I spent the last few minutes of my drive to work today shouting phrases like “how dare you” and “what a c**t” at the radio. Yes, Norman Tebbit was on the Today programme and somehow managed to turn a discussion about the rise in obesity into a lecture on the breakdown of the family and how all of society’s ills are due to gay men and rampant buggery. His wrongheaded defence of “family values” reminded me of a favourite piece by Stephen Fry about Section 28 which puts it much better than I could, here’s a couple of chunks:
[..]You’re a decent human being: you are as embarrassed to be living in a country which can have stained its statute books with so spiteful, repulsive and nauseating a collection of bigotries and lies as I am. The horror of it all should not be ignored or forgotten, but I prefer to move away from a specific lament to remind you that the tenor and thrust of the Legislation (if such a slimy smear swabbed from the epicentre of Satan’s anal ring can be dignified with this name) is to criminalise the promotion of homosexuality as an equivalent of family life. Family life, family values, decent normal family, family fun, family shopping, family leisure. The word is used these days much as the word ‘Aryan’ was used is Germany during the 1930s. Anything that isn�t family is ‘unfamily’, and anything that is unfamily is unrepresentative of the joyful majority. The ruthless condemnation of unfamily values is therefore a populist democratic imperative.
Family schmamily, I say. What is it with us at the moment that this word should be transmogrified into a shining banner borne ‘mid snow and ice that will lead us into a new golden age? It can hardly be a defense against the rise in the crime rate. After all, something like eighty per cent of murders are domestic in origin, child molestation and physical abuse are almost entirely family crimes and I believe there is only one recorded case of incest being practiced outside a family and that turned out not to be incest after all.
It seems to me that if we are going to control thought in this country, and that would appear to be the intention of our wise, loving and humane masters, then some sort of Bill to forbid the promotion of family life would be timely and appropriate.
[...]
Children want privacy from their parents, parents from their children. Independent and alternative interests, often parricidal in their nature or meaning, are essential. Parents shouldn’t like their children’s taste in music, clothes, television or friends and vice versa. At least they shouldn�t have to, or be expected to. Nor should we be expected to like our government’s taste in values, moral outlook and foreign policy. You won’t huddle me into a great Christian family that doesn’t talk to queers, expects the sick and disabled to receive charity and gives a good thrashing to anyone who dares to cheek our policeman and soldiers or asks to many impertinent questions.
Obedience, compulsion, tyranny and repression are family words as much as love, compassion and mutual trust. It rather depends on the family. I wonder which sort of ‘family values’ we most readily associate with our government? Well, I don�t really wonder: it’s all too plain.
Raving old dotard
Agh!
I spent the last few minutes of my drive to work today shouting phrases like “how dare you” and “what a c**t” at the radio. Yes, Norman Tebbit was on the Today programme and somehow managed to turn a discussion about the rise in obesity into a lecture on the breakdown of the family and how all of society’s ills are due to gay men and rampant buggery. His wrongheaded defence of “family values” reminded me of a favourite piece by Stephen Fry about Section 28 which puts it much better than I could, here’s a couple of chunks:
[..]You’re a decent human being: you are as embarrassed to be living in a country which can have stained its statute books with so spiteful, repulsive and nauseating a collection of bigotries and lies as I am. The horror of it all should not be ignored or forgotten, but I prefer to move away from a specific lament to remind you that the tenor and thrust of the Legislation (if such a slimy smear swabbed from the epicentre of Satan’s anal ring can be dignified with this name) is to criminalise the promotion of homosexuality as an equivalent of family life. Family life, family values, decent normal family, family fun, family shopping, family leisure. The word is used these days much as the word ‘Aryan’ was used is Germany during the 1930s. Anything that isn�t family is ‘unfamily’, and anything that is unfamily is unrepresentative of the joyful majority. The ruthless condemnation of unfamily values is therefore a populist democratic imperative.
Family schmamily, I say. What is it with us at the moment that this word should be transmogrified into a shining banner borne ‘mid snow and ice that will lead us into a new golden age? It can hardly be a defense against the rise in the crime rate. After all, something like eighty per cent of murders are domestic in origin, child molestation and physical abuse are almost entirely family crimes and I believe there is only one recorded case of incest being practiced outside a family and that turned out not to be incest after all.
It seems to me that if we are going to control thought in this country, and that would appear to be the intention of our wise, loving and humane masters, then some sort of Bill to forbid the promotion of family life would be timely and appropriate.
[...]
Children want privacy from their parents, parents from their children. Independent and alternative interests, often parricidal in their nature or meaning, are essential. Parents shouldn’t like their children’s taste in music, clothes, television or friends and vice versa. At least they shouldn�t have to, or be expected to. Nor should we be expected to like our government’s taste in values, moral outlook and foreign policy. You won’t huddle me into a great Christian family that doesn’t talk to queers, expects the sick and disabled to receive charity and gives a good thrashing to anyone who dares to cheek our policeman and soldiers or asks to many impertinent questions.
Obedience, compulsion, tyranny and repression are family words as much as love, compassion and mutual trust. It rather depends on the family. I wonder which sort of ‘family values’ we most readily associate with our government? Well, I don�t really wonder: it’s all too plain.