For those of you who don't know this story, it goes something like this.
At a civic ceremony for the then new mayor of Brighton a while back (August 2006), Peter Willows, a member of the Brighton Conservative Party, made a comment that 'all gay men are paedophiles'. He made this comment to Paul Elgood, a Lib Dem councillor and himself a gay man. At the end of the ceremony, Willows was re-approached by the councillor and James Ledward (the editor of GScene) and taken to task on it. When asked by Ledward if he thought that Elgood too was a paedophile, he said no, but that 'all other gays are'. It was an isolated and somewhat pathetic incident, and Willows really should have known better, but he refused to recant or apologise. Matters were complicated some more by the fact that Willows sat on the Brighton Community Safety committee, which had pledged to make LGBT safety its top concern at that time. He really should have kept his mouth shut.
The conservative party refused to take action, so Ledward went to the police. He made a complaint on the grounds that Willows committed a public order offence. Willows went to trial in December 2006 (after not bothering to turn up for the first hearing) and after a fairly pathetic defence by anyone's standards, he was convicted and subsequently resigned as tory councillor for the region he represented.
It was the aftermath that held my interest the most. One man, a friend of Peter willows, was interviewed in The Argus and said that the conviction was unjust, that too much of the law had been brought to bear on the Councillor and (if I remember rightly) that he had merely exercised his right to free speech. That friend of his was gay. The opinion underpinning the editorial in the newspaper at that time was that poor old Willows, being a 75 year old war veteran, should have been left alone. I came away from all this with a few things.
The standard defence that is trotted out on behalf of an older person who comes out with racist or homophobic comments is their advanced age. Why? Is it because they grew up in a time where the mainstream was less tolerant than it is now? The assumption behind all of this is that they have absorbed the values of the time when they were younger, and have since reached the point where they can no longer take on board newer ones, or adjust to what is going on around them. As lines of reasoning go, it's bollox, but when you think about it, it is the pernicious undercurrent that informs a lot of the ageism that you see around today: Older people are physically more frail, therefore they must be frailer in mind and intellect as well. They're not as resilient or adaptive as their younger counterparts, and therefore are not as useful as members of society in general. Blah blah blah. It is the logic that sees the elderly experience great difficulty in securing gainful employment, to name one of the many problems that are thrown their way.
The flip side of the coin is that Willows has been around for a long time. He's been living in Brighton and Hove for quite some time now, so will have had some exposure to the gay community. He's had a great deal of time to amass the wisdom that is the preserve of those who have been around for longer than the rest of us. He's seen more of the world and has seen more of the suffering wrought by wars than the average bloke, so by now he really should, at the very least, have some bit of wisdom and humility in his current dealings with people. His age is no defence. None at all.
Also, you have to wonder about that friend of his, a gay man friends with a man who obviously has issues with gay men. What does that say about the self-respect of the former? The way it worked out in court *could* be likened to the killing of a fly with a sledgehammer, but no-one else was prepared to do anything else.
One pet peeve of mine is that point about free speech. It's somehow seen as a violation of someone's personal rights when they are taken to task over making homophobic comments, and that casual homophobia is still acceptable, nay expected, in everyday circles.
Whenever I hear this, I think, if you replaced the homophobia with racism, would people still find it acceptable, if slightly unpalatable? Not at all, and like I've said before, homophobia can almost be put into this category at this stage. The fact remains though, if Willows had been racist instead of homophobic that day, his feet wouldn't have touched the ground and the door wouldn't have hit his ass on his way out. But because he was being homophobic, a case wasn't automatically made, and when it eventually was, it was done so in an awkward and haphazard way.
It's like this: Willows is a politician, and in a public position. There is a certain responsibility that goes with this position that he wasn't willing to live by. He tried to have his cake and eat it. He was fed an enema and...oh you get the picture.
Willows was a serial homophobe. When LGBT police liaison officers went on a fact-finding mission and training course to San Francisco previous to that time, he attacked them in the press, and the result was a tabloid feeding frenzy which resulted in the officers being followed and photographed in San Francisco nightclubs. It was more than a little invasive for the officers in question, but Willows was never cautioned by his own party, and again refused to apologise for it.
Ledward said his fundamental motivation for going to court was:
"...for every young LGBT teenager who is taunted and bullied at school for being different because bigots in public office have for years been able to spout this type of hate without being challenged."He was running for office himself later that year, but denied that this was also a factor in his pursuit of this case. The first reason is honestly good enough, and I don't give a shit if he was looking to bolster his public profile or not. He did the right thing.
Alas, it looks like the right thing has been undone. Surprisingly, the editorial in The Argus seems to have executed something of a U-turn, and has now summed up the result of the appeal quite well:
"This is not a case of common sense triumphing over political correctness. It is a vindication of a narrow-minded minority's urge to slap crass labels on those who exercise their freedom to live their lives the way they choose."
Indeed.
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