Military: Don't Ask

The confirmation today of the country’s first out gay man, Eric Fanning, as Army secretary is the latest sign we’ve come a long way since “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The Clinton-era policy became law in 1994 and lasted all the way until 2011, finally letting service members be out as gay or lesbian. Now the civilian leading the Army is gay himself.

Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin called the confirmation “a demonstration of the continued progress towards fairness and equality in our nation’s armed forces.”

“Secretary-Designate Fanning’s historic confirmation demonstrates that in America, we value hard work, talent and dedication,” said Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who is cochair of the LGBT Equality Caucus. “The capacity in which any individual can faithfully serve our country should not be limited.” ...

The Advocate.

Well done gay man now in charge of killing foreign people in service to American empire!

PS Dear old Blighty surely pioneered this when Michael Portillo was appointed Defence Secretary in 1995.

Thatcher: Prude Juice

The former Conservative minister Michael Portillo has said that Margaret Thatcher was more “liberal” about homosexuality than many would imagine.

Speaking on This Week, the ex-deputy Conservative Party leader said: “Many people would have an impression of Margaret Thatcher as a great prude – actually she wasn’t”.

“She was rather liberal on sexual matters. For example, she was surrounded by gay people amongst her advisers.”

After Andrew Neil probed him about whether Baroness Thatcher was conscious of this, Portillo replied: “Oh yes, she knew”. 

Under Baroness Thatcher’s reign, the Conservatives prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools via the introduction of Section 28 in 1988...

The Independent.

Sake.

Syrian Refugee Crisis: Caring, Sharing...

Send us your selfie to show that you care!

Part of the Independent's achingly sincere, self-serving Refugees Welcome 'campaign' - hideous.

The Indy was the only British newspaper to put the emotional pornography of that photograph showing the dead baby in full on their front page yesterday.

A strong piece by Max Fisher for Vox.

The massed index fingers of social media ain't been this angry and sad since Cecil The Lion!

Now to Tweet, Share and RT...

PS Mirror online have resurrected this story from April; Michael Portillo says desperate Mediterranean refugees should be 'dumped on a Libyan beach. Yes, that's the Michael Portillo whose father was a refugee from the Franco regime. Not the first time she's had a strange sense of recall about her past.

Matthew Parris in his Times' column, Saturday...

There are moments when a shaft of ice should enter the soul. Yes, I too saw the photograph of the dead child. Yes, I too had to brush away a tear. But weeping at pictures is not a policy, and saying “we must do more” is not a policy. Policy seeks remedies, and the remedy for the refugee crisis is no more apparent now that we have seen a picture of a lifeless toddler than it was before it.

What kind of primitives have we become that we need to see a drowned person before we acknowledge to ourselves that people are drowning? Did we not know, had we not read, that migrant children drowned? What happened to the written word? Are newspapers and broadcasters to dispense altogether with report and analysis and offer us only a slide show? “Tragic,” “shaming”, “shocking” — this is politics by adjective. We need some nouns... 
 

NOT EXCLUSIVE: We continue to exploit the drowning of two children by pretending we’d have cared about them if they’d arrived here alive.

— The DM Reporter (@DMReporter) September 5, 2015

Peter Lilley: Anything To Declare?

“We came to think that it didn’t matter what people thought about you as long as you got the right results,” he says. “It didn’t matter in that period if people disliked us as long as they feared Labour more than they disliked us.

“While Labour was unable to win elections, all it could do was attack the Conservatives’ motive and character, and we didn’t even bother to defend ourselves.”

Mr Lilley suffered more than most from some of that hostility. Although he insists he was never aware of being personally unpopular, he recalls he was the victim of vicious and inaccurate rumours put about in Westminster that he was secretly gay.

While his glamorous artist wife Gail dismissed them at the time, saying she found it “hilarious,” Mr Lilley never commented on the rumours, which helped ensure that no newspaper printed them and they did not gain wider currency in the country.

Discussing them for the first time, he seems more troubled than upset, saying he never understood where the stories emerged from.

“I didn’t like the rumour-mongering,” Mr Lilley says. “I didn’t mind so much for me but for my mother and sister and wife, it wasn’t nice. I never found out why [the rumours were put about].” ...

Daily Telegraph.

Maybe cos everyone thought you were bumming Michael Portillo...

Michael Portillo: State Secrets

So camp...

Margaret Thatcher: Some Of Her Best Junior Cabinet Members Were...

Generally she arrived at her opinions based on some simple principle. British history and her libertarian instincts had the strongest influence in forming those principles. That could lead to surprising attitudes. She was neither racist nor homophobic, nor even judgmental about people's private lives. She chose many Jews to serve in her cabinet and many gays. Cecil Parkinson's affair with his secretary worried but didn't disgust her. She had an extraordinary rapport with the Asian community, with whom she had some values in common...

A gushing tribute to Margaret Thatcher by ex-gay ex-Tory MP, Michael Portillo in The Observer - but then what did you expect?
In a breath-taking bit of revisionism Portillo argues the Iron Lady was actually a really nice lady.
And in-no-way was she homophobic - something ex-Tory MP and still-gay Matthew Parris also claims.
But if so, as Chris Bryant wrote in The Independent yesterday, doesn't that make her exploiting homophobia for electoral gain and sponsoring Section 28 "cynicism writ large", and arguably all the more odious?
Portillo suggests that having "many gays" in her cabinet is proof she couldn't have been anti-gay.
Though I can't quite see how this follows - doesn't politics usually operate under the maxim; "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice"?
Maybe it didn't matter if a man was one of them as long as he was "one of us".
But did she even know who was? One gets the feeling she was somewhat gauche.
Here is a list of all her Cabinet members.* 
By Portillo's logic she didn't seem to like gay men that much, or maybe didn't like that many gay men.
There was the late and closeted Lord Avon and Sir Peter Morrison - though the latter was widely suspected of being a child abuser, which perhaps supports the notion that Thatcher wasn't "judgmental about people's private lives".
Is Michael "I had some homosexual experiences as a young person" Portillo including himself here?
Despite the rumours that Mr P was having an affair with his cabinet colleague Peter Lilley, it's now assumed he isn't/wasn't gay.
And so who does that leave?
Norman St John-Stevas!

PS Has anyone heard if Ivan Massow and Matthew Parris have been invited to the funeral?  

* Note also there is only one female cabinet minister here, the psychopathically homophobic Baroness Young. 

Putting Tories On The Dole: Slumming It

Fagburn doesn't usually approve of e-petitions, mainly as they often serve little purpose beyond making someone feel good about themselves for ten seconds.
But I did sign the one asking Ian Duncan Smith to prove his claim he can live on £53 a week for a year.
Mainly as it's clearly making the hopelessly out-of-touch millionaire upper class-warrior squirm.
But lest we forget, back in 1984 another then Tory MP took up this challenge - our old chum comedy posh gay, Matthew Parris.
In a wonderful display of not-really-getting-the-point-ness, Parris lived for exactly one week (!) on £26.80 - which wasn't a lot of money in those days.
Undaunted by the laughter and contempt this patronising exercise incurred, he repeated it in 2004.
Sadly neither programme is on YouTube*, but here's a cracking demolition job of the last one by Gareth McLean in The Guardian, drawing comparisons with the equally patronising 2003 doc, When Michael Portillo Became A Single Mum.

Politicians may volunteer for such swaps imagining their credibility rising, but they rarely contemplate how idiotic they may appear. (This at least gives them something in common with other stars of reality TV.)
All of which is perhaps well and good. The use of personalities, such as Parris and Portillo, may draw to a film about poverty viewers who wouldn't otherwise watch. After all, poverty is ugly and nasty: not what anyone would call preferred viewing. But there is also a danger - in the sparks of worlds colliding, in the bright lights of personality-led current affairs - that the bigger issue gets lost. Everything is reduced to spectacle (see refined Parris in a nasty fitted kitchen!) and the wider context ignored.
In contrast to an authored report on poverty, say, there is scant analysis, but a claim to greater authenticity. It is, of course, a spurious claim: reality TV is a misnomer, an oxymoron. Matthew Parris negotiating life on a £55 budget becomes a variation on the tasks undertaken in the Big Brother house, slumming it in Newcastle akin to surviving in the I'm A Celebrity jungle. It's poverty as entertainment and very little else.

* The latter one, For The Benefit Of Mr Parris Revisited, appears to be on some of those sites where you have to sign away your life first and may just be phishing, so these are AYOR.

PS More recently we had "disgraced" Lib Dem Mark Oaten - gasp! - living on a Tower Hamlets council estate for a bit in Tower Block Of Commons - truly a documentary too disgusting to be described on a family blog.

Update: Matthew Parris writes in The Times his programme was a pointless exercise ("and this is the killer-objection to trying a life on benefits for a week — one week ain’t the half of it..."), and - oops! - faked; he and the camera crew actually left before the week was out. 

Archbishop Welby: Old News

The Archbishop of Canterbury voiced opposition to same-sex couples adopting children and insisted that the Bible is “clear” that gay couples should not have sex, previously unpublished writings show.

In one letter to his parish in 1999 he criticised the Church of England charity The Children’s Society’s decision to lift its ban on placing children for fostering or adoption with gay couples.
He spoke of the parish having to “review its decision to support them” in light of the change and urged the charity to rethink.
Since then the law has been changed making it illegal for charities to discriminate against gay couples, a move which effectively forced the closure of all Roman Catholic adoption agencies in England...

In the same article Rev Welby, as he then was, discussed the admission by Michael Portillo, the former Tory Cabinet minister, to having “homosexual experiences” as a student.
While emphasising that this did not matter for Mr Portillo’s political career, he went on to speak of sexuality as a “powerful force” leading people “astray” adding: “The standards of expected sexual morality are clear.
“Throughout the Bible it is clear that the right place for sex is only within a committed, heterosexual marriage.
“Interestingly, all recent research also shows that the children of such a relationship are likely (not always but often) to be happier and more stable.”
More controversially he also spoke about a belief that people can change their sexuality.
He criticised the media for “[talking] as though his sexuality is exactly the same now as then”...

The Daily Telegraph.

Hmm...
Despite the scary strapline the comments were made in a single article written more than a dozen years ago in a parish newsletter (so how can they be "unpublished"?)
They're taken from a new biography the Telegraph will be serialising. 
I really don't want to defend this man, he's clearly no friend to The Gays; an "evangelical traditionalist" who was silent over the recent great gay marriage debate (he supports civil partnerships) and homophobia in the African church, but this article perhaps is more about seemingly adding "moral support" to the Telegraph's own anti-gay views.

Equal Marriage: Heated Debates

Conor Marron from Coalition For Equal Marriage vs the beyond evil Sharon Jones from Cunts For Marriage.
Think it's safe to say Conor wins this one.

Update: Newsnight hosted an embarrassing bunfight - poor show Channel 4.
The subject wasn't brought up on Question Time tonight - presumably the producers thought they'd "done that" last week.
And who could top Will "Nice But Dim" Young?
It was the hot topic on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze this week.
Sadly, Melanie Phillips was away.
The highlight?
Michael Portillo: ‘Ben, can you confirm that one man cannot impregnate another man and bring about a child?’
Ben Summerskill: ‘I’m surprised you need to ask that question, Michael.’
Michael Portillo: ‘Help me out with the answer.’
Ben Summerskill: ‘I’ll assist you. It’s why you have no children, Michael.'

Andrew Pierce Watch: Behind You!

'The defeat of Michael Portillo by the openly gay Labour candidate Stephen Twigg in the seat of Enfield Southgate was one of the most memorable moments of the 1997 general election.
'It was seen by many in the gay rights lobby as a seminal victory against the ‘nasty’ Tory party.
'Now the local Conservative association is riven by another battle over gay rights. David Burrowes, who beat Twigg for the seat in 2005, is the ringleader of a revolt by Tory MPs against David Cameron’s commitment to support gay marriage.
'Burrowes is a father of six and head of the Conservative Christian Fellowship. ‘I do not see the need for legislation to recognise gay marriage,’ he says. ‘I will vote against it. But it does not at all follow that I am anti-gay and homophobic.’ Such reasoning cuts no ice with Phillip Dawson, treasurer at his Conservative association: ‘It is one thing for our MP to abstain on this sort of issue,’ he says. ‘To declare he will not only vote against it, but lead a revolt of up to 100 MPs is unacceptable.’
'Dawson, who is gay, has launched a Facebook and Twitter campaign against Burrowes. Ironically, he has the backing of Stephen Twigg, who is now an MP in Liverpool.
'Dawson needs only 50 signatures from members to trigger an emergency meeting to discuss Burrowes’s position as MP. ‘It is an option. No one should think an incumbent is there for good,’ he says.
'However, Dawson may find he is the one accused of intolerance. Cameron is almost certain to give MPs a free vote on gay marriage.'

The Daily Mail.

Blimey.
That's your actual gay Uncle Tom Andrew Pierce there, writing about The Gays and it's not completely offensive.
Did you catch the dig against the deffo not-gay Michael Portillo in the first line?
Now, if only I thought gay marriage was as important as gay Tories do.

Update: Phillip Dawson has replied below.

Moral Maze: Whose Rights?

There's been much ink spilled over the last week debating whether gay rights should trump Christian "rights" (ie bigotry).
Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times announced dramatically; 'This Is, Indeed, A Rosa Parks Moment' (If you can get past the paywall, there's also a video interview with Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy).
Radio 4's Moral Maze had an enjoyable heated debate on this vexed question yesterday.
Sadly the hilarious right-wing nutjob, Melanie Phillips, wasn't on - here's a predictably barking piece in The Daily Mail; 'Yes, gays have often been the victims of prejudice. But they now risk becoming the new McCarthyites' - but we did get Britain's best known ex-gay, Michael Portillo.