To hell with homophobes

Every week there is another story about homophobic religious fanatics. They try to justify their prejudice on the basis that it's their religious duty to be bigoted turds.

A religious commentator called "Tony Campolo" often said "the trouble with fundamentalists: they don't believe the bible". Here's an example:

"Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." (Bible: 1 Cor 6:9-10

How many ministers does this short passage exclude? But we hear no campaigns over greedy priests and inebriated vicars. And that's just one proof that the campaigners against gay ministers are just prejudiced homophobes trying to hide behind religious justification.

The Little Picture of MPs Expenses

There's a really good impromptu interview broadcast on the BBC news web site, with Stephen Fry talking to Michael Crick about the context of MPs expenses. And what he says in that broadcast makes a bundle of sense.

Appalling as the behaviour of some of the MPs have been, we've not heard of two dozen MPs whose behaviour has been objectively scandalous. The whole furore is not the last dregs of a small beer in comparison with the massive issues we should be getting ourselves wound up about.

If the debt the Government have placed on the UK in that last year was paid from the complete bill for MPs - salaries and expenses (even including staffing expenses) - it would take 1,500 years to repay, without including a penny of interest!

Or should we talk in the context of lives? (Was it 800,000 people estimated to have been died as a result of the Government's illegal war in Iraq?)

Or should we talk in terms of liberties enjoyed by the UK since magna-carta being taken away slice-by-slice over the last few years?

Or should we talk about democracy represented in parliament itself, that has become the feeble, toothless puppet of half-a-dozen members of the inner cabinet and their press secretaries?

This is the Mother of all storms in Mother's favourite china teacup. In any real kind of real context, becoming transfixed with MPs expenses at the cost of all other issues seems like fiddling while Rome burns.

"True Colors"

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is the law in the US military services which has seen 12,500 homosexual men and women ejected from service in the last 15 years; and repealing it was one of Obama's key election pledges.

The opposition in the military hierarchy to repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is, of course, undisguised. But if Obama gives the impression that he is reneging on this major commitment, then none of the commitments he made in his candidacy have any meaning at all. On the scale of "1997 Tony Blair the beacon of hope" to "2007 Tony Blair the discredited war criminal", we may as well just advance our opinion of Obama by 10 years and save ourselves a decade of disappointed expectation.

And, in fact, there is other evidence to suggest that would be a sage move... he already seems to have backtracked on his commitments to end the detention without fair trial of those held for years in Guantanamo to the point where Bush supporters are settling back in their seats and lauding him with praise.

Time to go, Mister Martin, time to go

The tenuous position in which the Speaker now finds himself, is not a result of snobbery as ex-public school boy Lord Foulkes has suggested.

Neither is it just a result of his handling of the MPs Expenses débacle, although - by any measure - he has been a lowsy steward to the nation; having not only blocked any move for reform and public oversight of MPs expenses, but also having spent £1.7m on refurbishing his official residence, winning himself the right to a tax-payer funded £1.4m pension and squandering £21,000 on lawyers fees to try and defend himself from criticism.

It's compounded many times by ther perception that he's an intellectual lightweight, unfit for high office. Few would argue with journalist Melanie Phillips when she described Micahel Martin as "simply the worst Speaker in living memory".

It seems that the Speaker has the right to bat away the motion of no confidence against him today, without bringing the matter to a vote. Who would expect anything better of him?

Paedophile ring "abused in a manner too horrific to describe"

An article in today's news says that eight paedophiles have been found guilty in a case that began with a computer repair firm finding an indecent image on a PC sent for repair. The BBC TV report says that the abuse was "too horrific to describe".

This "too horrific to describe" is very problematic for me, because if something is "too horrific to describe" it is also "too indescribable to believe".

The number of people convicted of paedophilia seems incredible to me. The number of convictions for paedophilia which I see reported even in a local newspaper in a town of just 14,000 people should mean that - if extrapolated to the whole country, many tens of thousands of people must have been convicted; and one assumes this must represent a fraction of the number of abusers who have not been caught.

So I'm always left with the question "what is the nature of abuse for which these people have been convicted?" The news reported by the media is very difficult to interpret.

- On one hand it has been reported that the kind of images shared by paedophiles will never be discovered by accident on Google, that they are in subscription internet sites set up by abusers for abusers.
- But on the other hand, we see news reports of group photos of children on a school site with their faces covered in case the photos are used by paedophiles. We hear about a BBC Breakfast presenter being reported to the police by Boots for a picture taken of her son in the bath. Taking photographs is apparently banned in all/many/some (?) swimming pools in case they are used for paedophilic titillation.

So what are we to make of convictions for crimes which are never described? In cases of child kidnapping we're given every possible detail, right down to animated maps of where the child was held; but in contrast we hear no description at all of the images that have resulted in paedophile convictions. In that case, how can we know if thy are valid.

One thing I find it difficult to get my head around: some years ago the ex-singer Gary Glitter was convicted of having paedophile images on his computer, that were reported to the policee when he took his PC to be repaired. (In fact, I find the body of evidence that Gary Glitter is a paedophile compelling.) But after this case, I really find it remarkable that somebody who was in the habit of exchanging such images would ever send their PC with such images to be repaired. PCs are £350 a pop these days: surely they'd put a hammer through the hard drive, throw the PC away and buy another one... wouldn't they?

I already hinted that I'd find reports of widespread paedophilia a lot easier to accept unquestioningly and at face value if the evidence we do get to see didn't look so incredibly foolish and implausible. I've heard so many stories of school-teachers being maliciously accused of abusing children by kids who know their stories will be accepted as truth and result in the teacher either being suspended, losing their jobs or/and suffering nervous breakdowns resulting from the experience.

And I have to say, the damage this must do to innocent people must be absolutely mind-blowing. Here's my personal experiences which are the vaguest shadow of what other people have had to suffer.

As a male, and even more as a single gay male, I feel hugely vulnerable to possible allegations of child abuse. I feel that there is an assumption that any interaction with children will be seen as potential child abuse. I'm not very comfortable with kids at the best of times (in spite of being, in many senses, a kid myself with the emotional development of a 12 year old). But if I pass a child on an empty street I'll tend to cross over the road to avoid walking past them; even my brother and sister's kids I discourage from having anything to do with me.

(Incidentally, I'll also tend to cross the road if a female comes towards me in similar circumstances - particularly in the dark; and walk at a different speed to overtake or fall back from a female walking in the same direction, because I've been conditioned to understand that females will have a perception of being followed otherwise, and feel very threatened.)

In spite of all that, I was in a restaurant a few weeks ago with a friend; and on the next table there was a family with a cute little boy who was trying, in the way bored kids do, to survive the restaurant experience. I said to my friend that the little boy was cute. and his reply to me has affected me ever since. He said that I should be very careful saying such things, because - it's ok, he knew what I mean, but other people may take that the wrong way.

What in the absolute name of fucking hell?!! Humans are programmed to see children as cute, so that we look after them. I have always been castigated for not kissing babies, holding children, letting my brother and sister's kids touch me. I was always given to believe that it's practically obligatory to comment on how cute a young child is. And here was a child that was actually worthy of the comment 'cute' at that particular time; and I was practically accused of paedophilia by my friend for saying so. It's beyond tolerance, beyond endurance.

And yet I have been at least as badly affected by my experience in Phuket, Thailand, where I went to a festival a couple of years ago. Thai is not a language in which I have any particular skill... after a few words, I'm already stuck. And so it turned out that I was playing with a crowd of kids, letting them take movie-clips with my cameras, trying to communicate with sign-language, learning Thai words of counting and colours, buying us all cold drinks, watching them set off fire-crackers (yes, i know, they'd never have done that in the UK).

I was quite comfortable, because this was inside a crowded shrine; apart from the nagging worry that they may not return my cameras. After a few hours, I was tired and decided to return to return to my hotel. I waved good-bye to the kids I'd been playing with, and started to make my way back. I'd only gone a few metres when one of the boys came after me. At first I thought he was with his mother, because he was right in front of someone who could easily have been his mother; but she opened a door and went into a house and the boy didn't follow, instead he came to me. I waved him good-bye again and continued walking, but realised he was following me.

At that point, I started to become a bit concerned. He had come out of the shrine leaving his sandals behind and - as far as I could communicate - I suggested he'd better go back; but he persisted. Over a couple of minutes it became completely clear that he intended to come back to my hotel, and increasingly clear that the reason was that he believed I would want him. The expressions on his face told me the biggest story. He was surprised, confused, when I kept refusing the idea of him coming back to my hotel. It's quite difficult to describe or remember exactly how the meaning was conveyed, but I was developing the unavoidable conclusion that this 10-year old expected me to want to perform some kind of sexual act with him; and that this was probably the first time he'd come across my reaction.

That conversation affected me deeply. The more I thought about it, the more obvious his meaning became. And I began to think that some of the other kids may have made the same assumption that this was my itention, and started to weigh up whether some of the adults also interpreted my intentions in that way.

As a result, I felt very down for several days, and barely left the hotel again. I cursed the Westerners who I realised or decided must have taken away this boy's innocence.

Well, that was a long story, and the purpose was to say that I understand that there are paedophiles in this world, and they are completely beyond any defence. Better, from the point of view of my own thinking, that they should take their own lives rather than prey on children. It's the absolute worst thing. But even so, I find it very difficult to grasp that there could be so many paedophiles in the UK; and because their crimes are never described, I have some doubts about the crimes committed by all of those convicted. And i say again, this prevailing mood that all men (and especially single men, and extra-specially single gay men) are surely paedophiles is enormously damaging. I'm sure the attitude must affect a hell of a lot of innocent people.