Strange times, indeed:
An Anglican newspaper has defended the publication of an article that compares gay rights campaigners to Nazis, saying the author has “pertinent views”.
Reported by The Guardian
The column, by former east London councillor Alan Craig, appeared in the 28 October edition of the Church of England Newspaper, one of the oldest newspapers in the world. Although it is independent of the institution bearing the same name, it carries adverts for Church of England jobs and is read by its clergy.
In his column Craig referred to a number of high-profile legal cases where Christians claim to have been penalised for their views on homosexuality.
He wrote: “Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK’s victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights stormtroopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners, registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors, and foster parents … find themselves crushed under the pink jackboot.
“Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police. Following a plethora of equalities legislation, homosexuals are now protected and privileged by sexual orientation regulations and have achieved legal equality by way of civil partnerships. But it’s only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated.”
Craig told the Guardian he was “pretty careful” to distinguish between the leadership of gay rights groups and “ordinary gay people”.
And, Bishop Alan Wilson has this response to this article in the Church of England Newspaper
Hitler and the ‘Gaystapo’ have no place in gay rights debate
Alan Craig’s laboured use of wartime imagery comparing gay campaigners with Nazis is unhelpful and childish in The Guardian
Some say it was Harry Truman who first hit on the wheeze of replying to his most outlandish letters by saying: “Dear Sir, I believe you should know that some dangerous lunatic has stolen your notepaper and is using it to write letters in your name to the president of the United States.”
I have to assume this rather obvious explanation doesn’t apply to former councillor Alan Craig’s article in the Church of England Newspaper, inviting its readers to “confront the Gaystapo”. It is, however, right up there in the green-ink stakes.
Prep-school wartime imagery is particularly offensive to people like me from a central European background. As attractive as some on the religious right seem to find it to spice up their bigotry with alarm and a sense of national destiny, it actually represents the lives and deaths of tens of millions of real people in our families. In addition, schoolboy imagery impedes the perfectly serious conversation there is to be had about the role of gender difference in the concept of marriage.
Back on the beaches, Craig rambles through a laboured analogy of all gay campaigners to Nazis. We are never told exactly how this works, because Craig gets carried away on his own Biggles-like account of the rise and fall of nazism, checked off against the supposed gay agenda that he says is about to engulf English civilisation.