Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond doesn’t seem to agree that being ‘gay’ is something to be proud about. To express this distinctly old-fashioned feeling he has banned British embassies from flying the rainbow flag to mark this year’s ‘gay pride’ parades.
Indeed, one struggles to see how people’s sexuality, perverse or even normal, can be a source of pride. One can more easily see how it can be a source of shame.
For example, my own, boringly conventional, sexuality has led me over a lifetime to do quite a few shameful things – and not a single one of which I can be proud, even though some have made me happy.
As to sexual perversion, taking pride in that is in itself perverse, while expressing such feelings publicly would in any sane society attract the attention of chaps in police uniforms or, perhaps more appropriately, white coats.
Moreover, a lifelong egalitarian like me can’t abide by the unequal treatment afforded to various perversions. If crowds are allowed, nay encouraged, to march in support of ‘gay pride’, any man who gets his jollies from incest, animals, corpses or faeces should feel slighted.
I can hear a strengthening chorus of voices harmonising various polyphonic strains. Where’s my ‘dead’s beautiful’ necrophilia pride march? And what about my ‘Daisy, Daisy, I’m half-crazy’ march for bestiality pride? My ‘eat and enjoy’ coprophilia pride march? Where can I join the ‘come to daddy’ incest pride parade?
It’s terribly unfair, not to say discriminatory, that some perversions can take precedence over others. It’s like those green fanatics picking out just one exhaust gas, carbon dioxide, for their attacks, whereas some others may be as or more damaging. Arbitrary or what?
That embassies representing Her Majesty’s interests abroad should even consider flying the rainbow flag has to be grounds for a wholesale change in personnel. The Union Jack is a symbol of the whole nation, and the only British flag that may on occasion appear next to it is the Royal Standard – not the rag celebrating deviant sexuality or any other particular interests.
Yet not only our embassies but also the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall flew the striped rag last year. William Hague, who had Mr Hammond’s job then, was so keen to broadcast that fact ad orbi et urbi that some warped minds began to suspect a personal interest.
I don’t know about that. A more likely reason for that show of weakness was that Dave was pushing his subversive homomarriage bill through Parliament then, and Hague, who has been a loyal party man since before he knew what ‘sexuality’ meant, must have felt duty-bound to stand by his man Dave.
I’m sure that even Peter Tatchell’s followers realise how utterly ridiculous this whole ‘gay pride’ movement is. It makes no sense – other than political sense, which is of course the whole point.
In common with many historically marginalised groups, politicised homosexuals resent traditional morality and the institutions upholding it. When they are not only politicised but fanatical, they feel the urge to destroy the morality and undermine the institutions.
The rest is simply expressing this animus as political action and massive propaganda. When the propaganda reaches a certain decibel level and breadth, it does what propaganda is supposed to do: override people’s traditional feelings and replace them with a new set.
Yesterday’s deviancy becomes today’s orthodoxy, the voices of isolated fanatics become vox populi, and that’s not the sound any modern, which is to say post-Christian, which is to say spivocratic, government can ignore.
Mr Hammond has restored a previously lost modicum of sanity to our embassies, but for how long? One already hears a rumble of discontent among our embassy staff in Rome and elsewhere. Before long it’ll segue into a crescendo culminating in a finale that’ll attract Dave’s attention.
If you can give me decent odds, I’m prepared to bet that Dave, now secure in his slender parliamentary majority, will overrule his Foreign Secretary. I’m not sure he’ll go so far as to follow the suggestion in the title of this piece, but I wouldn’t bet against it.
Any takers?