In 1930 the RAF pilot Douglas Bader crashed and lost both legs. In spite of that he fought during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe, scoring 20 victories. To this day Bader is held up as a paragon of courage.
Not that bravery is no longer needed. In fact, our soldiers dying in Afghanistan show that heroism never goes out of fashion.
However, the definition of heroism has been stretched to become lamentably loose. Nor is it so much the likes of Bader who are these days supposed to embody this virtue.
Instead it’s the 19-year-old Olympic diver Tom Daley whose death-defying bravery is being praised high and wide. Daley neither fought in Afghanistan nor entered a burning house to pull his granny out. He didn’t even use his primary skill to dive off a bridge to save a drowning child.
What’s drawing the effusive accolades is Tom’s YouTube video in which he heroically admits that he’s ‘dating’ another man. His female admirers needn’t despair though, for young Tom leaves the door open, if only ajar. “I still fancy girls,” he allows generously.
However, he has finally found happiness with ‘a guy’, which came as ‘a big surprise’ to him. It has to be said that the surprise is rather less earth-shattering to anyone who has ever seen Mr Daley or heard him talk, but that’s beside the point.
Truly emetic are the effusive panegyrics all over the press, praising Daley for his ‘courage’, ‘bravery’, ‘heroism’ and a thesaurus full of other synonyms for gallantry. Those RAF pilots have been overshadowed by a 5-minute video that has now received close to 5,000,000 hits.
By far the most intellectually unsound and morally reprehensible praise came from Matthew Parris, the acknowledged master of the genre. Granted, this hack is eminently capable of uttering rubbish on any subject. However, when he feels personally involved he outdoes even himself.
Writing in The Times, Mr Parris admits to having watched the video “with a mixture of admiration and envy”. The admiration part is self-explanatory, this is what courage is supposed to elicit. The envy comes from the retrospective regret that Mr Parris himself had to wait until a more mature age before admitting the rather self-evident fact that he too is what used to be called a ‘confirmed bachelor’.
Tom Daley’s coming out apparently confers some belated courage-tinted glamour on Mr Parris himself. He wastes no time in enlisting Tom as an ally in their common battle against “the forces of intolerance”.
These forces are as devious as they are ghastly: “they have switched the grounds of their attack… from ‘How dare you?’ to ‘Who cares?’
“After centuries of saying… it’s a mortal sin… the forces of intolerance now realise they’ve lost that battle. But they haven’t stopped hating, and their new cry is this: ‘Why don’t you just shut up about it?’”
The hating bit is indeed a problem, but not to worry. Paranoid delusions can these days be controlled with medication, so there’s hope for Mr Parris yet.
As to the putative question, I must admit it has crossed my mind as well. Nobody really cares and, at least in the rarefied atmosphere of Mr Parris’s life, few ever have.
He himself admits it: “The Foreign Office never asked. MI6 never asked. The Conservative Research Department never asked. Derbyshire Conservatives… never asked. London Weekend Television never asked.”
They didn’t ask because they didn’t care, not because Mr Parris’s sexuality was ever hard to guess. People only began to care when homosexuals began to wear their proclivity on the sleeve as a badge of honour, insisting that society accept them on their own terms. This occasionally encourages people to remind them that, as it ever was, homosexuality is indeed a sin, though far from the worst one.
Adultery, for example, is a worse sin than homosexuality, and every believer I know hates it. However, I have yet to meet anyone who hates either adulterers or homosexuals – indeed having such strong feelings may consign one to a life of resentful solitude.
“Hate the sin, love the sinner”, is how St Augustine put it. In the ethos in which this word has any meaning at all it’s assumed that God will forgive any sin if sincerely repented.
It’s only when the sinner doesn’t repent and moreover insists that there’s no such thing as sin that decent people become uneasy. But such nuances escape the likes of Matthew Parris. ‘Sin’ for them is merely a figure of speech used to mock anything disliked by ‘the forces of intolerance’.
“So ‘parade’ it – and damn the consequences. Daley has found the courage to do that. I wish I had,” concludes Mr Parris.
Notice the reference to ‘full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes’? One wonders what sort of torpedoes Mr Parris fears might sink Daley. It’s not as if diving were a sport like rugby, where machismo is an essential part of the package.
Greg Louganis, the greatest diver ever, had four gold Olympic medals to his name, compared to Tom’s solitary bronze. Yet Greg not only heroically declared his homosexuality 18 years ago but also owned up to having courageously become HIV-positive.
This hasn’t prevented him from having a profitable career, publishing several successful books and appearing regularly on TV. Earlier this year he outdid Tom’s heroism by marrying another man.
Neither is Tom’s courage going to lose him lucrative sponsorships with Adidas and Nestle. It won’t scupper his TV reality show Splash – in fact his heroism, purely by chance I’m sure, coincided with the launch of its new series.
So yes, I do wish he – and especially Matthew Parris – ‘shut up about it’. That would enable them to save words like courage and heroism for situations where they truly belong.