I had first heard about this when I had visited the two Craigs out in Arundel a while back. They have since availed of this new piece of legislation and on Wednesday the 21st of this month, after a 20-year 'courtship', they have gone ahead and tied the knot. They are amongst the first of all of the gay couples in the Brighton area to do so, and I wish them the very best.
Nazinger, I beg your pardon, the recently elected Pope Benedict XVMCIIwhat-fucking-ever is, of course, timely in his announcements: He has recently come out and pronounced that no priest-in-waiting may enter a seminary if he has ever exhibited tendencies toward 'the intrinsic disorder' that is homosexuality, within 3 months prior to the proposed time of enrolement. In a particularly noxious twist, the Vatican has issued this 'in response' to the revelations of child sex abuse at the hands of American priests, thus reinforcing in some of the smaller minds amongst us the 'link' that exists between homosexuality and paedophilia.
Here we fucking go again. The Vatican quite simply refusing to grow up and acknowledge the diversity that exists outside of their enclave in Rome. What they don't seem to appreciate is that at ground level, quite a lot of priests are embarassed at the stream of rubbish that is flowing out of there. Some of the less rigid amongst them may find that their job is made increasingly difficult by the pronouncements of a loathsome little toad in Rome who just cannot appreciate that guys who dig other guys are simply never going to go away. Seriously, we've been around since before biblical times, and step by step, we're winning all of our battles as time goes on. Get the fuck over it. Some priests, such as this guy here, are already 'rebelling' by refusing to give assurance that they won't engage in same-sex relations with - oh, this takes my breath away - the man they are marrying. You couldn't make up such a ridiculous scenario.
More and more, the Vatican are digging their own graves with these edicts, and widening what is already a substantial divide between them and the commmon church-goer. With public coverage and acceptance being given to the gay community more and more, we are now more visible than ever, and it has now got to the point where almost every straight person in Western Society knows or is related to someone who warms to the idea of warming up someone of their own gender, and this is where the cardinals are shooting themselves in the foot. They are forcing people to take sides, and if you were presented with the choice between a friend or relative in real life, and some abstract figure who is claimed to be represented by someone such as Ratzinger, well, I know which option I would choose. Only the most simple-minded amongst the Right need to be given instruction on how to live their life in this way.
Incidentally, it's good to see that people like Debbie Gaston aren't allowing organised religion to get in the way of their religious beliefs.
As an aside, if there is such a higher power, why are some people so readily accepting of the theory that he would have someone like Benedict as his spokesman here on Earth? If I were The Almighty, I would have long ago handed his holiness his P45 and found someone a bit more personable. Perhaps it's down to iconography, and how people have more respect for inaccessible figureheads, but I might be overreaching...
Anyhow, the partnerships have come to pass, and some political commentators, along with some of my friends, hold that it won't be long before it happens in Ireland as well. We'll see about that, but the fact that it now exists in so many European countries is good for me at the moment.
Lastly, another absolute red rag of mine. A recent letter to the editor of the Irish Times:
Madam,
Why are commentators on homosexuality so reluctant to use the word "homosexuality"? Is it an example of the Sellafield/Windscale syndrome, whereby, to change the public perception of something, all that is required is to call it by a different name?
In his article on civil partnerships for homosexual couples (Opinion and Analysis, December 21st), Niall Crowley of the Equality Authority uses the phrase "gay, lesbian, or bisexual", or some variation on it, no less than 15 times, while eschewing the term "homosexual". He evinced a similar tendency in his article on December 6th responding to the Vatican document on homosexuality.
He gives the game away right at the end of the latest article, where he uses the term 'all forms of mutually supportive relationships - same sex or heterosexual' when it would have been easier to say 'homosexual or heterosexual'.
Lest I be accused of homophobia, while I agree with the Pope's recent pronouncements on homosexuality, I have met many homosexuals over the course of my life and have generally got on well with them. I experienced a brief homosexual phase myself, lasting about a month, when I was a teenager. Many of my favourite actors - Dirk Bogarde, Sir John Gielgud, Leonard Rossiter, Denholm Elliot inter alia - were homosexuals. One of my favourite films, Death in Venice, based on the book by Thomas Mann, is about a homoerotic attraction towards a beautiful young boy.
One of the important tenets of a democracy is freedom of speech, but I have noticed over the years that if one expresses an opinion contrary to the liberal beliefs espoused by most of those working in the media - who incidentally are not representative of the so-called "plain people of Ireland" - one is accused of being accused of being conservative or intolerant or worse. For instance, as Eamonnn Gavin (December 21st), any suggestion that the number of foreigners entering this country should be restricted is met with accusations of racism. Similarly, any expression of dissent about the propriety of homosexuality is met with accusations of homophobia.
Tendentious articles such as Niall Crowley's latest two contributions are extremely annoying because they are clearly written from a politically correct perspective, the chief characteristic of which is an inability or unwillingness to speak plainly.
Yours, etc.
Discounting this clown's issues with terminology and the all-too-typical attempt to justify himself in paragraph four - I'll get to them later - one concept that needs investigation in this context is that of political correctness.
Political correctness was, like many social phenomena described in detail in the media, something that never really took off. It's central premise, the neuturing of modern speech, especially was something that existed only in the minds of a select few. Terminology such as 'intellectually challenged', 'horizontally advantaged', and 'vertically challenged' most likely had a half-life of about 5 seconds, yet were touted by those in the public eye for quite some time after everyone else had sensibly begun to ignore them. In short, if it ever did exist, it really does not anymore, at least not in the form in which it was originally conceived.
Here is something else. Thanks to variety of social factors, racism, and to a lesser extent, homophobia, stopped becoming acceptable in everyday life some years back. I'm not a social commentator, I can't draw a line in the sand and say exactly where this happened, but it is now not considered good social grace to disparage someone on either of these grounds and offend anyone in mixed company, and society in general is all the better for it.
Somewhere along the line being gay, or at the very least being polysexual, became kind of hip. One reason may have been that it was a way of dissociating oneself from, or offending, the old guard, in whatever form that might have been. Another reason was that it still has a aspect of sexual experimentation to it, along with the attendant party scene, that has since been relegated to the margins in mainstream heterosexual society.
Assimilation eventually came about, and now we have come to today's situation. Racism and homophobia, seen as the preserve of the uneducated redneck who never left his home town and never saw much of the world, is now quite unfashionable. But it's still there, buried in the subconcious of people who, under different circumstances, would never have been that pushed about erasing it from within themselves before.
So now, when people want to give life to the small-minded little shit inside them without looking like the under-developed prat that they are, they need a scapegoat, and boy is the PC concept fast becoming the punchbag of modern times. They give voice to their opinions, but when those are met with protest, they say such sensitivities are borne out of a stifling form of political correctness, the implication being that most people think like them at some level and thus they are absolved. Another annoying term of excuse, with connotations of plain-speaking, is 'irreverance'.
Horseshit. Ignorance is ignorance, and while homophobia is a strong word to use in these circumstances, their comments point to the fact that they are still little boys at heart, who haven't really experienced enough of the world. It's a result of people trying to excuse themselves because they have had a certain sensibility foisted upon them that they are not ready for, at least not yet.
I've always thought that Liberal bashing is done by those who have just a little too much time on their hands, or need to get out more, but now I think of it as a odious form of self-absorption. If these people themselves found that their own rights were being infringed, their whinging would be coming out of every available news outlet, but because it's someone else, they feel free to take potshots. It's the spoiled little kid within each of them being given a voice.
There is no PC brigade. If a slur from a person in the vein mentioned above induces a negative reaction in someone else, that's because the person is being an ignoramus, not a 'plain speaker'. End of story.
This brings me to his support of the Pope. You cannot support someone who condemns gays outright, and yet suddenly immediately afterwards start bleating that you 'don't have a problem with gays'. It just doesn't wash. At all. Not with a figure like that.
Which leads me to the other two points. First, his justificaton in paragraph four. It reminds me of something...
Sometime back, I saw an episode of The Office on TV, which had Gareth, anticharismatic par excellence, talking about gays in the army. He was against it, on the grounds that they might be sexually distracted by the other men in uniform on the battlefield, but then quickly defended himself against accusations of homophobia by pointing out that he had loads of gay musicians in his record collection, such as George Michael and Freddie Mercury ("And", he points out, "They're all bummers"). It was a genius sketch, mainly because most of us, least of all me, know someone this retarded in real life. The parallels between this sketch and the guy above, is that as lines of reasoning go, it's MORONIC!
Last, the use of the term 'homosexual'. It is true that the article referred to in the letter above goes to some lengths to avoid using the term, but in order to help the reader understand why, a quick history lesson.
Once upon a time, not so long ago at all, the medical establishment regarded homosexuality as a disorder, and as such it merited listing in the bible of psychiatry, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). The term they used to describe it at that time? Yep, you guesssed it. That was where the definition first surfaced. The term 'heterosexual' enjoys nowhere near the same kind of dubious history. Even now I'm still not a fan of the homo term, it just sounds too clinical, as if the person in question is some kind of curiosity, and I've noticed at a superficial level, that it can indicate in the user a certain aversion to aspects of our lifestyle. But maybe I'm being too 'PC', and 'not representative of the plain-speaking people of Ireland'. Oh, and if you find gay men getting defensive when you disparage aspects of their community, it's probably because they have a sense of history and are sick of fighting their corner all the time. Conflict can do that to you sometimes.
So on that note, plain speakers, don't diss gays. Apart from anything else it's not cool, and it'll make you look like a twat and you won't get laid. And you've already got quite a lot of catching up to do in that department before you get to where we are.
Hah!
