How does Boris Johnson’s decision to ban the adverts for ‘post-gay therapy’ make you feel? Are you worried that the ‘liberal’ values imposed on you by those London types are really just a way to undermine the culture you grew up to love? Well, if so, The Daily Mail is as ever ready and waiting to let you know that you are not alone, and to calm your fears with its traditional mix of homespun values and shrieking outrage. It reminds us that “people ought not to be reproached, much less punished, for the way they are born.”
But, feigning reason, the paper ventures that “they can be legitimately asked not to act on their aberrant tendencies”, which, in any case are barely tendencies at all as “only about one percent of us are that way inclined”, and anyway “homosexuality is obviously a departure from the norm”. They finish with a call to arms that sounds a teeny bit hyperbolic given that it was sparked by a debate over bus advertising: “All of us, Christians or otherwise, ought to be wary of the systematic campaign to destroy everything our civilisation stands for.”
Wow. Opening the Mail is always a jarring experience, a bit like being throw headfirst into a deranged version of the 1950s, but propagating hard-core, build-a-nuclear-bunker-under-the-shed conspiracy theories is definitely a new level of crazy.
The Guardian framed the controversy as part of a wider trend towards Christian political activism among ‘aggressively conservative evangelical groups’, citing some wonk who thinks that “the scale of their political power has been in long-term decline and some groups of Christians have reacted with fear and anger. They fear they will become irrelevant and they are angry because they feel they hold the truth and have a right to be at the centre of the arena.’ Because, of course, who does what to whom in the bedroom is the political issue of the moment.
The Telegraph tries to claim that “the ‘bus advert storm’ confirms that Christians are now more progressive than gay rights activists”, playing somewhat weakly on the argument that. perversely, it is now the Christians rather than gay rights activists who see homosexuality as a lifestyle choice rather down to some nefarious ‘gay gene’, as was the conservative belief in the old days. Interesting, though the point might be more convincing if those same Christians didn’t talk about these ‘lifestyle choices’ like some multi-headed beast from the hallucinatory parts of the Bible that no one bothers to try and draw moral lessons from.
The whole firestorm does feel a little forced, though: the British church is known more for fund-raising tea parties than for fire and brimstone about the devilwork of permissive values. I doubt we’ll be hearing much more about voodoo gay cures and saving British civilisation anytime soon.
