Ross Clark
people were persecuted and locked up to one in which expressing any kind of personal disapproval of homosexual acts or gay lifestyles is deemed to be unacceptable.
Many Western countries have legalised gay adoption in recent years but only in Britain could it be considered wrong to hold personal views against it.
Germany still does not allow open gay adoption – though it does allow gay people to coadopt the children of their partners. Norway has a reputation as one of the most liberal countries on earth and was one of the first to introduce gay marriage yet even there 51 per cent of the population do not support gay adoption, according to a study by the University of Bergen.
As the researchers explained, people saw the issue of gay marriage as being about the rights of two adults. When it came to adoption, however, they thought, like Richard Page, of the interests of the child. Place a child with a gay couple, they reasoned, and you would be depriving it of either a mother or a father.
In Britain you don’t get into trouble for expressing the opposite view: asserting that gay adoption is actually better than adoption by heterosexual couples. That was the astonishing view of a University
WHAT we have ended up with in Britain isn’t liberalism – it is bigotry just as before, except with the boot now being on the other foot. A true liberal would support gay marriage and gay adoption – but also the right of individuals to express their views, religious or otherwise.
Such a liberal is Peter Tatchell. No one fought longer or harder to end the stigma once suffered by gay people yet what alarms him now is the way in which any who disagree with the gay rights lobby are themselves subjected to the heavy hand of the law.
Last month Tatchell wrote of how discrimination laws have got out of hand with the prosecution of the Belfast bakers who refused to make a cake bearing a message supporting gay marriage. Needless to say Tatchell doesn’t agree with the bakers’ decision yet that wasn’t going to stop him standing up for the right of individuals to “freedom of conscience, expression and religion”.
That is not a concept which many on the Left now seem to recognise. Tatchell also signed a letter condemning the practice of the National Union of Students for “no platforming” anyone with whom it disagrees and trying to ban them from university campuses. You can probably guess his punishment – yes, he was “no- platformed” himself.
It was progress when the state stopped prying into the private lives of consenting adults and prosecuting them. But when we reach a situation where people like Richard Page are sacked for failing to hold the “correct” personal views on gay rights, that isn’t progress – it is a country sliding into persecution of a different kind.
‘ Not allowed to oppose
gay adoption’