There’s no such thing as gay rights

Yet another disaster movie in the Carrie On saga premiered the other day at the Conservative conference.

Mrs Johnson, whose sole entitlement to addressing the multitudes comes from her ability to bear children for Mr Johnson, delivered herself of a lachrymose comment on LGBT+ rights.

Apparently, the plight of the LGBT+ ‘community’ moves her to tears. Her hubby-wubby and she once hosted a Pride reception at Downing Street, where Carrie’s heart strings were tugged by a victim of a ‘hate’ crime.

It has to be said that Carrie’s heart seems to have more strings than a Steinway grand, each ready to be tugged by any woke cause on offer. So far the strings have vibrated mostly in response to the impending climatic apocalypse, with the plight of trees also getting a tinkle or two.

Yet it would be unrealistic to expect Carrie or any other such intellectually challenged individual to pick up woke fads piecemeal. These usually come as a full package, which saves time for vituperative commentators like me.

If Carrie-like creatures state a staunch commitment to making sure the climate never changes, then we can infer unerringly their position on any rights, whether women’s, animal, trans, gay or whatever. At a slight stretch, we may even assume that, according to them, inanimate objects, such as trees, also have rights – even if not dialectically linked to duties.

Such a polyvalent conscience is, according to Carrie, a specifically Conservative virtue. After all, the Tories are a “party of equality”, and thinking otherwise would be “illogical”.

I wonder what the founders of the party, such as Disraeli, Peel or, for that matter, Queen Victoria, would think of this notion if they miraculously came back. I can just hear them say “Go home, dear, have a glass of hot milk and don’t worry about things you don’t understand.”

‘Pride’ figures prominently in Carrie’s lexicon of misused words. Thus, “we can now say with huge pride that it was a Conservative prime minister who delivered equal marriage in England and Wales.” And “we now have a prime minister who is completely committed to protecting those gains and extending them further.”

A prime minister, Carrie kindly reminded, who wore a pink hat at a Gay Pride parade when he was mayor of London, while she herself plans to go dancing until wee hours at an LGBT+ Conservative club. “I hope to see some of you on the dancefloor,” added Carrie.

I take that as an invitation, which I regretfully have to decline. I do like dancing, but only with women, and I’m sure such binary preferences will be frowned upon at that venerable Tory establishment. Perhaps if Queen Victoria stays resurrected for a while longer, she’ll be happy to let Carrie have the first gavotte.

Someone ought to remind the Johnsons that Britain isn’t like the US in many respects, one of which is that we don’t have a political entity called the First Lady. Unlike a monarch’s spouse, a prime minister’s wife has no constitutional status in Britain, no matter how many babies she pops out in how short a time.

So this barely post-pubescent woman should keep her flaming conscience strictly for home consumption. And, if her logorrhoea is uncontainable, at least the papers should ignore her stream of woke consciousness, rather than giving it space on the front pages.

Untangling Carrie’s jumble of nonsensical bites would evoke the memory of the Augean Stables. Still, I feel duty-bound to do my best for the benefit of my readers – even at the risk of preaching to the choir.

Hence I’ll repeat the title: this side of woke animadversions, there’s no such thing as gay rights. This is to say that homosexuals should enjoy no specific rights as homosexuals. Such particularism has no place among the all-encompassing raft of legal rights enjoyed by every subject of Her Majesty, regardless of sexual or any other deviations.

We have any number of laws protecting us from crimes motivated by ‘hate’, greed, drug and alcohol intake or anything else. A thug attacking a homosexual for his sexuality must be prosecuted side by side with a thug attacking a straight man for his provocative pinstriped suit.

Alas, the word ‘rights’ is routinely misused these days to denote privileges, entitlements and appetites. A genuine right is one that doesn’t presuppose a concomitant obligation on anyone else’s part.

Thus, the right of a homosexual not to be attacked or otherwise abused qualifies. However, his right to being employed without prejudice doesn’t: it means that an employer must have the legal obligation to give the homosexual a job. This clashes with the employer’s genuine right to choose whomever he likes.

I’m talking about companies outside the aegis of the state. The NHS, for example, can be legally forced to introduce any number of perverse hiring practices – that’s par for the course. Yet doing the same to a privately owned firm means sacrificing a genuine right for a bogus one.

We may bemoan the employer’s antediluvian bias, but we all have a God-given right to have some quirks, no matter how disagreeable. In any case, a free market should protect homosexuals all by itself.

Businessmen aren’t likely to spite their faces by cutting off their noses, and turning away a qualified candidate for extraneous reasons would constitute just such a proverbial faux pas. Companies compete not just for markets but also for talent, however packaged. Ignoring a talented prospect would let one’s competitors score free points, thereby threatening to run away with the game.

Free markets do have such self-regulating features, and the more the state meddles, the more it distorts a practice proven to work everywhere it has been allowed to run more or less (if not entirely) unimpeded.

Carrie’s poor husband seems to realise this, which is why he was right to say yesterday that people shouldn’t appeal to him, meaning the state, to cure all economic ills, such as the cracks in the supply chain.

That was a proper conservative statement, and Johnson ought to be complemented. What I find baffling, however, is that Carrie seems to think that her poor henpecked husband can fix problems outside the legitimate remit of the state.

For example, he is expected to do God’s job by ordering climate to stand still, something it has refused to do during the previous billions of years. Carrie also wants him to extend “the gains [of homomarriage] even further”. True enough, the rights to interspecies marriage remain untapped, and this is the only immediately obvious area of possible extension.

Contextually, Carrie also wants her poor husband to prove his Tory credentials by legislating reverse discrimination in the workplace, forcing employers to give special privileges to homosexuals. She also seems to think that killing someone for his sexuality should be punished more severely than killing someone for his money.

The logic escapes me, but then I’m neither a card-carrying member of the Tory party nor a donor to it. I leave that privilege to Russian gangsters.