The New Eeeeuw: Who would have thought that about Ted Heath? Well…

Edward Heath playing the piano to the amusement of Kermit the Frog and Paddington Bear

In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible — that pungent little verse in Leviticus, perhaps, with its reference to ‘detestable acts’. Or maybe he would be OK reading out bits from Leviticus if he then made it clear that the Levite priests, and God Himself, were totally wrong on this issue and that homosexuality is absolutely lovely.

But never mind the Levites. These ‘old-fashioned’ views would include doubting the legitimacy of gay marriage and might incur an ‘Extremism Disruption Order’, according to the Nottinghamshire MP whose incandescent brilliance first came to light when he won the coveted ‘2011 Brake Road Safety Parliamentarian of the Year Award’.

So this is where we are. To be caught in the possession of one or two doubts about gay marriage is enough to label one an extremist — and (cue Carlos Santana playing ‘Samba Pa Ti’) not just any old extremist, but a Mark Spencer MP extremist. I think there is a difference between having doubts, rooted in the Christian faith, about gay marriage and pushing homosexuals to their deaths off tall buildings — but to Mark, they’re apparently one and the same thing. These days even the mildest dissenting view — even a mildly dissenting view held by the majority or a large minority of the population — is extremism. This is the new absolutism at work.

Long before Mr Spencer impinged himself upon the public consciousness, I think we all knew that Ted Heath was a poof. I use the term that would have been commonly applied during his spectacularly awful period in the highest of offices, by the way. The word ‘gay’ had not, by February 1974, completed its transformation in the British consciousness — it was in a sort of halfway house by then, sort of like those transgendered folk who have had their breasts stapled on but have not yet got around to slicing off their old fellas. ‘Poof’ or ‘queer’ were the descriptions du jour, along with more puzzling pejoratives relating to nine-bob notes and butcher’s hooks.  (more...)

The New Eeeeuw: Who would have thought that about Ted Heath? Well…

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