Milk Soured

So the other day I sat down to watch Milk, a great little film deserving of both your attention and Oscar’s. Although it climaxes on an awful tragedy - when Harvey Milk, the first gay man to be elected into public office in 70s San Francisco is murdered - what I took away was a sense of hope. Things can be changed for the better, in the face of almost overwhelming odds. Good will prevail and human rights can be fought for, won and protected.

And then I read Richard Littlejohn’s column from Friday’s Daily Mail – and if you’re a glutton for poisonous opinion reported as fact, then you can check it out for yourself here

The article starts with a flourishing hypothetical about a five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister who have been kidnapped and how everyone would be outraged, and demanding their return.

But Littejohn has got you there! Because you see, this has really happened! The only difference, quite a big one mind you, is that said children were ‘taken by social workers, not paedophiles. So that’s all right, then.’

Actually, it kind of is, isn’t?

I feel sorry for social workers, they’ve had a rough time of it lately what with the Baby P scandal. The terrible mistakes of a few have meant that all social workers have been portrayed as lazy, inefficient baby murderers-by-proxy.

And now, it seems the Daily Mail is having its cake and eating it – because not only are they inefficient, apparently, but now they are evil and ‘Stalinist’, hyper organized child snatchers. This hyperbolic reference, in an idiotic instance manages to a) cheapen the memory of the 11 million plus who died under Stalin’s communist regime and b) insult all the social workers who do a difficult job well. Oh and c) blow the whole damn thing out proportion. Obviously, I don’t know much about this case, (then again, neither does Littlejohn) but I am guessing that the social workers had their reasons. So leave them alone.

But the real crux of Littlejohn’s outrage comes from the fact that these kids, whose mother is a heroin addict, were adopted by a gay couple, instead of their ageing, infirm grandparents.

But don’t worry. Perhaps I’m being unfair, because as Littlejohn assures us he is not being homophobic like you thought: ‘I’ve always supported equality for gays in terms of housing, employment and civil partnerships.This little Trojan horse of tolerance is the gay equivalent of starting a statement with ‘I’m not racist, but…’

Of course, by now Littlejohn has got it in our little hate filled head boxes the blurry distinction made between paedos and social workers and now he adds queers into the equation. As bigotry masked with moral concern, I grudgingly admit, it’s a beauty. The article really hits its peak when he goes onto attack the ‘homosexual lobby who rigidly enforces the gay ‘rights’ agenda’. Yeah stupid gays, wanting equality.

Gay rights are placed in inverted commas, Littlejohn’s little wink-wink nudge-nudge to the discerning bigot/reader that these so called rights are fictive, illusory and insubstantial – in short, they are not rights at all, in the same way that you imagine some war lord having a jolly good chuckle about the European Court and their silly championing of human ‘rights’, whilst making little inverted commas in the air with his ring and index finger crooked. Unfortunately, cynical deployment of punctuation does not make something real magically un-exist.

It would be almost kind of funny if readers didn’t inhale this noxious rubbish and agree with it all. Check out the reader’s comments at your leisure: for now here are some of my favourites:

‘All we ever hear about is the rights of women and gays rights!’

‘Marxists walk all over us!’

‘Left-wingers are only interested in destroying families’

‘Bring back slavery!’

These all genuinely appear on the Daily Mail website, accept the last one which I made up, but the comments are all so crazy that it might as well be true, with violent assertions of the earth’s flatness.

I also saw this week another period film tipped for Oscar success, Revolutionary Road staring Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio. I haven’t really got much to say about it, accept that it is set in the 1950s and is incredibly depressing. A lot like Richard Littlejohn’s views.