer, business men who want to control public policy, for whatever reason, can use their fortune to push themselves into public life. He cites Rodd Perot and Steve Forbes as examples.

Souter’s ambitions are inspired by the Church of the Nazarene, a fundamentalist American sect based in Kansas City. “Although it takes a hard line on all things sexual, it allows him to get on with business,” said Cohen.

Meanwhile, Trevor Royle, in The Guardian tells us that the unholy alliance of Souter and Winning “sent Scotland into such a spectacular spin that the Parliament seems incapable of controlling it. Between them and their media advisors they have thoroughly unsettled Scotland by placing moral fundamentalism at the heart of mainstream politics. Indeed, so confident does Souter feel about imposing his own standards on the country that there is talk of him funding candidates to stand against politicians opposed to his views.”

It may be that when Souter and Winning engage with the Parliament on other issues that are on its agenda – namely reforming divorce laws, changing the status of illegitimate children and better contraceptive care for teenagers – the Scottish public might not be so eager to go along with the gruesome twosome. After all, these issues will affect far more people than just an unpopular minority that can be easily dismissed.

I’m hoping the Scottish people will see sense and give this evil pair their marching orders.

But, as The Guardian reported: “Last week a group of scholars and politicians met in Aberdeen to study the links between Scotland and Ireland. As one representative put it, given the predicament within the country, the comparison might be better made with Iran.”

Buoyed by what he sees as his great triumph, Souter will be eager to further bash the underpinnings of the democratic process with his chequebook. Who needs politicians when you’ve got money in the bank and God in your heart?

Much as we may disagree with our elected representatives in Parliament, at least we can expect them to make decisions on our behalf after looking at the issues in detail, examining the evidence and discussing them at length.

In the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament there is genuine debate in which all voices can be heard, and MPs and MSPs will be held accountable for their decisions at the ballot box. Mr Souter got his result by exploiting ignorance and by-passing debate.

In the world of the referendum, the winner is likely to be the one with the loudest and most expensive megaphone. Appeals to prejudice are easy in such circumstances and minorities, however innocent and right they might be, don’t stand a chance.

But, in the end, all democracies must be judged by how they treat their minorities. As Earl Russell tried to explain to the readers of The Times: “The question of the limits of the rights of a majority in a democracy is a real one. The essential obligation of the majority is to get the consent of the minority. Without that the majority is useless. Experience has shown that getting the consent of the minority is conditional on their right to equality before the law. Were there to be a clear majority in favour of allowing citizens the right to refuse to sell their houses to Roman Catholics, I would have no hesitation as a legislator in over-ruling that majority. Without this equality, consent disappears, as we have seen in Northern Ireland.”

On a lighter note, and also in The Times, Miles Fothergill wrote: “I know only one or two heterosexuals, so I have no idea what goes on – except for a rather peculiar image created by the media: child-molesting, abusing their own children, rape, divorce – all very sordid. I hope no-one sends me a form asking me to vote as to whether these antics should be promoted in schools. I think I would probably vote that I don’t think they should. But then, I don’t really ‘know’ this type of person very well, so perhaps I’m a ‘don’t know’ and more than a little ignorant.”

***

The latest Christian excuse for homophobia is a corker and comes from the same mould as “God Moves in mysterious ways”. It goes like this: Jesus was hated for his opinions and told his followers that they would be hated, too. Therefore, whatever Christians say, however foul and disgusting, it must be OK because those they are attacking come to hate them for it and being hated makes them more like Jesus.

Being hated is good, so let there be no restraint. I heard it from Anne Atkins on the R4 programme Why People Hate Christians and Cardinal Winning repeated it in a slimy article in The Spectator. It’s worth seeking out as an example of the frightening fanaticism that is such a threat to our rights,

Holy, holy, holy – who is saintlier this month, the Rev Tony or the Saint William of Hague?

It’s the rush to make a favourable impression on religious voters, our leader and would-be leader are making noises that are very bad news for gay people.

Mr Blair has given in to demands from the Christian Institute that he amend a European employment directive that would have given gay people employment protection for the first time. Now, if the religious lobby have their way, religious organisations (church schools, church charities, church hospitals and care homes) will have the right to deny employment to homosexuals. That’s thousands and thousands of job opportunities fenced off from us, just like that.

At the same time Mr Hague is trying to outdo our pious Prime Minister. As The Times reported: “William Hague has launched an audacious plan for Britain’s religious vote by promising strong support for social work programmes of the churches and other faith communities.”

The article revealed that “Mr Hague’s moves are a carefully co-ordinated attempt to attract the votes of religiously inclined people who tend to be socially and politically aware but not party political. He believes that he can show on issues such as the family, abortion and Section 28, the Conservatives should be their natural home.”

Things came to a head when Mr Hague had a meeting with a far-right American religious ideologue called Marvin Olasky. Mr Olasky sought to advise Mr Hague on how to transfer welfare provision from the state to religious charities.

You might think this is a reasonable thing for a Conservative politician to consider – until, that is, you look a little more closely at Mr Olasky.

Olasky runs a magazine called The World in which he spells out his ideas. He is, naturally, poisonously anti-gay. He’s written in glowing terms about the ex-gay movement – that bunch of crackpots whose homophobia is so extreme they want to eliminate homosexuality by turning gay people straight (with the Lord’s help, of course). “Homosexuality is a practice not only wrong, but not inevitable,” wrote Mr Olasky. “The success of Exodus [an ex-gay group] and other ministries to homosexuals shows that those sunk in this particular sin can change, just as people who have gotten stuck in welfare can change.”

Olasky talks of the “success” of Exodus and other similar outfits. What success is this? I wonder if he saw the Channel 4 Witness documentary last month, which took a close look behind the scenes of one of these gay-cure ministries. In fact, they didn’t “cure” anybody, all they did was make insecure people more confused, and unhappy people even more miserable.

As I watched the programme, it dawned on me what motivates the ex-gay movement. It is not a desire to help homosexuals at all, it is about bringing comfort to religious fundamentalists. It’s about making Mr Olasky and his ilk feel better that they are “doing something” to eliminate the source of their fear and loathing.

Despite the talk of compassion, they are unconcerned about the consequences for the people they are torturing with their madcap “therapies” and Bible-bashing lies. Schemes like Exodus provide a justification for the ceaseless gay-bashing that is emanating from religious sources.

Mr Hague was unrepentant about consulting Olasky, who advocates that faith-based organisations should take over social services. As the Texas Observer noted: “Olasky would prefer that government stop providing social services, such as drug treatment centres and homelessness shelters and for faith-based organisations to take its place.”

Can you imagine our social services – including Aids treatment centres and hostels for homeless young people – falling into the hands of some of the religious organisations that are currently agitating strongly against homosexuality? Let’s not forget that Mr Olasky wants religion to have a free hand to proselytise among the socially deprived and even restrict services only to those who are prepared to embrace religion.

A Guardian editorial was quick to chide Mr Hague on the company he is keeping. “By meeting Marvin Olasky, the ultimate Christian right-wing evangelical from Texas, the Conservative leader signalled a flirtation with the harsher face of religiously-informed politics. Mr Olasky is close to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. He also blames poverty on the poor and describes women as fit for public office only when there are no men available. Mr Olasky’s politics are reactionary and ugly: by sitting on his knee, Mr Hague has cast a shadow over his praise for religion – and made it little more than another move towards the intolerant right.”

In an interview with Rachel Sylvester in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Hague says that he believes in tolerance. “I am very tolerant of people living in whatever way they like, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the rights of others. I believe in being tolerant about different sexual orientation…”

Regrettably, actions speak louder than words and Mr Hague has forced his party into implacable opposition to the repeal of Section 28 and the lowering of the age of consent. It doesn’t matter what he says, it’s what he does that really counts.”

To be fair, not all Christian groups or individuals buy into the Hague philosophy. Belinda Shaw of west London wrote to The Times: “I, like many others, watched in sorrow as the ‘new morality’ of the Conservatives brought havoc to British society over two decades, with policies that gave many the impression of ignoring poverty, unemployment, homelessness and the resulting destruction of many families. I am alarmed by the implication that Mr Hague seeks to gain support from the intolerant religious right of whatever faith. The civil rights of many people, and poor women in particular, are threatened by those zealots.”

Mr Blair, meanwhile, his doing his own bit of evangelising among the “faith communities”. He spoke to a gathering of black evangelical churches in Brighton, and it became clear that he is unlikely to want to upset this particular demanding lobby again. And so our rights in the European Directive I mentioned at the beginning are likely to be sacrificed to prove that he really does take religion seriously.

But how can he take it seriously when it throws up nincompoops like Monsignor Michael Buckley, who writes an agony column for the Catholic weekly The Universe. Msgr Buckley was going on recently about “understanding homosexuality” and helpfully explained to his readers the difference between “gay” and “homosexual”.

“Just as every heterosexual, for whatever reason, does not engage in sexual activity, so also there are homosexuals who lead chaste lives. What really hurts them deeply is the assumption that they are sexually active and immoral… Genuine homosexuals are loath to talk of their condition because of the false assumption that this would classify them as perverts who could be other than they were if they really wanted to… Just as we have pilloried homosexuals because of our ignorance and prejudice, so the gay movement has gone on the offensive. It demands that t be recognised as an alternative society with the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals… not all gays are homosexuals and not all homosexuals are gays.”

So, I hope that has made it clear. You’re OK if you keep yourself pure (i.e. don’t touch anything below the belly button – ever), and evil if you follow your instincts and try to find love in the way that makes you happy.

And these are the people Mr Hague wants to take over our welfare provision. And Msgr Buckley is not alone in his opinions within the Catholic Church. He is only repeating the papal party line.

Over in Rome, the Vatican had been crusading fiercely to stop or restrict World Pride. The Guardian reported that the Vatican is receiving support for its efforts from the Italian “fascist community” – (is this a sub-division of the “faith community”?). On the day that the celebrations began, there were noisy demonstrations by neo-Nazi groups – together with further denunciations from the Vatican. It seems they make natural allies.

In Israel, gay pride in Tel Aviv prompted an article in The Independent on Sunday. Once again almost all the aggro is coming from religion. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish “faith community” demands not only rights but privileges for itself. It is organising politically and trying to force its rigorously biblical way of life on to the whole country. Needless to say, there is no room for homosexuals in the Orthodox view of the world.

Israel has, at the moment, a liberal secular majority that is resisting incursions from the religious right. But on the day before the pride parade, the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had, according to the IoS: “Saved his coalition from collapse by persuading Shas, a party run by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, to remain in government. That followed his two agonising weeks of coaxing and cajoling the rabbis, caving in to one demand after another. In the end he was forced to sacrifice three ministers from the left-wing Meretz party, giving victory to the Shas, a party with a leadership about as sexually enlightened as Saudi Arabia (sentence for cross-dressing: 2,500 lashes). High in the Shas hierarchy is Shlomo Benizi – Israel’s health minister, no less – who has described homosexuality as a sickness and suggested that gays should be committed to mental institutions.”

Just as the Church of England is likely to be torn apart by homosexuality, the issue could also lead to civil war in Israel. The threat to peace is now more pronounced from the Jewish religious right than it is from the PLO.

And just to show that we are slow to learn our lesson, we go to the United States where The Church Times informs us that All Saints Church in Beverly Hills is running an Alpha Course for gay people. A spokesman for the church said that Gay Alpha was a course designed to introduce people to Christianity based on the well-known evangelical material produced by the Holy Trinity Brompton in London.

But isn’t that the same Alpha Course that preaches against homosexuality? Isn’t the Rev Sandy Miller, the man who invented Alpha, the same man who wrote to the heads of local political party associations ahead of the Kensington and Chelsea by-election, urging them to seek as their candidate someone “who is eager to uphold Christian standards”? And wasn’t this a direct attack on Michael Portillo, who had admitted earlier homosexual encounters?

Gay Alpha, unless it abandons the evangelical fervour of the British original, will require its participants to refrain from having sex. And, in that case, is it really any different to the ex-gay movement?

If it arrives in this country, give it a wide berth. It has nothing to offer but unhappiness.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The European Court of Human Rights has judged that Britain’s legal restrictions on gay sex are incompatible with the European Convention’s guarantee of the “right to a private family life”. The judgment created the predictable furore among the small-minded Little Englanders that make up the Tory party. The Daily Telegraph (slavish mouthpiece of the Tories) said that the decision was no business of the Human Rights Court. “It is not for foreign judges to decide whether or not Britain’s sex laws are fair to the people of Britain”, the paper thundered. “That is a job for our own Parliament.”

And this is the core of the right-wing argument: we don’t want foreigners telling us what our laws should be. Even though we signed up to the European Convention of Human Rights in the fifties, it seems that it is only now that the European Court is giving out reasonable judgments in favour of traditionally oppressed minorities that The Daily Telegraph decides to squawk about it.

Of course, soon we won’t have to ask foreign judges to treat us with dignity and fairness. In fact, there is only a month to go before the European Convention on Human Rights is incorporated into our own law and our own judges will be making decisions in its light.

Naturally the Tories don’t approve. They have now found themselves in the invidious position of having to rubbish the very concept of human rights, simply because this legislation has its origins in Europe.

They have already created scare stories saying the HRA will make it illegal for teachers in boarding schools to stop their pupils having gay sex and that gay couples will be demanding the right to white weddings in Westminster Abbey. The propaganda has only just begun.

First in the ring to condemn the Human Rights Act was Ann Widdecombe, the shadow home secretary, who declared that it will be a “disaster”. “Clever lawyers are going to be crawling through this legislation to find cases to bring,” she told the Daily Telegraph, “Common sense seems to have taken a back seat.”

The London Evening Standard – from the same stable as the Daily Mail and rapidly becoming indistinguishable from it – editorialised: “Now that it will be easier for petty criminals to allege that they have been subject to the illegal use of force, or for any sixteen year old delinquent to claim that their right to engage in sex has been curtailed, a large number of time-wasting, vexatious cases can be confidently expected… There is a real danger that some legal decisions, while technically justified under the Convention, will collide with common sense.”

If we look closely at what the Standard is saying, we see it for the distortion that it is. Why shouldn’t petty criminals be protected from police brutality? Aren’t they human? And why shouldn’t sixteen-year olds (delinquent or otherwise) make the case for their right to have sex if they want to – surely even teenagers are human? Human rights must be universal or they are meaningless; the idea of some people being more equal than others is a contradiction in terms – and deeply conservative. Yet this notion of “partial equality” is precisely what opponents of the HRA seem to be advocating.

Take Melanie Phillips in the Sunday Times. Writing about plans to give gays a better deal in law, she says the whole debate is now driven by the message that “homosexual behaviour is equal in every sense to heterosexual.” “Indeed,” she wrote, “the whole gay rights agenda is based on the premise that homosexuals merely want to be treated equally to anyone else.” She concedes that it is reasonable that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their sexuality, but then spoils it by saying that it is an error to believe that “tolerance must entail approval, when it means we must put up with things of which we don’t approve.” A second mistake, she says, is “to confuse tolerance of individuals with acceptance of their behaviour.”

She proceeds from the assumption, of course, that her own behaviour (presumably as a conventional married heterosexual) is the “norm” from which everything else is an aberration. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Ms Phillips how breathtakingly arrogant this thinking is. The idea of a plural society, where everyone is not required to be the same, but where diversity is seen as desirable, seems beyond her comprehension.

We have to get to the end of her piece to find out what her real beef is. “Our society has been degraded by its obsessive reduction of sex to a casual experience with no meaning beyond physical sensation. All public sex is an affront to human dignity. If such encounters are an integral part of the homosexual lifestyle, they remain such an affront.”

There is an interesting debate to be had here about the different meanings sex has for men and women, but Ms Phillips has reduced it to the over familiar moralising of the Christian authoritarians.

Anyway, whatever the Right says, the Government is going to have to change the law so that gay men are not arrested, humiliated and punished for something that actually isn’t very important, and which heterosexuals do with impunity. And all thanks to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Whatever else Mr Blair may (or may not) have done, he can congratulate himself on introducing the Human Rights Act. He has given ordinary people the opportunity to correct glaring injustices in their lives without having to spend years hauling through the European justice system.

But, of course, every reform that this Act brings will result in another attack from the conservatives. The Daily Mail has already called for the HRA to be abolished before it has even come in England and Wales (it is already operating in Scotland). The paper commissioned Martin Howe, a barrister and QC “specialising in European law and constitutional affairs” to say: “Of course our laws should protect human rights. But there are British ways of doing so, which can be based firmly on our own history and traditions going back to Magna Carta. It is high time we exercised our option and abandoned this damaging and fundamentally un-British Convention.”

The British way of protecting human rights is obviously inadequate. Of all the Governments who are signatories to the Convention, Britain’s has one of the highest numbers of judgments against it. The “British way” with human rights presumably means The Daily Mail way. And that would mean a regression to the dark ages of mean-minded, narrow, bigoted, compassionless, nasty and unjust legislation. But hopefully the HRA is going to free us from all that. Never again will it be possible to legalise prejudice and discrimination, such as happened with Section 28.

Naturally those whose prejudices were best served by the old system (the one that goes back to Magna Carta, remember?) won’t be best pleased by this modernisation.

In The Daily Mail – which is in high gear over this whole issue – wheeled in Anthony O’Hear, a professor of philosophy to write: “There is no third way between the traditional values of the family and the ideology of political correctness underlying the proposed reforms [of sexual offences]. For that ideology, based on gay and feminist dogma, is profoundly hostile to the concepts of family life and heterosexual sexuality which, for centuries and for good reason, have enjoyed a privileged status under the law.”

But there is more bad news on the way for those who think human rights are just another frivolous expression of political correctness. Another initiative is emerging from Europe – this time a proposed Citizens Charter – that will give even more power to the people. It will guarantee, among other things: “The right to the equality of opportunity and treatment without any distinction such as race, colour, ethnic or social origin, culture, language, religion, conscience, belief, political opinion, sex or gender, marital status, family responsibilities, sexual orientation, age or disability.” It will complement that Convention on Human Rights and move into the area of employment, which the HRA doesn’t cover.

Anything that seeks to include everybody – but everybody – is anathema to conservatives. Their whole philosophy revolves around privilege and special treatment (so long as it is they who are receiving the privileges and special treatment). So, we can expect to see strong and sustained resistance to this Charter, although the Christian Institute had better get its skates on because it is hoped to adopt the final version at the summit of EU leaders in December.

There are some surprising dissenters, though. One is Richard Littlejohn of The Sun, who unexpectedly came out in favour of the European judgment. Over his piece stood the headline “Why I’m backing Europe over gay sex orgies”. He admits that he doesn’t generally have much time for the European Court of Human Rights, calling it “that ridiculous quango”, but in this case he thinks they’re right to rule that what people do in the privacy of their own homes is their business, not the state’s. “If four or five men want to spend the evening playing choo-choo trains with the curtains closed, that is entirely a matter for them, not the local constabulary,” wrote Littlejohn… “In private, consenting adults should be allowed to do what they like. I’m convinced that the vast majority of people would agree with me. It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of the government to frame the law to accommodate that. Without any help from Europe.”

But that’s the point, Dicky. This government – and all its predecessors – have not framed the law in anything but oppressive fashion. And they did need Europe to make them stop persecuting homosexuals. If it weren’t for Europe, nothing would be happening and the laws would remain in force.

Of course, even on our own side there are those who don’t share my Pollyanna-ish optimism about the HRA. Nick Cohen in The Observer worries that British judges are not going to go along with the idea that the HRA will liberalise our constitution. He points out that our legal system has consistently thrown up a bunch of geriatric reactionaries on the bench, and we cannot guarantee that they will reach the decisions that we want them to. The HRA, Mr Cohen informs us, “is hailed as part of Tony Blair’s attempt to create a new consensus. A ‘liberal century’ has dawned, we are told, in which the anti-Tory majority will finally take charge of the country. The difficulty with this argument is that the times are anything but liberal. Hardly a day passes without Blair or Willy Hague proposing some new assault on fundamental freedoms. They know the Human Rights Act is coming in and the judiciary will be able to interfere with their plans, but they carry on without pause… You might reply that our leaders are idiots, who don’t understand what is about to hit them. It’s an attractive thesis, I grant you. On the other hand, they might have taken a harder look at the judiciary than the gibbering conservatives and gushing liberals and concluded that it won’t be too much trouble.”

Well, I go with the gushing liberals. I really feel that the HRA is going to make a difference, and that the Citizens Charter will reinforce it.

Although we may feel devastated at the moment about what happened to Section 28, we can allow Lady Young her moment of glory. Let the old witch cackle while she can – her victory will be short-lived. The European steam roller is on the way, and hopefully it will crush her and her monstrous ilk once and for all.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Although we still have the insulting Section 28 hanging around the statute book like a bad smell, events last month made its crude references to “pretended family relationships” look particularly dated.

The bandwagon started rolling at the Liberal Democrat Conference. According to The Independent, Susan Kramer gained rapturous applause when she “appealed to the British public to support legalised gay partnerships because the current law was simply not fair. Surely Middle England would agree that such discrimination before the law is not fair.’” The conference accepted her argument and passed the resolution.

The following weekend, The Sunday Telegraph reported on its front page that Mary MacLeod, the chief executive of a Government advisory body called the National Parenting and Family Institute, had said that it was “hard to argue against” the case for giving homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals. Ms MacLeod had opined, according to the Sunday Telegraph, that it was a human rights issue. The paper said that her remarks had embarrassed the Government, which had studiously tried to avoid the topic until now, fearing another debacle to rival Section 28.

At the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, the Home Secretary Jack Straw agreed that the advent of the Human Rights Act might force him to put the issue before Parliament, but that if he did so it would be as a free vote – and that he personally was unlikely to be voting in favour.

Then The Observer revealed that adoption agencies are making a special push to recruit gay couples as adoptive parents. And if, for you, other people’s children do not make a “real” family relationship, a scientific report was published claiming that it was perfectly feasible, in the light of the research into cloning, for two men to produce a child without the need for a female egg.

The potential for non-pretend – in fact, very real – gay families has never looked rosier.

Naturally, the normally cold blood of the reactionaries began to boil. In The Daily Telegraph, Tom Utley was writing that it had been “the most triumphant month for the gay lobby since December 1967, when Parliament legalised homosexual acts by consenting adults in private. It is a measure of the astonishing success of the gay rights campaign that politicians are so desperately anxious to please homosexuals, and so terrified of saying or doing anything that might upset them.”

(Which politicians can he be referring to? Surely not Ann Widdecombe, who said of the idea of gay marriage: “It is inappropriate and we will resist it. If this is another bit of chaos to come from the Human Rights Act then we will fight it.” And surely he can’t have meant Norman (Slobodan) Tebbit, either. The nauseating Tory has-been, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph: “If sodomites have the right to marry, would it not be ‘inevitable’ for paedophiles to establish their human right to child sex and ‘inevitably’ would follow those with a taste for bestiality.”)

Anyway, back to Tom Utley’s fantasy world, where “the battle for gay rights has entered the final phase which is not to persuade the Government, employers and the public to respect differences between human beings. It is to convince us all that homosexual love is exactly the same as the heterosexual sort, and that homosexual marriages are the precise equivalent of marriages between men and women.”

But, as he concludes, gay marriages can “only be parodies of the real thing, just as sodomy mimics and mocks the act of procreation”.

Over in The Daily Mail, the Director of the Christian Institute, Colin Hate (er, sorry that’s Colin Hart. Oh well, maybe I was right the first time) was saying: “Any free vote would be a full-scale attack on marriage. Marriage has been established in English law for centuries – you can no more vote to change it than you can vote to change the number of hours of sunlight in a day.”

The churches are mostly in panic mode over the whole issue, of course. They regard “marriage” as their own property, and they will fight tooth and nail to ensure that homosexuals do not get their filthy hands on it. In the Netherlands, where gay people have just been given partnership rights on a par with heterosexuals, the only dissenting voice was that of the church. According to The Tablet, the Archbishop of Utrecht said: “We did everything possible to combat this law, but we were not listened to. Many Protestants and some Catholics do not obey the morality of the Catholic Church. This is the situation… It is a sign of the way our people’s thinking has changed with regard to certain fundamental points on which human society is based.”

Here, the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Nazir-Ali went into drama queen mode to tell The Church of England Newspaper that the culture of human rights that has developed in Europe “will drive the Church into exile”. He cited gay marriage as one of the issues that could destroy Anglicanism. “The desire to deny what the Bible teaches about the human condition will put the church in a corner,” he said portentously. “We must prepare for a period of exile.”

Even if the bishop could qualify for an Oscar for services to melodrama, there is little doubt that he is totally out of touch with the people who pay his wages. John Dowie is one such. He is an admitted Christian, but he doesn’t go a bundle on his church’s homophobia. In an amusing tirade in The Independent headlined “A mad, mad church that won’t marry gays” he wrote: “I don’t know why it is, but when some people develop a belief in God, any sense of compassion, tolerance, humility, humour or, worse, a sense of shared humanity, flies straight out of the stained glass window.” He asks ranting religionists to “Look again at the New Testament and see what your main man had to say, not just about loving your neighbours, but loving your enemies also. Then have a good scratch around and see if you can find the passage in which he says: ‘Peter, you shall be the rock of my church. Just make sure you keep the gays out.’ I don’t think so.”

Indeed, when we leave the predictable reactionaries behind, there is a surprising amount of support for the idea of giving gay partnerships equal recognition – some of it from quite unlikely sources. Take A. N. Wilson who wrote in – of all places – The Sunday Telegraph: “In an old style monoculture guided by a single ethic… everyone was expected to conform to the pattern of life believed to be the norm. In a society which has become, of necessity, pluralistic in its attitudes to the emotional and domestic life, such monomorphic concepts of the law seem not merely unjust but impracticable.”

Even the Church Times ran an editorial supportive of formalised gay unions: “There are no objections to legal equality between married and single people; there should be none to extending this to homosexual couples.”

John Diamond in The Daily Express is all for it, too. He had learned from bitter experience that heterosexual marriage is not always the model to be preferred, as (the unmarried) Ann Widdecombe insists. “Whatever my first wife and I felt about each other when we started,” Diamond wrote, “when the end came, the only ruling the law was prepared to make was on our rights as property owners. And I can’t think of a reason why gay couples unable to have children shouldn’t have the same property rights as straight couples unwilling to have them. To allow a gay couple to have equal pension, tax or inheritance rights isn’t to make any moral judgment on the ‘rightness’ of homosexuality any more than it is to allow gays to have driving licences.”

He says that it is “paranoid nonsense” for the “self-styled family lobby” to insist that allowing gays to marry is anti-family because it reduces the marriage contract to one of property, while at the same time, and in some mysterious way, ‘promoting’ homosexuality.

“Part of the wedding contract,” says Diamond, “is about love, devotion and family – all the things I found in my second marriage. But I’d be just as devoted to my wife and children if we weren’t married: love is not something you can legislate for or against. Pensions, property and the rest of it, on the other hand, are.”

Much of the problem that will face us if Mr Straw keeps his word and brings the issue before Parliament will revolve around the word “marriage”. The traditionalists will say that marriage is really about providing a framework for the rearing of children. As Norman Tebbit said: “Homosexuals wish to hijack the world ‘marriage’ as they have hijacked the word ‘gay’. They are as free to share their beds with others of their choosing as are heterosexuals. They may if they wish devise ceremonies to mark a decision to set up partnerships but those are not and should not be described as marriage.”

The majority of gay families do not contain children – although one day they might – and so “marriage” may not be the best word to choose for our own partnership structures. Inventing another word or phrase to describe our unions would take the wind out of the sails of our enemies who are working themselves up into a major lather ready to defend to the death “traditional marriage”.

Let them keep “traditional marriage” (and its associated horror, divorce). Gay people can perhaps come up with a better model, and it will need another name that is not so loaded with emotive heterosexual baggage.

Given that the church is not going to change its policies soon (or probably ever) our partnerships are going to have to be civil affairs conducted at the registry office, so we could, perhaps, do as the French did and call them Civil Partnership Pacts—although the name does have the ring of two businessmen founding a factory rather than uniting their souls.

We could, on the other hand, go for something romantic like Love Unions, but that would risk leaving the guests squirming with embarrassment.

I’m sure we can come up with something appropriate that will defuse the fury of the “we must preserve marriage for heterosexuals” brigade. But if we insist on “marriage” we can expect the battle to be long, nasty and bitter.

Content to be added.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Has Mr Blair done the principled thing in forcing through the equalisation of the age of consent? Or has he seen another blasting coming from the European Court of Human Rights and thought that a bit of flak from the Tories in the Lords was preferable to another adverse judgment from Strasbourg?

Whatever his motivation, you can’t fault the man’s determination in the face of a major onslaught. He could easily have put up his hand and said: “Not my fault, voters – it’s those Europeans again who are making me do it.” But then again, that would have given his Eurosceptic critics the ammunition they needed to give him another battering.

It’s a dirty game, and although the Labour Party was the major target of the reactionary rags that call themselves newspapers, there is no doubt that gay people suffered heavy collateral damage after another high profile face off.

All the same, we have reason to be cheerful. One of the major aims of the gay struggle has now been achieved, and it is time for us to step back from the fray for a moment and decide what our next step should be.

What can we learn from this latest battle in the struggle for equality?

The first thing is that our most potent enemies have discovered that violent opposition to gay rights can bring them support from the large constituency of bigots that still infest this country. Whether it’s the Tories or the loony religious lobby, opposing justice for homosexuals has become a major area of activity for them. The fact that Mr Blair is such a high-profile Christian also makes his present stand against intolerance so brave and admirable. For some, though, it is a mystery why a man who espouses “family values” and Christian principles should be so passionately sympathetic to gay demands.

“The question one would like to know about Mr Blair’s religion,” wrote Richard Ingrams, in the Observer, “is to what extent it impinges, if at all, on his political decisions. Last week, for example, the Daily Telegraph published a letter from the heads of all the Christian churches, including the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, opposing the Government’s decision (now enshrined in law) to lower the age of homosexual consent to 16. One would love to know how a committed Christian could push through a law which apparently offends not only the main Christian churches but Muslim and Jewish religious leaders too.”

Meanwhile in The Mail on Sunday, Peter Dobbie was also perplexed about Mr Blair’s espousal of family values and his commitment to gay rights. He made the usual connection between the disintegration of “the traditional family” and giving justice to homosexuals. “It raises the basic question of how Mr Blair can shy away from recommending marriage while condoning so vehemently sex between 16-year old boys. It is a message that goes out loud and clear. To propose that to support marriage is to be partisan and hurtful to a minority while insulting the majority by bowing to the desires of a vocal minority is hypocritical and, yes, hurtful.”

I’ve longed for someone to challenge this Daily Mail-created myth that being pro-gay automatically makes you “anti-family”. At last, Suzanne Moore, also in The Mail on Sunday, did it. “It cannot be said often enough that gay people are born into families and often raise families,” she wrote. “Nor can discriminating against gays do anything to strengthen the institution of marriage. We heterosexuals do a fine job of screwing up marriages all by ourselves. Making gays scapegoats for our failure to maintain relationships is as daft as blaming our high divorce rate on global warming.”

The Daily Mirror, too, ever loyal to the Blair camp, editorialised: “What the Government has done is sensible and fair. What on earth does it have to do with family values? In fact one of the difficulties for many gay people is knowing that they will never have children. But others won’t have children, either. Ann Widdecombe, the Tory Home Affairs spokesman, for example. No-one accuses her of being anti-family.”

(The Mirror failed to mention Michael Portillo and William Hague, too, are both without offspring. And the relentlessly homophobic Archbishop of Canterbury never mentions to his dwindling band of followers that his precious Jesus wasn’t exactly a family valuer, either. Quite the reverse, in fact.)

Of course, such common sense will have no effect on the usual suspects, particularly The Daily Mail, which will continue to insist that giving right to homosexuals means the end of all family life as we know it.

Norman Tebbit was also intrigued to know how and why Mr Blair is pushing a “New Pink Labour policy”. He asked in The Mail on Sunday: “Just what is the hold that the extreme homosexual lobby has over this Government that in the face of public opinion Mr Blair persists in this legislation?”

Poor old Tony. If he stands up for what he believes he’s accused of being in the pocket of Stonewall, and if he backtracks he’s condemned for kow-towing to The Daily Mail.

Perhaps he is taking notice of something written by Mary Ann Sieghart in The Times under the headline: “Why Blair can afford to ignore the Mail”. She had been on a Radio 4 phone-in show about “gay marriage”. The producer had hoped for argy-bargy but had found that “by a ratio of four to one those listeners that called the programme thought that gay couples who stayed together should have the same beneficial tax and pension treatment as heterosexual married couples.”

Ms Sieghart concluded from this, and from the British Social Attitudes Survey published the same week, that “society is becoming more permissive in its attitudes to pre-marital sex, homosexuality, sex on TV, and abortion. And, what is more, those of us who are liberal in our youth are not becoming more conservative as we age.”

She discerns a real culture change that is at odds with what The Daily Mail preaches. “Most of its readers don’t live like that,” she wrote. “And I wonder how many of them still subscribe to the old dogmas that sex is smut, asylum-seekers are bogus, liberal means ‘politically correct’, working mothers are selfish and homosexuality threatens the family. It’s a peculiarly dated agenda, which was passé enough when Mr Passé himself, John Major, was Prime Minister. Now it tastes like yesterday’s toast.”

She advises Mr Blair to lose his terror of The Mail because, she says, “it no longer matters”. This could “remove huge constraints on the Government’s liberalising tendencies”. She reassures Mr Blair that: “If the past week has taught the Prime Minister anything, it is that the big tent does not have to enclose 75 per cent of the electorate. He can be confident in standing up for modern values, and he might even be surprised to find the occasional Mail reader agreeing with him. If he alienates others, he can afford to. After all, he only needs 42 per cent of the vote to win another big majority.”

So, now that we’ve got an equal age of consent (and doesn’t it just gladden your heart to hear Lady Young sobbing among what The Daily Mail called “the smouldering remains of her campaign”?) where do we go next? There is obviously still a huge amount of unfinished business in the way of partnership rights, adoption and fostering, employment rights, immigration rights, pensions and so on. But how much more enthusiasm for the battle can we expect from Mr Blair in the immediate future?

Emerging bruised and battered from this latest heave-ho, and immediately before that, the Section 28 debacle, and with an election in the offing, Mr Blair’s political survival instincts are coming to the fore.

The Times reported: “Downing Street has decided not to renew its pledge to repeal Clause 28 and will leave it out of the Queen’s Speech… Labour officials are planning to drop hints that the issue will be included instead in Labour’s manifesto… The decision to avoid the issue reveals the extent to which the Government feels vulnerable. Labour suffered a huge backlash north of the border when the Scottish Parliament forced through the reform. Labour has decided a legislative battle on Section 28 would divert attention from economic questions.”

Like all politicians, Mr Blair has to be pragmatic. He has seen how the opposition can use gay rights to damage him, and he is unwilling to risk giving ground to the Tories with an election perhaps less than five months away.

I think we should support him in this. We should send Angela on a sabbatical (and perhaps she could take Peter, and his catastrophic demands for a new age of consent of 14, with her), giving Mr Blair a clear run. There should be no further demands and no further parliamentary initiatives until the election is over.

And any suspicion that, having had his hands burned, Mr Blair will be tempted to drop gay rights completely in the next Parliament can be put aside. It is Europe, not Westminster, that now drives the gay rights agenda. The Government has committed itself – through signing a European Directive – to give us, within three years, protection against employment discrimination.

Naturally, when the domestic legislation is framed and comes before Parliament, our bitter enemies will once more march on to the battlefield and try to deny us our rights. We must be ready for them, and if Mr Blair is in power with a reasonable majority, I am sure he will be on our side.

But who are our enemies? And how do they operate? I’m afraid all roads lead to Jesmond in Northumberland. It is there that the Christian Institute resides, and it is from there that a huge amount of damage was done to perceptions of gay people during this – and previous – attempts to lower the age of consent.

This time around, with the promise that the Parliament Act would be invoked, the Institute realised that it could not succeed in stopping the legislation altogether, as it had in the past. So it concocted a rather clever tactic – try to water it down by framing amendments that kept the age of consent for the specific act of “buggery” at 18 for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. The amendments appeared under the name of Lady Janet Young, but what I want to know is how much input into their formulation came from the Christian Institute’s high-powered legal advisers? Given that Lady Young is their Patron, I think we should be told.

In a briefing paper that the Institute issued at the beginning of its campaign, great emphasis was placed on the word buggery. In its summary briefing, which ran to only two pages, the word occurred 19 times. It was obvious that the intention was to create as much revulsion in the minds of middle England by harping on endlessly about a sexual act that many of them see as being the very definition of homosexuality. You know the old cry: “I don’t mind people being queer, so long as I don’t have to think about what they actually do.”

Well, it was the Christian Institute’s intention to give them chapter and verse about “what they do”. The Institute also went into great detail about the medical problems that “buggery” brings with it, including the connection with Aids. There was much information about the damage done to the lining of the anus by this practice and the amount of “slippage” and tearing that occurs when condoms are used. They sent out 65,000 copies of this report to their supporters, with a plea for them to bombard their local Peer and MP with letters.

Their Lordships were, of course, entranced by this minutely detailed information about the supposed sexual practices of homosexuals, and several of them quoted verbatim from the Christian Institute’s document during the debate. Letters appeared in the press that were direct lifts from the “report”. A whole swarm of doctors wrote to the Daily Telegraph to inform its readers about the dangers of buggery. Although it was not clear how these concerned medics were brought together, one can’t help thinking that their rallying point might have been somewhere in the vicinity of Jesmond.

Then a flotilla of religious leaders wrote to The Telegraph – the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, a prominent mullah, Lady Jakobovits (widow of the late and unlamented Chief Rabbi) and various important Lords and Ladies. Who had concocted this round robin and got this disparate group to sign it?

Then a Mori poll was conducted in the Prime Minister’s constituency of Sedgefield, which was leaked to The Sun and showed that 71% of the voters there thought it wrong to use the Parliament Acts to allow gay sex at 16. And who commissioned that poll?

After that, an advertisement appeared in newspapers with the heading “A very unhealthy act?” It quoted the above mentioned opinion poll and asked readers to “Give us your view on the Lords amendment”, inviting them to visit a website – http://www.ageofconsent.org.uk – to register their vote. The advertisement was placed, it said, by “a group of Peers from the Lords, led by Baroness Young, who voted against lowering the age of consent for anal intercourse.”

Is that so? It is just pure coincidence, is it, that the website is an offshoot of the Christian Institute’s own site? Anyway, the whole thing was a disaster. At the time of writing, some 9,000 people have responded, and answered the question “Do you want to keep the age of consent for anal intercourse for both boys and girls at 18?” 41% said yes they do want to keep the age of consent at 18, but 59% voted no, they didn’t.

Not quite what the Christian Institute was expecting, but that may be more to do with a badly worded question than anything else.

The conclusion has to be that almost all the organised opposition to the age of consent emerged from this one source. We should bear this in mind next time.

In the meantime, if you wanted to write and let the Christian Institute know what you think of them, their address is FREEPOST (NT2948), Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1BR.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Despite my poor prognosis for Queercompany.com (and I hope I’m wrong, for their sakes), I have to congratulate them on their fantastic advertising coup, which netted millions of pounds of free coverage for what must have cost a matter of thousands.

Over the Christmas period, Queercompany’s advertising agency, Anti-Corp, issued a new poster showing two scantily-clad girls on a bed, kissing, with the legend “Thank God for women.”

Immediately it was the focus of one of those ambivalent displays of newspaper outrage/fascination. The release of the ad came only nine days after an outcry had caused the banning of a poster advertising Opium perfume which showed Sophie Dahl wearing just a necklace and high-heeled shoes in a pose which one commentator said made her look as though she was “having sex with the invisible man.” The poster, according to the Advertising Standards Authority had caused “widespread offence”.

The ASA said it would be “monitoring the public response” to the Queercompany advertisement, but would certainly not be banning it outright. “We are not social engineer or censors,” a spokesperson told the Daily Express, “We would need an enormous bureaucracy to check all 100,000 posters each year before they appear.”

The Authority had already rejected complaints about the previous ads Queercompany had issued showing two men embracing under the headline “I’m Queer and, by the way, this is not an apology.”

Because the poster had been released over the Christmas period, when there is little else for the newspapers to report, it got far more attention than it otherwise might. Zoë Williams in The London Evening Standard said that her complaint about the poster had nothing to do with the “moral wrongness of lesbianism”. No, she said, that would be daft. She was much more concerned about what thoughts were sparked by the sight of “two people, with their improbably white underwear, having that much fun, with only each other and an improbably tidy bedroom.” She envied them their passion because “they probably didn’t go home for Christmas” and “they categorically didn’t force each other to eat turkey and puddings fashioned from the purest lard (look at those gamine thighs). And if they didn’t go home, they didn’t have to go on a train, or a plane, or even go outdoors. I bet they don’t own a telly, let alone know how rubbish it was. They probably don’t even know it’s snowing, goddamit. All our rage about being cooped up for 48 hours, having to eat too much and not be able to whine about it, is being vented on two thin people who choose to stay in bed and get off with each other instead. Which is, of course, entirely natural. Somebody ban this sickening ad!”

More seriously, Nigella Lawson in The Observer, tackled the issue of who the ad was actually aimed at, and who it would please most. She began by chastising Queercompany for the nature of the image, which she found “stylised and cold and not the slightest bit sexy.” If she were lesbian, she said, she’d be furious. “If Queercompany really wanted to challenge peoples’ assumptions, as it claims, it would be better to use an image like the recently censured one of Sophie Dahl: a beautiful woman, a real woman, fully inhabiting her flesh, rather than a couple of model-thin boy-girls in artful embrace.”

Ms Lawson continued: “The image here is not particularly inflammatory, (though lesbianism may still be). For one thing, it seems to hold such an erotic charge for heterosexual men (and women). Straight men are both turned on by it and excluded from it. For the fantasy, or reality, to be at all satisfying, the man has to be involved either as a participant or spectator.”

She then goes on to try to answer the question that has puzzled lesbians for many years: why is lesbianism such a turn on for straight men? “Is it that men do not feel that a sexual act could be complete or fully satisfying without a penis, so that in imagining two women sexually engaged with one another, the straight man feels himself powerfully in possession of what they really want?”

And yet, she says, men also seem to feel that in witnessing two women pleasuring each other, they are seeing a display of sexual gratification that they cannot bring about – and this makes them anxious.

It’s a conundrum, but it might also explain why the poster showing two men embracing did not draw quite same attention. Instead of provoking pleasant sexual fantasies in straight men, the male poster would be more likely to provoke nausea and anxiety. So, no widespread reproduction of that that image in the straight papers, then.

Nigella Lawson makes the point that in order to make the straight fantasy of lesbian sex potent – for it to be a kind of foreplay to straight sex – the women involved have to be heterosexual. In that way, the straight man can intervene and give them a dose of the “real thing” – which is what they really want. The fantasy fails to arouse if the women are really lesbian and therefore unlikely to welcome a male intervention.

Some confirmation of this theory came when the macho and irredeemably heterosexist News of the World took up the tale and tracked down 25-year old Tabitha Denholm (she’s the one on the right in the picture). The paper says Tabitha admitted to being bisexual. The NoW quotes her as saying: “My sexuality is ambiguous. Yes, I’ve snogged a bird. I don’t think there is anything wrong or shameful about being gay.” But, at the same time, her main emotional focus is on her boyfriend. So the fantasy is still viable for the leering male readers of the News of the Screws.

Unable to muster the usual “this filth must be banned” outrage, The Daily Mail instead went to Tabitha’s parents for their reaction. Her mother said: “I’m extremely angry about this. To put up (the poster) is extremely dangerous, irresponsible and stupid. I have no problem with people wanting to be gay or lesbian – that’s fine. But please don’t include heterosexual people with that. It can create all kinds of problems… She is not lesbian and has a boyfriend and everything – has he seen this?”

Oh dear, this is the kind of coming out that every gay person dreads – having someone else tell your parents for you – and not only that, but telling them particulars of your sex life that you thought were private.

Meanwhile, Kathryn Knight in The Daily Express had grave doubts about Tabitha’s mother’s claim that she has no problem with people being gay. “Ah yes,” she said, “the old ‘don’t have a problem’ chestnut. In my experience, whenever people say that, they usually mean exactly the opposite.”

As to the other woman in the picture, all we know about her is that she is called Helen, is an American and is a friend of the photographer. So we cannot know whether she is primarily a fantasy for gay girls or for straight men.

Queercompany claims that since it started it has gained in excess of 4.5 million hits on its site. I wonder how many of them were straight men responding to the advert and looking for more of the same?

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The traditional perception of newspapers is that The Mail and The Telegraph hate gay people, while The Guardian and The Independent love us.

But last month there was a very interesting cross-over of values, when The Daily Telegraph had to admit that, really, it doesn’t mind us, and The Guardian dropped its friendly mask and got nasty.

It started with an interview with Tory shadow Foreign minister Francis Maude in The Daily Telegraph. Mr Maude is of the Portillo persuasion (politically-speaking, that is) and opined in the interview that “it should be perfectly possible for the leader of the Tory party to be gay.”

Mr Maude told The Telegraph: “We were the first party to have a Jewish leader, the first party to have a woman leader, so I could absolutely conceive of that happening. The fact is that we are a country where there are homosexual people. That’s part of life, so disapproving of it is rather like disapproving of rain: it’s pointless. We mustn’t give the impression that we are against homosexuality.”

Compassionate Conservatism in action, you might think, but many Telegraph-reading members of the Tory party did not agree, and a couple of days later they made their feelings quite clear as a tidal wave of hatred washed from the paper’s correspondence column.

Pastor Ken Slater led the charge with a quotation from Revelations 21 verse 8, in which he listed the many categories of sinners who were headed for the “fiery lake of burning sulphur”. Top priority for the swimming pool from hell are sexual deviants.

Nigel Simms, in the same batch of letters, was repelled by the thought of “a newly elected Prime Minister, standing at the door of number 10, waving to the assembled media, whilst kissing and cuddling his boyfriend.”

The Rev J. W. Hughes thought that it “beggars belief, even in these Dark Ages, that sexual perversion should be spoken of in the leadership of anything… the perversion of homosexuality should not be allowed in any form of public life.”

Jason Robertson castigated us for our “disease-creating practices” while John Horsely also thought that practising homosexuals should be excluded from public life. And then came Lynette Burrows, career homophobe and sister to the equally appalling Victoria Gillick. She produced statistics that she said proved beyond doubt that “a disproportionate number of homosexuals molest children.”

Letter after letter was burning with the same disgust and detestation. Such was the scale and depth of loathing that The Times reported that the more liberal elements on The Telegraph’s staff had protested vigorously to the editor about the tone and extent of the homophobia, and some had even threatened to resign.

In order to mollify its revolting journos, The Telegraph promised to put the other side of the argument the following day. And, indeed, another ten letters were printed, nine of which expressed shock and disbelief that such bigoted opinions could find a platform in the 21st century. (The other one was from a frothing-at-the-mouth Air Chief Marshal Michael Armitage who claimed to have been corrupted by reading Peter Tatchell’s book Safer Sexy. One can’t help wondering how the Air Chief Marshall came to be in possession of the book in the first place, and what prompted him to read it in such detail, but hey ho.)

The Telegraph also concocted an editorial for the same edition saying: “Some readers of The Daily Telegraph seem not to like the idea that the Conservative party might one day be led by a homosexual… With respect to our correspondents, we disagree.” There then followed a gentle distancing of the paper from the rabid elements within its readership.

One point seems to have been forgotten amid the brouhaha – we’ve already had gay Prime Ministers. And some of them were even Tories.

Anyway, you might be saying to yourself, what’s so shocking about Daily Telegraph readers showing their true, blue, homo-hating colours? Isn’t that why we all read The Guardian?

Oh yes, The Guardian. Now let’s take a look at something that our traditional friend in Fleet Street thought appropriate to print after the resignation of Peter Mandelson. It was an op-ed entitled “It’s a gay thing” and was written by Hywel Williams. Mr Williams is himself gay, so presumably The Guardian thought it OK for him to pronounce that Peter Mandelson’s homosexuality is a fatal character flaw that was bound to destroy him.

Mr Williams says that many homosexuals suffer from a sort of “Mandelsonian deception” syndrome, particularly those who flourished in the 80’s when being gay was almost OK, but not quite. For the “orthodox careerists” among them, lying has become second nature. Mandelson has not been completely honest and upfront about his sexuality, and this, according to Williams, informs everything he does. Take his resignation announcement, for instance: “I’m afraid he couldn’t have been queenier if he had tried. The tousled locks, the quivering lower lip, the nostrils poised to flare: all signalled a gay at bay. This was camp High Noon.”

It was as though Mr Williams were projecting his own insecurities and self-hatreds on to the rest of us. So then, like The Telegraph, The Guardian found itself inundated with letters from its own outraged readers.

Nicholas de Jongh, who was once the paper’s chief theatre critic, wrote: “The conviction that present-day homosexuals, unlike their heterosexual counterparts, are inherently unreliable, dishonest and self-destructive, unfit to do anything more than act, make dresses, cut hair and decorate shop windows, flourished in the age of gay witch hunts – the 50s… By publishing an article dependent upon this discredited, malign claptrap, complete with tasteless references to ‘bare-backing’, ‘one man’s bitch’ and ‘the shifty fudge-packer’, The Guardian becomes the transmitter of a form of homophobia more virulent than anything published by the tabloid press.”

Mr de Jongh is right, of course, because if such stuff appears in The Guardian it gives it added credence. It’s easy to dismiss Daily Mail diatribes against gays on a they-would-wouldn’t-they basis, but not so easy to do so with The Guardian.

De Jongh was right, too, about the tabloids – why would they resist such a story? And tabloid-man himself, Richard Littlejohn of The Sun, really went to town on it, gratuitously dragging in Mr Mandelson’s boyfriend, Reinaldo da Silva. “Last night,” Littlejohn wrote. “Howell James, former aide to John Major and adviser to the Hinduja brothers, admitted that he used to sleep with Peter Mandelson’s Brazilian boyfriend. That’s right, a man who served in the private office of the last Conservative Prime Minister and now works for the man at the centre of the cash-for-passports scandal, had a homosexual affair with the current lover of a Labour cabinet minister, who was one of Tony Blair’s closest advisers until he was forced to resign this week over his own role in the same cash-for-passports scandal… Mandelson has consistently refused to answer questions about Reinaldo’s immigration status. Now we know why. What is he doing here? Apart from being passed around like a tray of biscuits across party lines?”

Littlejohn returned to the attack a few days later after Mandelson engaged the services of solicitors to try to stop some of the slanderous things that were being said about him. Under the headline “Mandy making a drama queen out of a crisis”, Littlejohn advised Mandy not to sue. “He reminds me of a journalist friend of mine who once considered suing for libel. After careful consideration, his brief told him he didn’t have a reputation to lose. Mandy’s got too much previous. This isn’t going anywhere.”

I’m sure Mr Littlejohn hopes he’s right, particularly after a little contretemps he had with Barnardo’s. The children’s charity won an out of court settlement after The Sun columnist called the staff of the charity “perverts.” Littlejohn had accused Barnardo’s of producing a teaching pack “featuring pimps, rent boys, incest, smackheads and prostitutes” and that far from protecting children from perverts, the perverts were on the payroll. In fact, the teaching pack was aimed at warning children of the dangers of prostitution and had been endorsed by the Home Office, Department of Health and Department of Education. The staff at Barnardo’s were, understandably, up in arms, particularly when they discovered that Littlejohn hadn’t even seen the material he was complaining about.

The News of the World couldn’t resist kicking Mandelson while he was down, either. It reported that the “family of Peter Mandelson’s gay Brazilian lover have accused the ex-cabinet minister of corrupting their lad. They insist that there was ‘nothing wrong’ with 28 year old Reinaldo when he left their humble home.”

The paper seems to think that the crude and primitive approach to homosexuality that holds sway in Brazilian slums is perfectly reasonable.

Under such pressure is there any wonder that the couple are having difficulty holding their relationship together? The Sunday Express reported that, indeed, there was speculation that the two year affair was at an end, and Mandy was devastated.

So, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it seems poor old Peter is human after all. Hard as it might be, you’ve got to feel a bit sorry for him.