Gay Rights: a shit writes

It’s fascinating to speculate the psychology behind Alan Duncan’s decision to publicly call Jo Swinson MP a “shit” for inconveniently pointing out the Tories’ lamentable record on gay rights.

As I pointed out a couple of months ago, the Conservative Parliamentary Party response to Cameron calling for his party to support the Sexual Orientation Regulations was to do the opposite. This isn’t a dead issue, it is a very much live one – particularly at a time when Cameron, via his predecessor Iain Duncan Smith, is reintroducing Back to Basics. With the appointment of Sayeeda Warsi, the fact is that when it comes to gay rights, a vote for the Tories is a vote for a pig in a poke. As we’ve seen over the last ten years, civil liberties won hundreds of years ago can be removed by a government with minimal debate – who knows what would happen to comparatively recent civil liberties outlawing discrimination on the basis of homosexuality if people like Eric Pickles were in charge?

It isn’t just legitimate for the Lib Dems to point out their voting record; as the only overtly liberal party in the UK, it is incumbent on them.

4 comments

  1. Alan Duncan’s outburst brings it all flooding back. As Cameron’s opponent in 2001 I can remember that on more than one occasion this diatribe about ‘fringe politics’ came out. It wasn’t just for show to the local headbangers either (numerous then as now including one local councillor obsessed with ‘buggery’ as he called it) – but it even came out in public debate.

    Of course the Tories haven’t changed a bit. Only the PR has.

  2. I don’t seriously think that gay rights are a turnable around commodity, I was doing gay projects in the eastern bloc when it was still a ticket to Siberia if not a 7.62 extra ear on a forest track. I was in awe of the Toronto Gay Pride parade. What was missing was the the customer base for some of the rights being celebrated.

    ‘Foreigners take lead in Toronto same-sex weddings
    Fri Jun 22, 2007 6:21 PM EDT148

    TORONTO (Reuters) – In the city that was home to Canada’s first legalized gay wedding — and the host of the country’s biggest and brashest Pride Week celebrations — so far this year only one marriage license has been issued to a Canadian same-sex couple.’

    When San Francisco, New Orleans and everywhere in between has to be dragged to Toronto to do weddings, it gets to the stage folks are being married two or three times. it is surely funny, it is possibly proof that gay rights is the most successful public relations engine in history, it is not however authentic sexual liberation. It is of course also a business.

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