Anglican Mainstream

Excerpts from Jenny McCartney’s editorial of 13 November in the ‘Daily Telegraph’.  Ms McCartney rightly draws attention to the inherent inequality of this legislation.  Many of us are also concerned about its chilling impact upon free speech -  how it maximizes the psychological dynamic of ’soft coercion’.  In a recent Parliamentary Committee on this bill, Don Horrocks quoted a leader of the London Black Churches as saying, ‘Freedom of speech, if it means anything at all, must include freedom to offend’.  

And offended I at least am, and that on a fairly regular basis.  What about you? Christianity is often marginalized, misrepresented, even slimed and blasphemed, yet somehow that is legitimate, just a bit of fun really - or if it is less sanguine, it is well deserved!  At any rate no one loses too much sleep over it. In truth, it is called ’Having A Double Standard’ – and the Victorians are not the only practitioners. 

But now to this worrying legislation.  

‘Our Government is so eager to emphasise that hatred is wrong, indeed, that it has created a special category of crime called “hate crime”, whose exponents will be punished more heavily than other criminals (presumably the ones who love us). The most recent proposal is that those who “incite hatred” against homosexuals could be guilty of a criminal offence punishable by up to seven years in jail.

It is on this heavily-mined territory that the Government and I part company. That is not because I am any fan of those who like to sneer at gay people, either by fulminating against the perceived depravity of their sexual activities or slipping constantly into dreary faux-effeminate mockery: such people tend to be bores and creeps.

But it should not be a criminal offence to be a bore or a creep, since otherwise British jails would be at bursting point and beyond. If an individual’s animus against gay people goes further, and he or she should begin a campaign of incitement to violence, harassment or physical attacks, I would urge that the offender be prosecuted according to the full force of the existing law …

There are of course violent offenders who specifically select gay men as targets: but are they any worse than those who pick on women, or homeless people? To create politically-approved hierarchies of culpability on such matters is to make a kind of nonsense of the law.

Take for example the case of the late David Morley, a gay bar manager who had survived the Admiral Duncan Soho pub bombing in 1999, which killed three people. That bombing was carried out by David Copeland, a 23-year-old engineer and Nazi sympathiser who had deliberately sought to murder gay men.

Five years later, Mr Morley and a friend were walking home near Waterloo in the small hours, when they encountered a four-strong group of teenage thugs who were “out to beat up tramps, druggies or just people on the street” and film the attacks on their phones. Mr Morley was a person on the street, and they beat him to death for it. There was no suggestion at the trial that they attacked him because he was gay.

What I find extraordinary, however, is any suggestion that Mr Morley’s vicious killers are somehow less culpable because they didn’t attack him for his sexual orientation. Yet that is the skewed logic of the “hate crime” legislation.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/11/do1104.xml

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