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Editorial
Dogma or debate
It’s
election time again here in the UK. An
opportunity, so the pundits are always
telling us, for the British public to engage
in the crucial debate about the choice of
who will govern and what policies will be
enacted in the next four or five years.
Am I just a tad
pedantic – cynical even – in believing that for
there to be any meaningful debate about anything
there has to be a divergence of position, a
fundamental difference of opinion? If you like, a
choice. For example, all the major contenders are,
as usual, trying to outdo and score points off their
rivals over who is going to spend more or tax less.
But can you ever remember being offered the choice
of not paying compulsorily taxes at all? I don’t
think so. Instead, all the fuss is about half a
percent more or less here or there, not about the
really big question of whether compulsory taxation
by the State is actually legitimate. You might care
to ponder under what authority tax is extracted from
the people at all, a process that, if conducted by
any other body or organisation, would be called
extortion and rightly condemned as unlawful and
immoral. Seriously, if anyone can tell me under
which Act of Parliament this is legally done, please
do so.
If paying taxes were
of such obvious benefit, why would coercion be
necessary, unless, of course, you believe that human
beings are corrupt, self-serving, untrustworthy
creatures who cannot be allowed to determine their
own affairs. But you are a humanist. How could you
believe such a thing? I think most thoughtful people
will probably have noticed that human beings are at
their best and most benign as individuals and very
small groups. The trouble starts when groups get too
big. Somehow, our humanity seems to diminish in
proportion to the size of the group until you end up
with a totally dehumanised chimera called the State.
True, big groups of people can do bad things, but it
takes the State to commit the real atrocities such
as the illegal and unjustified war on Iraq. It
wasn’t in the Labour Party’s manifesto, the British
people didn’t vote for it and in fact protested
against it in enormous numbers, but it still
happened. If you are looking for corrupt,
self-serving and untrustworthy, look no further than
the Government. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter
whom you vote for, who gets in, it’s still the
government that wins – and that’s the root of the
problem.
In his “Vote
seXuality” feature
Andy Armitage
takes a look at whether being gay influences the way
people vote. He asked the eight main political
parties fielding candidates in the UK General
Election a simple question: “What can your party
offer to the LGBT community that other parties
cannot or will not?”. Only three of the parties
bothered to reply at all: the BNP, the Green Party
and, very belatedly, the Labour Party. The fullest
response came from the BNP. They pointed out the
growing menace to gay people in Britain from the
burgeoning Islamic culture. I certainly think they
are right in this but can take little comfort in
their nihilistic attitude to gay people and gay
issues. It is naïve to imagine that anything but
continued discrimination, misery and further
suffering will result for gay people under such a
regime. That said, they have at least promised not
to torture and murder us, which is more than can be
guaranteed by the other parties who seem blind to
the growing Islamic menace in Britain.
Pretty damned unequal
Personally, I’m not
really sure why a gay person would vote Labour.
Surely, after 13 years of Labour government gay
people are about as equal as they are ever going to
be under Labour, which is pretty damned unequal.
And, of course, they seem recently to have adopted
the Pope as policy adviser, so don’t hold out too
many hopes. As for voting Conservative, well, you
would have to have severe cognitive problems even to
consider this as an option. That’s pretty much what
Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the Tory gay group leader,
thinks, too, as she’s announced she’s voting Labour!
Peter Tatchell
too, is far from impressed by the platitudes coming
from the Tories as he reports in his “Big Gay
Flashmob” article. The election theme is continued
in our “Out of Print” feature, which is taken from
the Summer 1997 issue of G&LH, in which Terry
Sanderson assessed the gay law reform prospects
following the election of Tony Blair’s Labour
government earlier that year.
Steven Dean
seems to have an opinion on almost everything, and
this time he gives us an insight to how he chooses
whom to vote for. As you would expect, there’ll be
an “X” in it somewhere!
HIV =
AIDS?
HIV-AIDS is another
subject that still arouses heated debate, much of it
no better informed than the political kind. As in
politics, there are distinct bounds to what may be
questioned and discussed. In particular, any
suggestion that HIV may not cause AIDS is met with a
tirade of abuse and much frothing of mouths and
gnashing of teeth from the AIDS establishment. That
question has been answered, they cry; move on.
Well that’s a funny
sort of science they’re peddling that stops asking
questions. Actually, no, it isn’t science at all:
it’s dogma. Just imagine what these people would
have done to that famous upsetter of Newtonian apple
carts, Albert Einstein! Of course, scientific
knowledge is always provisional, never final and
always being revised, while dogma is certain, final
and permanent. Not surprisingly, attacks on the
substance of dogma result usually in either silence
or personal attacks on the dissenters.
Nowhere is this
trait more evident than in the “debate” over what
causes AIDS. A recent attack of this kind was made
in the November/December 2009 issue of the British
publication New Humanist by an AIDS
establishmentarian Seth Kalichman, a clinical
psychologist, who has written several books on AIDS.
Kalichman uses both approaches in his article.
First, he mounts a scurrilous ad hominem
attack on a number of well-known HIV-AIDS
dissidents, and then urges his readers never to
enter into a debate with dissenters about the facts
surrounding the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.
Outraged
One reader of
Kalichman’s article, HIV-AIDS dissident
John Lauritsen,
was understandably outraged by what Kalichman had
said and asked the New Humanist editor,
Caspar Melville, for the right of reply. For reasons
best known to Melville and New Humanist, this
perfectly reasonable request was denied. In this
issue’s “AIDS critics” article we have given
Lauritsen the space to make the rebuttal that he was
denied by New Humanist.
Though hardly
radical by freethought standards, debate within the
Church of England has been rumbling on within that
stalwart of dogma for the past decade or so. There
has been a head-on collision between the traditional
hard-line dogmatists of the worldwide Anglican
Communion and the slightly less dogmatic “liberal”
reformers. The anti-reform backlash has been
marshalled by a group called, in true Orwellian
fashion, “Reform”. In his feature, Church’s end,
Neil
Richardson laments the influence of these
hardliners and remembers fondly the “tolerant and
easygoing C of E” of his youth, an image, or perhaps
illusion, not too familiar to many gay people.
Whether or not
Richardon’s view of the Church of England is true, I
doubt that he would see the Catholic Church in such
a vignetted way. The Roman Church has been waging
war on humanity, and particularly gay people, for
centuries. Many people feel that this evil seat of
hateful dogma is guilty, quite literally, of crimes
against humanity.
Arrest the Pope
What more
appropriate action could there be then, than to
arrest the current Mr Big himself? But will someone
really arrest Pope Ratzinger? In his feature,
“Arresting the Pope”,
Andy Armitage assesses the likelihood of success for this
audacious plan. The mounting evidence of Ratzinger’s
involvement in at least concealing child abuse
within his Church would seem to be good enough
grounds alone for his indictment.
In his “Priestley
abuse” article,
Andrew John
discusses the impact of a letter from the 1980s
alleging that Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope
Benedict XVI, counselled against the defrocking of a
California priest, putting the unity of the
universal church first and asks, “Where does it all
go from here?”
Sometimes it seems
that the world at large is rife with homophobia
wherever you look. Many of us harbour the dark
thought that, with the resurgence of radical
religion across the world, things are getting worse.
Though I don’t altogether share his optimism,
author
Narvel Annable
counsels against being too negative. In his
short article, “House of homophobia”, he cites much
to give us hope and says that “the House of
Homophobia, like a house of cards, is fast falling.”
I hope he’s right.
Social-awareness campaigns
Continuing in a more
optimistic vein, gay-rights campaigner
Mirka
Makuchowska tells us of the extremely
active Polish gay rights organization, Kampania
Przeciw Homofobii, of which she is currently
secretary. The organisation was set up in 2001 as a
national public-benefit organisation and has since
worked in many areas and specialises in large
educational and social-awareness campaigns.
One of its current
campaigns is for a Polish civil-partnership bill. It
intends to create a photograph exhibition of gay
couples in other European countries who have
legalised their partnerships, juxtaposed with
pictures of Polish gay couples who would like to do
the same but are prevented from doing so by Polish
law. In support of this, George Broadhead and Roy
Saich of the Pink Triangle Trust (PTT) have supplied
photographs and a brief account of their civil
partnership registration in 2006.
This issue see the
first of our new-look news feature, “The full
story”, which replaces the long-running “News Watch”
and “World Watch” features. The intention is to
provide a more integrated view of chosen news
stories worldwide in an attempt to join up the news
dots, as it were.
Dean
Braithwaite and
George
Broadhead have the full story.
Blogwatch this time
focuses on the blog of
Derren Brown,
who will have been seen on UK television by many
readers. For those who don’t know of him, he’s an
illusionist extraordinaire, a mentalist and a
painter. And he’s a sceptic.
Another well-known
illusionist is James Randi, who at the age of 81 has
recently come out as gay. In his feature, “An
amazing escape”,
John Brand
takes a closer look at Randi and how he decided to
come out.
Warren Allen Smith also has something to say about Randi
in his “Gossip from across the Pond” article, in
which he tells us of his correspondence with Randi
following his coming-out.
To
the woods
Last issue we
presented an article by Neil Richardson about
woodland burials. This article discussed the more
ecologically sound choice of burial that is becoming
more and more popular. Also becoming popular are
nonreligious ceremonies, not just funerals but birth
and wedding ones, too.
George
Broadhead takes a look at what’s on offer
in his feature, “Exit strategy”.
I hope you enjoy
this issue’s mix of articles and, in case you missed
any of our previous online issues, you can see them
all in our
Archive.
As always, we
hope you’ll feel the urge to write to us if
you have something to say. Please see our
Contact page for details of how to get
in touch. We would be particularly
interested to hear from you if you have an
article or letter you would like published.
Whatever you have to say,
we’d love to hear from you.
– Mike Foxwell
Editor |
