Houses of the Unholy

“Bigots obsessed with men’s bums”. That was one commentator’s apt description of the galoots who gathered in the House of Lords at Westminster last month to vote down a proposal to equalise the age of consent for gays.

Among odd-balls in ermine who managed to make it to London were Lady Saltoun of Abernathy, the Viscount L’Isle, Earl Kitchener, Baron (Norman) Tebbit, Lord Quirk of the Isle of Man and Baron Willoughby de Broke.

They haven’t gone away, you know. Sadly, neither have bishops, imams or rabbis.

There is a bright side to it, if we look hard enough. It is, surely, gratifying to be able to remind ourselves from time to time that however quaint, whimsical or ignorant we Irish may sometimes be, we are no match for the aristos and bishops of Britland when it comes to hatred, unction and evil.

Baroness Trumpington wanted it known that she spoke as “the widow of a public-school headmaster”, and knew well the “endless difficulties” lowering the age of consent would have created for her husband. Hmm.

Quirk of Man quoted extensively from the works of (who he?) Jeffrey Satinover: “Anal intercourse traumatises the soft tissue of the rectal lining which is nowhere near as sturdy as vaginal tissue . . . Even in the absence of major trauma, minor or microscopic tears in the rectal lining allow for immediate contamination”

Quirk went on to reveal that he doesn’t know the difference between one ride and another: “If by law we protect motorcyclists from head injury, we must give a thought to protecting the sexually active from anal injury”.

Some say there’s a gene for it, that the ilk of Quirk were born like that and aren’t personally to be blamed. But I say that a kick up the arse would do them no harm at all.

The Church of England’s spokesman, the Bishop of Winchester, expressed “astonishment” that anybody could believe that “homosexual activity is as appropriate and as desirable as heterosexual activity”. Which means, if meaning attaches to it at all, that His Lordship finds the existence of homosexuals astonishing. Which is fair enough. Personally, I find the existence of the Church of England astonishing. But I don’t demand a law against it.

The leading Catholic peer Lord Longford said: “A girl is not ruined for life by being seduced. A young fellow is.” Ah.

The Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jakobovits, reminded the noble lords and ladies of the terrible things which had resulted from “the depravities of the biblical city of Sodom or the pagan Greek island of Lesbos”. This is wrong. Sodom was zapped by the Lord God, right enough, but figuratively and literally the bible left Lesbos alone. Neither explicitly nor implicitly is there a single condemnation of lesbianism or of lesbian sex in the Old Testament or the New. This cannot have been an oversight. God knows everything.

The correct scriptural position is, then, that while the Judaeo-Christian god may have had a vicious attitude to gay men, she loved lesbians.

The House of Lords rag-bag of homophobe reactionaries managed to block the equal rights proposal by 290 votes to 122.

The following week, the Lambeth Conference – the world council of Anglican bishops which meets every 10 years – was dominated by the issue of homosexuality.

“Repent, repent of your sin. You have no inheritance in the Kingdom of God. You are going to hell. You have made yourself homosexual because of your carnality”, Bishop Emmanuel Chukwuma of Enugu, Nigeria, warned gay Christian lobbyists, expressing, as things turned out, the view of a huge majority of the 700-plus prelates present.

Chukwuma was recorded by Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting as he ranted outside the conference hall in Canterbury.

“We have overcome carnality just as the light will overcome darkness. God created woman for man. God did not create you as a homosexual . . . Your church is dying in Europe because it is condoning immorality. You are killing the church. This is the voice of God talking. I am violent against sin. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed”.

Such intense hostility to homosexuality is one of the Anglican Church’s selling points in Nigeria and other African and South East Asian countries. The Church fears that if it weakened its stance it would lose out to Islam and to “independent” evangelical sects in competition to recruit from “traditional” homophobic areas.

There was an emissary from the Vatican on hand at Canterbury throughout, Cardinal Edward Cassidy warning that any mitigation of the line on homosexuality would put progress towards “Christian unity” in peril.

African and Asian bishops were further encouraged towards the fundamentalist position by a deal offered by the US evangelicals: we’ll support an easing of the debt burden on the Third World if you back a tough stance against gays.

A caricaturist might be forgiven for rendering it thus: help us put the boot into homosexuals or we’ll let your people starve.

By such means is the “Word of God” deciphered by Christians these days.

We would do well to take note of these developments, lest we fall into the liberal delusion that progress is assured. On gay rights, as on abortion and much else, it’s easy to assume that the hate merchants have had their day and are being left behind, that there’s a tide in the affairs of men and women inexorably ebbing and leaving twisted bigotry stranded. But it’s not necessarily so.

In the US, abortion rights won 30 years ago are under renewed assault. In some States, women’s right to choose is more constrained than at any time since the ’70s. Under the guise of “anti-porn” ordinances, words and pictures presenting gay sex as normal have been outlawed in a number of cities.

The Lambeth Conference vote will have a material effect in boosting the morale of the bigots as they head back home. Anti-gay feeling will have been reinforced in countries like Zimbabwe where homosexuality is already illegal and gay activists are routinely imprisoned.

Individually, the majorities at the House of Lords and the Lambeth Conference may have comprised doddering nonentities and purveyors of ridiculous superstition. But their influence for evil when they operate together is not inconsiderable. We should keep a baleful eye on them.

The Real Thing
On the day after the “Real IRA” bombing of Banbridge, a Derry Journal editorial summed up the consensus political view of the group.

They “represent nobody”. They are “renegades, yesterday’s men . . . with no agenda except to keep violence an ingredient in our society . . . No policies, no political philosophy, no contribution to make to the ideals of Republicanism as expressed in the 1916 Proclamation”.

If that’s all they amounted to, the Journal wouldn’t have to worry about them.

During Easter Week in 1916, the Journal commented in forthright style on the Dublin events. The insurgents, it suggested, were not true Republicans at all, but followers of the anarchist Bakunin(!). Sinn Féiners who might be involved were “not really Sinn Féin as a compact force”, but “desperate characters”. The leaders of the Rising were men “without sufficient education to gauge correctly the dire consequences of their behaviour....mad-headed...criminal, senseless, suicidal, deplorable . . .”.

Not much change there.

The Real IRA and the rebels who occupied the GPO are alike also in that the 1916 Proclamation was never put to the electorate for endorsement before being advanced in arms as the will of the people. The Rising, and the subsequent War of Independence, were undertaken in the name of the people, certainly, but just as certainly, not at the behest of the people.

Ever since, the IRA has seen itself as defending the Republic thus proclaimed – not as a movement or organisation striving towards a Republic. This may seem, and indeed it is, abstract and even mystical, an altogether unrealistic perspective on history. But it’s the perspective, and the conception of themselves, which has sustained Irish Republicans down through the years and given them a sense of individual and ideological legitimacy in the face of all condemnation and scorn.

One of the reasons it’s so difficult for the Provisional IRA leadership to say “The war is over” is that such a declaration would signal the abandonment of this position, boosting the plausibility and the prospects of others already representing themselves as, precisely, the real IRA.

Like every other movement or organisation which uses violence in the name of “the people” or a section of the people, the Real IRA should be called to account. But to suggest that their ideas and actions contradict “the ideals of Republicanism as expressed in the 1916 Proclamation” is plain wrong.

On the contrary.