Pride comes before a fall

As the chairman of my university Conservatives in England, I led my members on a march to legalise homosexuality in Scotland and Northern Ireland. That dates me. The law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982. It was of course already legal in England & Wales where the law changed in 1967. I’m old but not that old.

We marched neither for self interest nor self promotion. There was no social benefit for us — indeed we were made most unwelcome by leftists on the march, because we didn’t fit their narrative. Already in the 1970s, among student politicians, no one gave a damn about the “content of your character” or even the correctness of your policies if you were not of the Left. 

We were small state, low tax Conservatives. The national party would shortly thereafter close down the Federation of Conservative Students to which we belonged for advocating the legalisation of drugs, for example. We wanted Liberty to reign and people to make their own choices wherever possible — and express them mostly through the economic democracy of markets.

So my rationale for leading my members that day was not to win homosexual votes,  nor to feel cool for being an ally. Their sexual urges were as icky to me as mine were, I assumed, to them but they were of just as little concern as they were of interest.

My objective that long-ago day was to reduce the number of unnecessary laws. What consenting adults did to each other in bed was (like all other aspects of our private lives) none of the state’s damn business. If, as they liked to sing back then, homosexuals were “glad to be gay”, we were glad for them. The “crime” was victimless so should never have been a crime at all.

The legal reform we sought was an excellent one, not least because it was (unlike much legislation since, which actively and anti-democratically seeks to shape thought) driven by changing attitudes. Few people cared if their neighbour was gay as long as he or she didn’t “do it in the street and frighten the horses”. The law opened gays to abuse and blackmail. It did much harm and no good. It was clearly better to restore some Liberty and let people be. 

Since then my only involvement with the gay rights movement has been to be delayed in traffic by a “Pride” march on a visit to New York City once. If I’ve thought about it at all, it’s been to worry that rights specific to particular groups are dangerously divisive insofar as they undermine the key concept of equality before the law. I’ve advised gay people professionally, worked alongside them and employed a fair few of them without ever thinking about their sexuality. Why would I?

So why am I thinking about them now? Firstly because they are insisting upon it. I’m no more proud to be straight than I am to be tall or white. It’s just one fact among many. Yet activist gays insist that not only are they proud to be what they are, but that I should be proud for them too. That’s frankly nuts.

The Pride march in NYC that once prevented me getting to lunch as quickly as I would have liked has become a global festival that lasts a bloody month. Gays literally want us to celebrate them more than we celebrate our great inventors, poets or the warriors who died for our freedoms. How can that be a good look in PR terms? Frankly, if you think your sexuality is thirty times more worthy of celebration than Shakespeare’s genius, you are off your tastelessly-painted trolley.

Secondly, they’re using their bully pulpit unwisely. LGB, a standard TLA (three letter acronym) is getting perilously close to consuming the entire alphabet. The minute a plus sign was added, I wondered why they don’t just settle for G+ and save some trees. 

By adding more and more letters to that alphabet soup and insisting not on a general human right to be harmlessly different, but on category-specific rights for ever smaller and wackier groups, the movement has weakened the consensus that drove legalisation all those years ago. We were with you (or at least benignly indifferent to you) until you embraced people waving their dicks in our faces while insisting they’re women. Or until you advocated life-changing surgeries for confused minors (more than most of whom were on track to be happily gay).

What were you thinking?

The sloppy “born that way” arguments deployed to support that excellent reform back in the day are being stolen and abused. You ignored the risk of reductio ad absurdam until it morphed into reductio ad fastidium. 

Are you looking for trouble? Did you learn nothing from the damaging attempts of the Paedophile Information Exchange (supported by Harriet Harman in her stupid youth) to ride on the coattails of gay rights back in the day?

To try to answer my own question I attended an online Pride Month seminar yesterday. It was not pretty. The three presenters were variously queer. One was — of course — transgender. I knew more history of the gay rights movement than they did. They spoke of decades as if they were aeons and words as if they were cannons. They were wedded (in complete ignorance of the struggles of their pre-legalisation brothers and sisters) to a sense of oppression. They saw no logical conflict between despising heteronormativity and bemoaning how much unhappier and more suicidal they were because they were outside that norm.  

Rather than being glad to be gay and celebrating the world of opportunity opened to them by their oppressed predecessors, they made it clear they could never be happy until everyone else approved of them. They wanted us all to learn the minutiae of their kinks and waste great chunks of our lives proving the depth of our useless knowledge. They want us to respond to them in total sensitivity to a sense of self that one of them said varied from day to day according to his/her/its “vibe”.

These are luxury beliefs no society is rich enough to afford.

If you want to be happy, accept yourself. Most people don’t know or care about you anyway. If you try to force them to look at you and then tell them you can only be happy if they approve of you, you are “cruising for a bruising”.  

It is a recipe for lifelong misery. Pack it in.