Homosexuality

Referring to her imaginary victory in the midterm elections, the LARPing governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, delivered to Democrat voters a come-to-Jesus moment. ‘The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last 10 years, and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress,’ she said to an audience last week. ‘I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and it’s exactly how we won.’ She didn’t win, for the record. But this is what they call in therapy a breakthrough. The Democrats seemed to have finally entered the fifth stage of grief: Acceptance, a time of adjustment, readjustment and resolve.

Jackie Kennedy oversaw a restoration of the White House and transformed the First Residence into a museum of American art and history. She also arranged for the Mona Lisa to tour America (a move that caused riots in Paris). Betty Ford, candid about her struggle with drugs and alcohol, established the nation’s preeminent addiction treatment center. Rosalynn Carter attended cabinet meetings and was the president’s emissary to Latin America and Melania Trump is a paragon of grace, elegance and style for American women to admire. But it’s time to step aside, First Ladies, because there’s a big, goofy, gay nerd coming through and his name is Chasten Buttigieg.

This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first world war. A bare week before the conflict concluded in a grey November, another poet, Sassoon’s friend and protégé Wilfred Owen, whose work now epitomises the waste and futility of that struggle, was cut down by a machine-gun as he tried to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal in one of the war’s last battles. Owen’s sombre verse, the ‘poetry of pity’ as he called it, came to represent the disillusion and despair that set in as casualties climbed into the millions and the blood of Britain’s youth drained hopelessly away in the Flanders mud.

The credit for decriminalising male homosexuality in 1967 — for those over 21 in England and Wales at least — goes to Harold Wilson’s government, the Labour MP Leo Abse, and the Conservative peer Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran. Yet more than a decade before the Sexual Offences Act received royal assent, a journalistic campaign to overturn an unjust and unworkable law had begun in the pages of The Spectator. After the dust had settled in post-war Britain, disparate MPs held the sincere but mostly tacit belief that the law criminalising homosexuality desperately needed amendment, if not scrapping entirely.

‘If he can’t be in politics,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted last week after Tim Farron resigned the leadership of his party, ‘media & politicians have questions.’ So prelates now think complex theological concerns can be despatched within the Twitter limit of 140 characters. They cannot. Let me now unpack Dr Welby’s abbreviated consideration of this subject and examine what’s behind it, because the subject is of profound importance —and not only for Christians. Nobody has said Mr Farron can’t be in politics. He has been returned as MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale with the support of 26,686 voters.

Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s main Brexit negotiator, tweeted on Monday: ‘Any #Brexit deal requires a strong & stable understanding of the complex issues involved. The clock is ticking — it’s time to get real.’ This was on the same day as media reports — allegedly leaked by associates of Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president — criticised Theresa May for her naivety about Brexit talks at the dinner she gave Mr Juncker last week. These tactics are intended to affect our general election. By throwing Mrs May’s campaign slogan adjectives ‘strong and stable’ back in her face, Mr Verhofstadt was goading her at the decisive moment of her political career. So were the friends of Mr Juncker.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t remember the BBC running a documentary 100 days into Barack Obama’s first presidency and kicking him from pillar to post. Interviewing almost exclusively people who hated him, pouring scorn on his every utterance. They did it this week to Donald Trump, though, and even wheeled out Jeremy Paxman to present this travesty of a documentary. Because Jeremy was interviewing exclusively people with whom he wholeheartedly agreed, he didn’t get the chance to put on that famous supercilious expression we all used to love, back when he was good. Shame. With Obama, as I remember, it was a very different approach. The studio floors were still awash with liberal ejaculate well after 100 days of his singularly inept presidency had elapsed.