tut tut

At least here in the US, this speech would upset liberals, but we expect to be upset by conservative creeps.

In Britain a liberal is now more likely to make excuses for the speech than condemn it.

@ David,

Until the 60s, homosexuality was illegal. Gays were regularly entrapped and persecuted thereafter.

This was not the product of mass immigration.

Sad to see you using the Doctor Who Fallacy so beloved of whataboutists for the treatment today of homosexuals in countries like Iran etc. Your reasoning is illogical and the point from which you drew it in any case irrelevant.

You may as well adduce the fact that 70 years ago it was Nazis, not Muslims, blowing people up in London ad elswhere, to support the supposition that Islamism has not contributed to an increased threat to civilian lives in Britain recently. I think you are very honourably intentioned on this matter, David, but also simply wrong.

@ Barad,

Yes, but this is ancient history, before I was born and I am not that young.

Britain has grown up and according to polls (to the extent you can believe them) the majority of longstanding Britons are fairly comfortable with gay people. BNP aside, the very vocal threat comes from West African Christians, various Jamaican rappers & followers and Muslims. I am afraid this is very much the product of mass immigration.

As others have noted, that is spot on.

It’s bad but no worse than you would expect in any Baptist church. At least here in the US, this speech would upset liberals, but we expect to be upset by conservative creeps. You might have noticed there’s an unbridgable political gap between right and left in the US. This sort of thing is the reason.

Parts of the current government knew all along what they were doing.

Pete W.: I agree, as far as the secular population is concerned. However, that is not where the problem is.

I am with Barad on this one, as on many other things.

Unless my memory is playing tricks, there were very few calls in the UK in the 60s to have gays stoned. And very few public meetings were such calls were made.

“There is no reason to believe that those coming from subcultures which are homophobic will persist in their hatred of gays, generation after generation.”

Why? Since extremist Islam is becoming shriller and shriller and more and more widely accepted, and is making more and more physical threats against various groups of peaceful UK citizens, and more and more young Muslims seem to embrace such ideas, according to surveys which I have not seen refuted, I’d say there is every reason to believe so.

That is not at all how the modern meaning of gay came about. The word ‘gay’ was not appropriated by homosexuals from meaning ‘jolly’ but was originally applied pejoratively by majority society to describe ‘wild’ prostitutes and subsequently homosexuals. That is to say, the original divergence from ‘nice’ came from straight society (which later of course complained the word had been stolen and distorted, which inaccuracy has been the basis of no end of whining in recent years). One may as well claim “black people have hijacked the word ‘nigger’, a nice old word, and given it a horrible meaning, and can we have it back as its old meaning whch was simply ‘black’?’