Society
Clause 28: the cardinal should try to be more Christian
Published 31 January 2000
Tomorrow, in his classroom, your teenage son will be subjected to pornographic videos hailing fisting as fab. Your daughter meanwhile will be deluged with pamphlets portraying lesbian love as the only way to come.
This, at least, is the Sodom and Gomorrah scenario according to those who would keep Clause 28 (Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988), which bans "the promotion of homosexuality in schools". Without the clause in place, argue the likes of Catholic Cardinal Thomas Winning in Scotland and the Anglican Bishop James Jones in Liverpool, young people will be urged to try out "perversion" (Cardinal Winning's word) and to regard all sexual activities as of equal moral worth. The traditional family will fade into the sunset, its status diminished to one of many alternative lifestyles.
The Winning formula seems to be: scare parents into thinking that, without Clause 28, classrooms will be filled with cheerleaders sporting George Michael T-shirts and Michael Barrymore haircuts, shaking their pom-poms and chanting "gay pride, rah rah rah!" The tactic has worked : a furious row has erupted in Scotland, dividing liberals and conservatives into mud-slinging, name-calling factions. The Cardinal was alleged to have drawn an analogy between the bombing that Britons suffered 50 years ago at the hands of the Nazis and the bombardment of "images, values and ideas" which they are now subjected to by the gay lobby. The Cardinal claims to have been misquoted. Whether he was or not, the conservative forces are winning - a recent poll has showed that 60 per cent in Scotland want to keep Clause 28. Though until now there has been little comparable fuss over the repeal of the legislation south of the border, Archbishop Carey has suddenly jumped on the Winning bandwagon, saying there should be no lifting of the gay education ban.
But what exactly is involved here? Perhaps before 1988, in a few loony left councils, there were men and women who used taxpayers' money to print and distribute leaflets advocating gay sex. Yet I've never met anyone who read this kind of literature inside a classroom, with the complicity of the teacher.
I have, however, met plenty of teachers and pupils who despair about the countless incidents of playground bullying which involve the vicious taunting of suspected gay pupils; and I've read many accounts of how gay-bashing has grown to such proportions that in Edinburgh - where the keep-the-clause campaign is at its strongest - one out of three gays was beaten up last year. The man who spends his Saturday nights giving gays a hard time is probably one whose only encounter with homosexuality was explicit graffiti in a lavatory stall at school.
If prejudice is rooted in ignorance, then information about gay sex is the only way to fight the kind of school bullying that grows up into gay bashing or gay pub arson.
Information is not promotion. Indeed, in the case of male homosexual promiscuity, which entails the risk of Aids, a few statistics about the disease will serve as a pretty powerful deterrent for any impressionable school child who is uncertain about his sexuality. For those who are certain, instead, that they are gay, information may prove a life-saver: not only physically but also spiritually.
Seeing others like you, and learning that they deserve to be treated with respect, must provide immense relief for a young member of the gay minority who otherwise has only known social exclusion.
The Cardinal and his supporters should therefore advocate more light, not less, to be shed on homosexuality, and on its rights, risks and consequences. This in no way compromises the Christian position on the family as the morally perfect unit; rather, it supports that other Christian view, the one we see trotted out so rarely - that every human being is equally deserving of love and respect.
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