Free Speech: Oh Do Shut Up!

Yet another right-wing shitbag leaps to the defence of Bindel and Tatchell - here, Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times - completely missing the point in the process.

Fagburn preferred it when Liddle was pointing out what a pointless wanker Saint Peter has become.

Rod Liddle: Eeeeeuw

From the current issue of Private Eye.

Rod Liddle: Blunt, And To The Point

A year or so back my friend and colleague Hugo Rifkind wrote a very good piece in which he argued that the issues concerning gay rights should not be resolved simply by an elongated ‘eeeeuw’. In other words, heterosexual distaste at the practices of homosexuals should not determine general policy towards this minority. A good point and well made and I agreed with much of it. But it shouldn’t stop the rest of us going ‘eeeeuw’ from time to time, nonetheless.

So, Crispin Blunt MP feels hurt because laws proscribing amyl nitrate (or ‘poppers’) would criminalise the entire gay community. A jar of poppers and a tube of ‘lube’ are always found in the bedside drawer of a gay man, we are told. I would have thought that the requirement for amyl nitrate to relax the sphincter muscle and lube to accommodate entry was God’s way of telling you that what you’re about to do is unnatural and perverse. Or your body’s way of telling you – your call. So eeeeuw. Amyl nitrate is very bad for you – so ban it. Crispin and others can always use a jemmy instead.

The Specator blog - this is Mr Liddle's post in full, by the way.

Civilisation is man's triumph over nature, Rod.

Update: Government launches review of poppers law after outcry over ban, Pink News.

The Sunday Times: Sometimes

Even two drunken cocks tell the right time once a day...

Gaybabiesgate: Isn't it great when straight people tell gay men what to do?

The Observer.

And you are, Miss Babs?

Dolcegate: Take My Picture!!!!!

At the protest LGBT rights campaigner @PeterTatchell holds up "homophobia is NOT fashionable" sign pic.twitter.com/cyfGVdyEgZ
— Aisha S Gani (@aishagani) March 19, 2015 

Cause getting your photo taken holding up a badly printed sign is how the world changes... 

Update: Rod Liddle pops down to the protest...

Gay Marriage: Til Death Us Do Meet

TWO killers are set to become the first prisoners to have a gay wedding in jail.

Mikhail Gallatinov, 40, is getting hitched to former “gay basher” Marc Goodwin, 31.

It was reported last night that they are going to hold the ceremony at Full Sutton Prison, East Yorks, next month.

Ministry of Justice chiefs said it will not be funded by taxpayers and the couple will not share a cell afterwards.

Goodwin was caged for a minimum of 18 years in 2007 for the murder of Malcolm Benfold, 57, on Blackpool promenade.

He led a gang which roamed the Lancashire seaside resort searching for homosexuals to beat up.

Gallatinov was jailed for a minimum of 20 years in 1997 for throttling Adrian Kaminsky, 28, in Manchester.

The judge called the murder “a cold-blooded, well-planned, callous, chilling and apparently motiveless killing”.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Prisoners are entitled to apply to be married in prison under the Marriages Act 1983.

“This would take place at no cost to the taxpayer and there is no possibility that they would share a cell.”

The Sun.

Adorable!

Mail Online readers - somewhat surprisingly - are not so keen.

NB The photos show them at the time of their arrests some time ago, so they may not look quite so hot now. Sorry.

PS Anyone remember this story about two killers getting gaymarried in a French prison? Almost certainly a hoax - or at least a politically motivated PR stunt - by the notorious far right anti-semitic French comedian, Dieudonne M'bala.

Update: Rod Liddle's piece on this for The Sunday Times is titled, Do you murderous queer basher take this gay man?

Paedomania: Spectating

Rod Liddle and Matthew Parris in The Spectator on a very British witch hunt.

This is all going to get so ridiculous...

'People can make accusations, can infer guilt by association, can assert grandly. They can draw cartoons of murky establishments and of eyes under lifted stones. They may be right, they may be wrong. But only the evidence can tell you which it is. And in the past fortnight we have entered a zone heavy on claim and light on substance.' David Aaronovitch, The Times.

Sad but true - this bout of paedomania seems to be bringing out a lot of people's inner David Icke.

PS And Stephen Fry speaks out against Operation Yewtree at a Labour party do, in apparent defence of his chum Paul Gambaccini.

Rod Liddle: The Digested Read

You. Yes you, you poncey metropolitan elite. Put down that Richard Littlejohn autobiography right now. And shut up about Clarkson. How come they get all the attention and you forget there's another irritating gobshite on the block? I can be offensive, too. Wog. There. I've said it. I'll say it again. Wog. My parents didn't like wogs. Chinks. I can write that, too. My parents weren't too keen on them, either. They once went on an aeroplane and there was a gay cabin steward. Gay. Pansy. Suck on that. Actually I quite like gays. Some of my best friends are gay. Muggers, obese chav monkeys … Oi, I said, don't ignore me. Please. I couldn't bear it if you ignored me. Or if you weren't offended. Please be offended, too.

The peerless John Crace, The Guardian.

PIEgate: Latest!

'Compound for sins they are inclin’d to,

By damning those they have no mind to:

Still so perverse and opposite,

As if they worshipp’d God for spite.

The self-same thing they will abhor

One way, and long another for.'

Samuel Butler, 1684.

Sunday Times.

Further, PIE was founded in  October 1974, after the GLF had died.

Here is Rod Liddle's original article.

Here is Rod on gay marriage.

And here is that oldie but goody; How can the swine Rod Liddle, who cheated on me within days of our wedding, set himself up as a champion of marriage?

It's by Rachel Royce, who he left for a woman 30 years younger than him - his new lover, Alicia Monckton, soon had this paragon of virtue charged with assault.

This is The Observer...

Paedophiles not actually pictured.

This piece in The Independent is predictably barking.
Fagburn remembers the good old days when unimaginative journalists blamed the 60s for everything.
He once saw Yasmin Alibhai Brown speak at a Stop The War Conference in London.
Her first words; 'I'm not sure why I'm here, I don't want to stop the war...'

Sunday Mirror: 'If these allegations are true...' Which they are probably not.

Will this paedohysteria ever end?

Private Eye.

Update: Oops! 'A senior aide to David Cameron resigned from Downing Street last month the day before being arrested on allegations relating to child abuse images.'
Patrick Rock, who was involved in drawing up the government's policy for the large internet firms on online pornography filters, resigned after No 10 was alerted to the allegations...' Guardian, March 4th.

Liberty: Now And Then

"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance.
"In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship."

EM Forster, the first president of the Council For Civil Liberties.

The Guardian marks the 80th anniversary of Liberty by asking 'Edward Snowden and top writers what freedom means to them'.

PS The Daily Mail is celebrating Liberty's decades of good work by running a series of stories such as this; The Labour elite who gave succour to paedophiles.
As are the Telegraph.

Great stuff guys!

Edit: In The Sunday Times Rod Liddle wonders why this hasn't been 'in the news' [sic].
A leftist conspiracy?
Even though it's been covered by Rod, them above and in today's Observer!

It's not been in the news much as it's not actually 'news' - it's an old and distinctly tenuous story dredged up by the Mail to smear Labour and Liberty.

Russia: The Sun Says

THE first action is about to get underway at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia — if the entire city has not been blown up by berserk Muslim terrorists, or gay-rights activists.

There will be people competing in something called a “luge”.

I haven’t a clue what a luge is.

And probably there’ll be those strange Scottish women running up and down the ice with brushes, in the always-exciting curling event.

And then the organ donor competition, otherwise known as skiing.

Call me a killjoy but winter sports don’t really do it for me.

Best left to those countries which struggle through the season in perpetual darkness, drunk out of their skulls and perpetually on the verge of topping themselves.

The Scandinavians, then.

This time, though, there have been calls to boycott the Games because of the manner in which Russia treats its gay and lesbian people.

The, uh, entertainer Paul O’Grady led a protest in Whitehall last night and Stephen Fry has stamped his little feet and demanded everyone tell the Ruskies how horrid they are.

Lots of Western politicians have declined to attend the opening ceremony.

They don’t want to be photographed with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has been fingered as a homophobe.

I don’t like the way Putin behaves towards gay people, either.

Though I have to say, he’s very camp for a supposed homophobe — never happier than when stripping off for the cameras in some rugged outdoor pursuit.

You just know he’s got all the Pet Shop Boys’ albums.

But if we boycott Russia, who don’t we boycott?

This is the point that the gay activists are missing and the point lost on the Western politicians who won’t go to Sochi for the opening ceremony.

Truth is, Russia’s attitude towards gay and lesbian people is a damn sight more enlightened than the attitude in most of the rest of Asia — and pretty much all of Africa, plus large swathes of the Caribbean.

All Putin has done is ban the “promotion” of homosexuality, in much the same way as the UK did in the 1990s with the infamous Section 28 law.

In other words, he’s sort of where we were 20 years ago.

Homosexuality is still legal, just about, in Russia. There are 83 countries in the world where it is illegal. Should we boycott all of them as well, have nothing to do with them? That’s almost half of the entire globe you’re talking about.

Should we refuse to play Iran, or Uganda, at football?

Should we refuse to trade with Egypt and Morocco?

It’s just a difference of opinion.

We think we’re right, Russia thinks that it is right.

And boycotting the games won’t make the slightest difference.

Rod Liddle, The Sun.

Yes, The Sun gets it more than gay fuckwits.

Conservatives: Aliens

The Conservative Party cannot win a majority unless it wins around young people by “shouting from the rooftops” about liberal policies like gay marriage, a Tory minister has said.

Nick Boles, an ally of David Cameron, said that the Conservatives will struggle to win a Commons majority because “a significant number of people will not even contemplate voting Conservative”.

Because the Conservative Party image still repels many voters, the party should consider running candidates under a new National Liberal banner, Mr Boles said.

The minister was a strong supporter of Mr Cameron’s attempts to modernise the image of the Conservative Party and reach out to new voters. His comments reflect concern among senior Tories that the modernisation project has stalled in recent years.

Speaking to the Bright Blue Tory think tank, Mr Boles said that young voters will only back the Conservatives if they highlight their socially liberal policies including allowing gay marriage.

“The Conservative Party will only win office on its own when it has established beyond doubt its commitment to the advance of freedom and found the courage to stake its claim as the party that all liberals should vote for," he said.

“This new group of voters represents a fantastic opportunity for our party. But we have no hope of securing their support if we approach them with the same proposition that we use to woo our stalwart supporters.” 

Mr Boles said that the Conservatives should campaign among young voters by emphasising policies like gay marriage, free schools and tax cuts for low earners.

“We should not shy away from those achievements but shout them from the rooftops. They should make us proud,” he said. “Having taken the pain, not to be proud of them is completely pointless.”

Daily Telegraph.

How MPs voted then and now...

PS Alex Massie in The Spectator replies - with links to what various other right-wing types think.

"Nick thinks being a bit wary of gay marriage and opposing immigration is toxic' to voters. That can only mean one thing to me.

"He’s never, actually, met a voter in his life."

Rod Liddle, The Sun. 

His point is most voters "couldn’t give a monkey’s one way or the other".
Sort of.

Marriage: Rod Liddle's Got Issues

The Sunday Times' Rod Liddle talks to some gays of note who are opposed to equal marriage.
You'll never guess who...

Alan Turing: Pardon?

It was not simply the fact that homosexuality was illegal that made Turing’s life apparently unbearable, but that the overwhelming majority of the rest of society, back then, believed it to be a disgusting practice, as bad in its way as being a foreigner. We were, of course, a more conservative country in the 1950s; a smoky land of antimacassars, church attendance and almost no blacks.
Now some of our most eminent scientists, including Stephen Hawking, want Turing’s conviction overturned, erased from the record.
Does this do any good? Doesn’t it devalue the battle that has been fought for 40 years by gay rights campaigners, for legality and, later, equality under the law, to suggest that Turing’s case was a grotesque anomaly, an isolated instance of prejudice by a reactionary state, which can be suddenly put right by an emollient statement from the prime minister?
If we pardon Turing retrospectively, shouldn’t we also pardon convicted homosexuals who were not possessed of genius — who were, to put it bluntly, a bit thick, or completely useless? The boring, workaday clerks and the bus drivers and the plumbers and the greengrocers, who were subjected to treatment no less horrible. Should brilliance — and Turing certainly possessed that — make someone a special case under the law, deserving of different treatment?
I fear that this replaces one prejudice with another; I suspect that the scientists who are demanding this pardon think of themselves as exceptions, distinct from the masses, caviar to the general. They believe that, as a consequence of their learning, they stride above the morass and should be dealt with differently...

Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times.
It's rare that I agree with Rod Liddle, but he's quite right in the above.
I can see no good that an official posthumous pardon would do.
Will Turing rise from his grave and say "thank you"?
What happened to Alan was a great crime, but it happened to thousands of other men, their names not known.
You could even argue Turing got special treatment, by not being sent to prison.
It is also unclear if he commited suicide, or if so for what reason.
Here's a link to the Telegraph on the letter that Hawking co-signed - proof that genius can still be vacuous.
I bet Alan Turing would think this was all a bunch of stuff and nonsense that boils no cabbages, and then went back to work.

Hamley's: And Pink For A Boy

The mad Rod Liddle in his weekly Sunday Times video on Hamley's "controversial" decision to stop having seperate sections for boys' and girls' toys.
Good of Hamley's to announce this in the run-up to Christmas.
Note how all the parents Liddle interviews say they wouldn't be bothered if their sons play with "girls' stuff."
Fagburn spent much of my childhood playing with my Action Men and it never did me any harm...

Rod Liddle: "Gay Fascists Run The World"

"I don’t agree, viscerally, with private education and I’m not sure I like what it produces — ie, loquacious, over-confident, sexually bewildered sociopaths. But then loquacious, over-confident, sexually bewildered sociopaths run the world, and we all want the best for our children. And when you look at what the state has to offer — at the manifest incompetence of the state educational establishment and the 90% mince-thick teachers, with their low expectations and even lower IQs and their fabulously bereft, ingrained, metropolitan liberal ideologies which cannot ever be challenged or gainsaid — well, hell, the battle is sort of lost.
"I mean, given the choice between siring a gay fascist who can read and add up and a well-adjusted illiterate imbecile, I am beginning to agree that the former is the more desirable option. Hell, please, tell me I’m wrong — I’m really hanging on here."

You are wrong.
That bizarre horse, Rod Liddle: 'My kids’ choice — be a gay Nazi or thick and right-on', The Sunday Times.
I agree that public schools turn children into dreadful people - and sending your kids to one should be seen as child abuse - but gay?

On a different tack, Johann Hari wrote an interesting piece on gay men and the far right for Salon in 1998; The Strange, Strange Story Of The Gay Fascists.

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.

ONS Gay Survey: No idea. Anyone?

Here's Rod Liddle's take on the ONS survey in The Sunday Times.
Fagburn is posting it mainly to stick it to The Man in brazen defiance of Rupert Murdoch's News Corps paywall, but also as it's a textbook example of how to write a newspaper column if you're a liberal bigot.
Read it and see if you can tell what Mr Liddle's argument is.
No?
Me neither.
Do you think he was sober when he wrote this?
No?
Me neither.
Verily, Rod Liddle is the thinking man's Jeremy Clarkson.

Lesbian myth

I knew it. A census from the Office for National Statistics has at last proved that lesbians — like the Abominable Snowman, the unicorn and werewolves — do not actually exist, but are the creation of someone’s mischievous imagination.
The report out last week suggests that 0.6% of the British population are lesbian, and only 1.3% of men are gay. Given the usual margin of error on such studies, this could mean that minus 4.4% of British people are lesbian, a figure I would be inclined to believe.
For years, gay pressure groups have insisted that at least one in three of us is gay, or perhaps all of us but we don’t know it yet: all we need is a night out down Old Compton Street with some amyl nitrate. Just as disabled pressure groups insist that one in three of us is disabled and child abuse groups claim that almost every child in the country has been interfered with.
It is a shame that there are not more gay people in Britain, as they are responsible for very little crime, work hard and are high achievers.
If only the ONS was wrong and the gay pressure groups were right, we’d be the richest country on earth.

No idea. Anyone?

Rod Liddle: "As crushingly dull as Brian Paddick, as duplicitous as Mandelson"

Rod Liddle replies - one presumes - to Andrew Pierce's piece about how he "abhors these TV queens" in The Daily Mail this week.

"Homosexuals are tired of being portrayed on television as sexually obsessed, hilariously narcissistic, outrageously dressed queens each carrying a boxed set of Abba CDs — ie, Clary, Norton, Carr and so on.
They want a bit more realism, believing that this sort of stereotypical depiction is hardly better than the Black and White Minstrels, or Al Jolson. Well, maybe. But be careful what you wish for. Inaccurate it may well be, but at least it has been an agreeable stereotype which has probably advanced the cause of homosexual equality.
If we suddenly discover that gay people aren’t always the life and soul of every party but can be as crushingly dull as Brian Paddick, or as duplicitous as Mandelson, then even more bed and breakfast institutions might refuse them entry (“refuse them entry — ooh missus!” etc).
They should talk to the Irish, who know the value of good PR; the whole of Europe loves the Irish for being ineffably good-natured, top o’ the mornin’, fiddle-de-dee, live-and-let-live free spirits, rather than grey-skinned, marsh-dwelling gingers with an insuperable sense of grievance. The truth is somewhere between the two, as it always is.
Stick with the image, boys."

200 words on "the gays" without lapsing into bigotry.
Congratulations would be in order if Fagburn didn't feel the whole point of the piece was really Rod Liddle bitching about Andrew Pierce.
And Brian Paddick.
And Peter Mandelson.
Manbags at dawn!