Victim of attack should ’seek help for being gay’
I despair sometimes, why can’t god bothers stop worrying about what others do in bed. Pink News reports:
The wife of the First Minister of Northern Ireland has caused controversy with her born-again Christian outlook on life. Iris Robinson is MP for Strangford and chairs the Northern Ireland Assembly’s health committee.
Reacting to news that a man was viciously attacked because he is gay, she suggested that he should consider therapy to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster today she condemned the attack on Stephen Smith but added: “I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals trying to turn away from what they are engaged in. And I have met people who have turned around to become heterosexual.”
This pisses me off in so many ways.
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We Hate the Kids pt1: the madness of young men
Hypermasculinity, like hyperfemininity, is a pose of the powerless. There is a reason you don’t see gangs of City bankers stalking Moorgate and Maylebone with long knives and hoods pulled down over their heads – and it’s not because they’ve been better brought up.
It’s because they’ve no need to. When you’ve got money and status and class and education and power, you don’t need to act out physical prowess and aggression because it’s not all you’ve got – although the hard-working ladies at Spearmint Rhino might well testify to the fact that city lads too are prone to the odd bout of gibbon-like strutting and howling.
Finer minds than mine have discussed this function of the culture of young male violence.
The pronouncement of US anti-violence educator Jackson Katz on gang culture amongst young black males in the States can be applied equally to disenfranchised boys of every race in London:
“If you’re a young man growing up in this culture and the culture is telling you that being a man means being powerful… but you don’t have a lot of real power, one thing that you do have access to is your body and your ability to present yourself physically as somebody who’s worthy of respect. And I think that’s one of the things that accounts for a lot of the hypermasculine posturing by a lot of young men of color and a lot of working class white guys as well. Men who have more power, men who have financial power and workplace authority and forms of abstract power like that don’t have to be as physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways.”
Lesbian mothers and ‘traditional’ families
Medical technology is an awesome thing. It can save lives, cure terrible diseases, rebuild bodies. It can prolong and improve the lives of the chronically ill and disabled beyond the wildest dreams of sufferers even fifty years ago. It can reattach limbs, restore sight, cure depression, return the manic to health and sanity.
But can it be used to give women control over whether and when they have children? Only if male doctors and MPs say so.
Whoever your parents are, they’re going to fuck you up to some extent. I make no apologies for assuming that gay women and single women are just as likely to make good parents as anyone else, if not more so, as children conceived via the arduous process of IVF are slightly more likely to be wanted and treasured infants. For the purposes of this post we shall assume that one’s sexual orientation has no bearing on one’s likelihood of raising an unfucked-up child, nor on one’s right to attempt to do so. With that one out the way, let’s tuck in to a tasty breakfast of radical feminism with a gin chaser.
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The natural progress of procreation?
During the HFE Bill debate, several members of the House of Commons stood up to claim that fathers are being sidelined by the lack of legislation on whether lesbians should have to provide evidence of a male role model in order to qualify for IVF.
Several other members stood up to claim that the child has rights, and that these rights are best looked after by the existence of such a ‘father’ clause.
The terrible logical inconsistencies in such statements became very obvious in debate. If we’re insisting on a male role model, because it will result in a better brought up child, why is it immaterial what sort of role model we’re talking about? If the male role model is a drunk, a wife-beater or any number of other things, then that will hardly result in a better brought up child.
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In favour of class war
Danny Finkelstein bemoans Labour’s toff-bashing in Crewe. For me, though, the problem isn’t that Labour’s displaying its class hatred, but rather that it’s attacking the wrong class, and years too late.
As Danny says:
To be portrayed as a top-hatted toff actually represents an improvement in the Tory image. Being seen as pinstripe-suited bosses, estate agents and spivs was far more devastating.
And herein lies the failure of New Labour. It is the party of pinstriped bosses. And it’s in this that lie the origin of its current troubles. For example:
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Violent femmes
Here’s a dilemma that’s got ‘Bleeding Heart’ written all over it: how do we understand the not-so-shocking fact that rather than just being simpering, sugar & spice sweethearts, women are just as capable (though far less likely) of committing crime as men?
Whilst he doesn’t make any earth-shattering insights (this is Comment is Free, after all), Ally Fogg at least makes an honourable attempt at it. Fogg’s main argument is that whilst there are some easily-identifyable facts about gender & crime – (a) we live in a patriarchal society, (b) men commit the most crime & the most violence and (c) women are more likely to be victims of male agression than vice versa – female criminality shouldn’t be reduced to just a symptom of these problems.
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Are lefties guilty of ignoring abortion rights?
Abortion, and of course the wider issue of reproductive rights, still seems to be an area that the left need to be pushed on.
Yeah they will often make the right noises, but they will make excuses for anti abortion men such as Galloway, and yet I can’t see them being quite so tolerant if someone was, ooh let’s say pro-war. But abortion is a women’s issue isn’t it, it’s not quite up there with the serious male leftie men and their real politics about war and arguing the toss over the finer obscure theoretical points of Marxism or who did what when to whom in 1983.
That’s not to say the majority of the left aren’t pro choice and I’m not going to bang on about Galloway as it’s pointless. Back to the subject, the left and pro choice, why should they get their finger out on this?
Much has been said on this, so I will try to focus on what I see as specific issues for the left, starting with the fact that working class women are those who lose out the most when abortion rights are restricted. Money has always helped procure such services from discreet private doctors.
Working class women, pre 1967, had to make do with the back street abortionists and the resultant risks to health, potentially fatal.
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Nadine Dorries MP and her hoax science
1) On March 19th Nadine Dorries MP published a blog-post titled The Hand of Hope, which featured this image of a small hand apparently coming out of a uterus. She said:
When the operation was over, baby Samuel, at 21 weeks gestation, put his hand through the incision in the uterus and grabbed hold of the surgeon’s finger, a gesture which was apparently met with a huge amount of emotion in the operating theatre. Dr Bruner said that it was the most emotional moment of his life and that for a moment he was just frozen, totally immobile.
Except, it was a hoax and Dr Bruner himself had said so. This was pointed out on several blogs including LC and Dorries wrote another post defending her actions with the view that the photographer, a born-again Christian, should be believed over the surgeon (who she had earlier quoted herself).
The Hand of Hope also makes an appearance on the pictures and video section of her new campaign. In other words, a member of parliament is actually perpetuating a hoax that has been debunked several times.
In many ways, this sums up her entire campaign.
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The case against Nadine Dorries MP (pt 1)
Today on Liberal Conspiracy we have a treat for you. This week we officially launch our campaign: Coalition For Choice, to support the HFE Bill and develop an online advocacy group in favour of extending abortion rights over the longer term.
See the website for more about our aims.
To mark this launch we have a week of Nadine Dorries MP on Liberal Conspiracy! We will illustrate how this Conservative MP:
- has consistently misrepresented the arguments around abortion;
- is fronting campaigns by Christian groups without declaring so;
- is promoting hoaxes on her websites;
- has frequently and wrongly smeared reputable journalists and scientists;
- hides her true long-term intentions on the issue of abortion
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The Tory ‘progressive’ sham
So David Cameron the political shape-shifter, just like Odo from Deep Space Nine but with less humanity, is spinning away the true nature of the Tory Party again today.
This seems to be his main tactic – either lie about what your party believes in, ignore anything your party may have believed in the past, or preferably believe nothing at all.
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Yesterday’s Compass event
Compass put on a sizzling debate last night on Labour’s future direction. Two contributions in particular stood out- those of Steve Richards and a devastating but completely constructive contribution by Jon Cruddas. Actually, I left the meeting feeling that if we don’t win the next election it won’t be because we lack ideas, conviction or talent.
First to Cruddas’ contribution. He counselled that the Conservatives have changed, not just in terms of style but in terms of philosophy as well and Labour underestimates that at its peril. Moreover, and anyone who followed the London Mayoral elections can vouch for this, they have adopted a new emotionalism to their political language. Labour’s language by contrast is managerial and aloof.
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What about women’s rights, Mrs Dorries?
In the pages of the Daily Mail yesterday, anti-choice poster-girl Nadine Dorries MP was given a platform to put across her misogynist, reactionary views.
She and a claimed ‘coalition of 200′ MPs are calling for a reduction in the time limit on legal abortion from 24 to 20 weeks, despite a lack of evidence that fetuses can survive outside the womb before that point and despite the fact that most women are against further reductions in the time limit.
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How British feminism has to change
(I was asked to give a speech, yesterday, at the Housmans Bookshop in London. This is an extract from what I said)
A sea-change is taking place in contemporary feminism, particularly in the cities. Feminism is moving out of the universities and back onto the streets, as women of all backgrounds realise that practical action, class agitation and the rights of ordinary, working women are, and always have been, the future of the movement.
Midway through writing this article on Monday, I had a pregnancy scare. My period was a couple of days late, I was spotting but not cramping, I was off my food… I panicked.
It didn’t take me long to decide that I would want to terminate the pregnancy, and that meant a litmus test for my socialism: should I spend my limited savings, money that could be going towards vital schooling, on a quick, safe, private abortion, or should I go through the stress and psycho-physical trauma of asking for an abortion on the NHS?
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Spain’s pregnant defence minister
Time mag has a brilliant piece on Carme Chacón – Spain’s newest defence minister. The 37 year old is not only the first woman to head Spain’s armed forces, she is also seven months pregnant. The Spanish are leading the way in gender equality.
Is this all women are good for?
Maths prodigy Sufih Yusof outed herself last week as the latest girl-genius to hang up her blue stockings for suspenders and a push-up bra. Sufiah, an Oxbridge scholar at the age of thirteen, sold her story of academic destitution leading to high-class prostitution to several major tabloids after being outed by the News of the World.
The story, of course, is an old favourite just screaming to be partnered with extensive photographs of the economics PhD in various states of graphic undress, brandishing whips and dildos and pull-outs about loving sex with random strangers.
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Nothing about us without us
There are 650 million people with disabilities in the world; four-fifths of them live in the developing world. While much has been done in the developed world to improve the lot of people with disabilities and to bring us closer to equality, we are not there yet; things are that much worse in the developing world.
One year ago yesterday, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was opened for signing. It has been signed by 126 states, including the UK, but only ratified by seventeen: Bangladesh, Croatia, Cuba, El Salvador, Gabon, Guinea, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, San Marino, South Africa and Spain.
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Poll cites support for hybrid embryos
A Times poll published today will show that around 50% of the public support the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos to tackle diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
A poll for The Times reveals today that the contentious medical research enjoys broad public approval, with 50 per cent backing new laws that would permit it and only 30 per cent opposed. The findings undermine claims by critics of the experiments that they enjoy little public support and they will bolster the Government’s attempts to pass the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which begins its passage in the House of Commons next month. MPs of all parties will have a free vote on its provisions for human-animal embryos.
…
The poll finds much greater scepticism about another section of the Bill, which would remove the legal requirement that infertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father before accepting patients for treatment. This reform is opposed by 40 per cent of people, with just 32 per cent in favour, but is popular with voters aged between 18 and 34.
The poll (pdf) shows that Liberal Democrats were the most sympathetic towards lesbian mothers.
Multiculturalism and ‘managed’ migration
The Spectator’s leader contains (at least) two silly claims.
First:
Nobody sane can be opposed to a managed migration system that functions well
Leave aside the fact that a well-functioning managed migration system is just impossible.
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‘The Unrecognized’ still unrecognized
A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.
Their story has been in the news again recently, due to a recent report by Human Rights Watch that renews the criticism of Israel’s discriminatory laws.
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My position on the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill
The HFE Bill is most likely to be passed through parliament without any serious danger of it being shelved. Nevertheless, I think left-liberals need to make more noise in opposition to its critics, particularly from the Catholic Church. And not just on the issue of human-animal hybrid embryo research but also abortion.
So I’m going to start by briefly laying out my position on the bill. I’m working to launch a more concerted campaign so I’d be interested in hearing what readers have to say.
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» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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