HAVE HOMOSEXUALS GOT FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE IN NORNEVERLAND? by Harry McAvinchey

There are no gay unionists!!! It really is a curious thought , isn’t  it ? The idea that within the entire unionist voting community there are no homosexual people anywhere. None! Nada!They just don’t seem to exist. Well.. if they exist….Where are they? Maybe it goes against the grain for a homosexual person to even think of voting for one of those parties . You can see why , if that  actually is the case.As a gay person , you’d really have to do some mental gymnastics to square that particular circle and join “Team Unionism”.Certainly , neither the DUP  nor the TUV seem to recognise any of them existing….or if they do ,they probably feel they can be “fixed” in some way , either by hypnosis or by some pill.  They are  certainly not about canvassing their votes and actively chase those votes away. They don’t , apparently,want their vote . You’d imagine that any party would try to encourage as many votes as possible…not so. It is possible that many gays are huddled in some darkened  corner of the Official Unionist Party but I really don’t know.

I have no real idea what percentage of voters out there are gay , but there have got to be many.i know several within my own  extended family and neighbourhood and I don’t really give it much thought…well not until now . They just get on with their ordinary lives ….but ….Gay people will never enter the hallowed doors of either of those aforementioned  parties.  There’s not much to encourage them , after all. Of course , who would ever want to , given those parties  previous track records in relation to all things gay. Those parties have certainly not laid down any welcome mats for gays or lesbians …or even free-thinkers .It is a curiosity because any one of us ,and possibly even yourself , dear reader, can cast a glance throughout your own extended families , friends or colleagues  and see that a percentage of them are gay. They haven’t got two heads  or have striped skin so it’s hard to count them but they’ve always been there  .It was always like this throughout time and history. It’s nothing new. Of course there is a long track record of disparaging or  discriminating against gay people by these parties . There was the “Save  Ulster From Sodomy” campaign, in the past where  they imagined themselves in the bedrooms of the land and attempted to legislate what goes on behind  the every closed  door of every house-holder. That is a curious , prurient thing to do , really .It’s like worrying whether or not your neighbour plays with train sets in the attic. Why would you even care? you’ll probably never see that Hornby or Tri-ang set anyway.

The outworkings of this is the DUP’s” Freedom of Conscience  Bill “which they are promoting.. It is really a bill to discriminate , of course .It is still more of the same old Bible -invoked  slant on a right-wing  form of  Christianity which still can’t quite shuck off it’s Old Testament  revenge-leanings.  It also manifests itself  in the recent DUP’s slight on the Muslim community and also the mad anti-paganism and fear of folklorish, demonic  devilry that we hear of regularly…most recently along the Antrim coast.”Paranoid” doesn’t begin to describe  any of it . It is the kind of madness that has  always stirred -up low-level racism across Norneverland. Should a religiou/politicals belief be allowed to dictate laws if that religion/politics practices discrimination or is inherently of racist bias?. That is the big unasked question at the core of all of  this. Nobody asks it  as they squabble over private sexual practices they’ll never see…but  it’s why the Jews eventually ended up in the ovens of Nazism.

Would it matter if  Jesus Christ was gay or not, for example  ? Does it really matter? He may have been, for all we know.We only know of legends written down years after his existence anyway; a few scraps of stories of a man’s life . As John Prine sang…”Jesus ..the missing Years”. What did he do in his twenties when every young man is out flying his kite? Did he have girlfriends or boyfriends? Nobody actually knows. This person had greater worries in his early thirties .This was a man who believed he was a “god” of sorts…or at least thought that he was a representative of a god and  that his point of view was worth sacrificing himself for. When someone today has those kinds of thoughts , we frown and worry about them and think that they  are guilty of self-harming. When suicide bombers blow themselves up for their beliefs, we shake our heads in disbelief . We live in very different times with much more information at hand. We  also now  know something about delusion of course.

At least, some of us do….but there are many in Norneverland who do not.