As a gay man I’ve grown accustomed to the arguments put forward by the religious in favour of restricting my civil rights and legislating for intolerance and bigotry. So often is the case made against my ‘lifestyle choice’ that it fades into the foliage- it becomes white voice chatter amongst those who believe god is on their side.
On occasion however, an article comes along that sets the bar that bit lower. Enter Alan Craig, leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance and ex-candidate for the London mayoral elections.
Alan, a self proclaimed ‘advocate for social justice and fairness for society’s down-trodden,’ recently wrote a piece for the Church of England Newspaper, entitled ‘Confronting The Gaystapo.‘
‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man,’ writes Alan; ‘for years Winston Churchill was a lone voice against the burgeoning darkness of Nazi ideology and intolerance. In the wilderness and with few public friends, he was marginalised and dismissed as belligerent and a war-monger. He was scorned as a political has-been, out of touch with the then-modern mainstream. But he saw clearly the hidden hegemonic ambitions of the Nazis and their intended assault on our civilization, our values, our way of life. To the fury of the Nazi leadership in Berlin he exposed the sinister truth, gave a trumpet-call for resistance and rearmament, and in due course galvanised the nation for an epochal battle against the fascist menace.’
The ‘lone voice’ is in Alan’s interpretation now the Christian way of life, and he its Winston Churchill. The ‘fascist menace’ you have no doubt already concluded, is the gay lifestyle.
He writes, ‘Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK’s victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights storm troopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture. Flattered by appeasers and feted by the political class, the Oberkommandos from Stonewall and OutRage! have expansive goals for cultural hegemony and have long wanted to march on the next territory. They want to hijack a word and capture our culture at its deepest level. They want to reconfigure relationships, eliminate the traditional family and hence eradicate stable upbringing for our children.’
The homosexual community, if you can call it a community (there’s much debate about that, never mind the assertion that we have a unified plan of cultural domination) are used to the charge that we want to eliminate the family and endanger children. Me and my gay friends often ponder this accusation over a cup of newborn baby blood, and can’t for the queer of us fathom where it comes from (urgh!)
Indeed, the calls for gay marriage and adoption rights seem to many a conservative ambition: a way of integrating further into societal norms. That’s a far cry from the aims of the initial gay rights movement of America, which sought to distance itself altogether from what it considered to be conservative norms. The days of Harvey Milk were full of ideological debate about things as fundamental as monogamy, the family unit, and freedoms of expression. Today, the desire to be a part of society at an equal level is termed by many a radical step too far.
To equate the gay rights agenda to that of the Nazi imperial ambition however, is not only an attempt to misrepresent the gay community, but to rewrite history.
In 1936 Heinrich Himmler sought to cleanse Germany of gay people. More than a million German homosexuals were targeted, with more than one hundred thousand arrested and fifty thousand imprisoned or institutionalised. There gay men faced castration, shock therapy and later torture. When concentration camps were finally erected, thousands of gay men and women were murdered in the name of Nazism.
Alan Craig’s article conveniently ignores the horror that faced gay people in Nazi Germany, and ends his hate filled article with a call to arms: ‘Now is the time for people of courage to rise up and defend marriage, our children and the very foundations of our civilisation.’
The Nazi genocide gained public acceptance only by convincing the public, through the use of propaganda, that the Jews and any other minority that Hitler sought to remove from the face of the Earth, were subhuman. The Jews were equated to pigs, the homosexual to the mentally ill and perverse, and now Alan seeks to convince you that the modern gay man is a fascist.
This sinister propaganda should be challenged. For an article of this kind to be published in the Church of England Newspaper, the official newspaper of the church that our monarch and head of state oversees, raises very disturbing questions about the nature of this debate, and the extent to which those who seek to persecute us are willing to go.
