More cant from Cantuar

There have been eight Archbishops of Canterbury during my lifetime: the sanctimonious Cosmo Gordon Lang; the robustly socialist and community-focused William Temple; the schoolmasterly Geoffrey Fisher; the saintly and subtle Michael Ramsey; the staid and uninspiring Donald Coggan; the misleadingly affable and on occasion steely Robert Runcie; the principled evangelical conservative George Carey; and now the amoebic Rowan Williams.

Lang was satirically immortalised by Gerald Bullett for his implacable opposition to King Edward VIII’s intention to marry a divorced woman and stay on the throne:

My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are

And when your man is down, how bold you are

In Christian Charity how scant you are

Oh Auld Lang Swine how full of cantuar.

When Edward VII appointed Lang as Archbishop of York he gave him only two instructions: ‘Keep the factions in the Church from fighting one another, and don’t let the clergy wear moustaches.’ But moustaches or no, the devotees of the Anglican church have an ingrained habit of squabbling like a bunch of ferrets in a sack, and their disputes are usually about sex because these days the Church appears to have little to say about the wider injustices and hypocrisies of society, which don’t interest their flock nearly as much as the naughty peccadilloes lapped up by News of the World and Sun readers.

William Temple, seen as a towering figure by his contemporaries (“the only sixpenny object in a penny bazaar,” quipped Winston Churchill when nominating him to Canterbury after his many years as a much-loved Archbishop of York), only survived his translation to Lambeth by less than three years, dying of gout – a lifelong affliction – at 63. Temple had been a headmaster but was much more than just a headmaster. His successor, Geoffrey Fisher, who was also an ex-headmaster, remained essentially just that.

It was indeed fortunate that Fisher had been succeeded by Michael Ramsey, the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury, by the time that the Wolfenden proposals for the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality were being debated in parliament in the 1960s. A social liberal as well as a great churchman, Dr Ramsey unflinchingly supported the Wolfenden thesis that sins should not always be crimes, speaking and voting repeatedly for the reform bill. I remember crossing the precincts of Westminster Abbey with the Archbishop’s lay secretary after one of the Lords’ debates when the Archbishop had been castigated by some of the opposing peers and saying “well, I suppose this is one of those cases where the doctrine of the lesser evil has must be applied”, to which I received the lugubrious response: “I can assure you that it has been – copiously!”

One of the most impressive events of that period was the first Anglo-American Consultation on the Church, Society and the Homosexual, held in London in the early summer of 1964 at the instigation of the Rev. Ted McIlvenna of the US Methodist Church’s Board of Education, who was director of the San Francisco Young Adult Project. Encountering many young homosexuals in the course of his social work, Ted had founded the Council on Religion and Homosexual which organised some pioneering gatherings around the topic in the USA. Visiting London, he had met me and asked for the Albany Trust’s co-operation in setting up the Anglo-American consultation. I was privileged to chair the three-day meeting, and it was an inspiring occasion. There were about 60 participants, including a strong American contingent of clergy, sociologists and lay people, and a matching British presence, including Anglican, Roman Catholic, and nonconformist clergy and two of the authors of the seminal Quaker pamphlet Towards a Quaker View of Sex which had been published the previous year and caused a considerable stir by declaring that “homosexual affection can be as selfless as heterosexual affection, and therefore we cannot see that it is in some way morally worse”.

Not all the participants were liberal – there were conservative voices too – but the atmosphere was remarkably open and people were willing to share their personal views and experiences to an extent unusual for those days. Even so, it was not always easy for them to declare their own sexual preference, and Ted McIlvenna’s opening remarks reflected this when he reassured those taking part that they need not make any personal revelations which they felt were too difficult. “Forget who you represent. We represent the human race. Let’s start there” was his sage advice. Six papers – three American and three British - were presented, and there were several hours of group discussion. In his closing remarks, McIlvenna said that despite all the genuine concern that had been manifested, he was troubled by the difficulty which so many well-meaning pastoral advisers evidently experienced in simply accepting a homosexual. “I happen to believe that the only significant thing Christian faith has to say that is distinctive and significant is an unqualified ‘yes’ to man. Forgiveness is continuous, and does not depend upon our state of righteousness at the moment.”

The issue of acceptance is still the nub of the matter where Christianity and homosexuality are concerned. That 1964 consultation has a surprisingly modern ring about it when contrasted with the casuistic discussions which have wracked the Church of England for the following half-century and which still show no signs of abating or of being amicably resolved. These agonisings started immediately after the law was changed. An Anglican working party was set up which deliberated at great length and to which I and other concerned people gave evidence, but whose report was never published because it was unable to reconcile the opposing views of traditionalists and would-be liberalisers. “We couldn’t publish that, you see,” Archbishop Ramsey remarked to me, “it was neither one thing nor the other”.

This strikes me of an apt description of the Church’s irresolution ever since. Some years later a wider consultation was launched, and this time, I was solemnly assured, the nettle of theological literalism versus Christian charity really would be grasped. The outcome, published in 1979 as Homosexual Relationships: A Contribution to Discussion, entirely failed to do any such thing, at which point I gave up on Anglicanism and vented my spleen in a couple of articles strongly criticising the wishy-washy prevarication yet again on display. Whilst saying that since 1967 discussion had become more polarised and strident, and public opinion more confused, the document did not venture to suggest – as one would have thought it might have done – that the Church had a responsibility to educate a bemused public, or to combat what it admitted was an irrational weight of anti-homosexual hostility. Just as Archbishop Rowan Williams does in his latest pronouncement (which I deal with below), the authors sidestepped the need to analyse the nature and religious origins of the hostility, or to accept the large measure of responsibility which Christians must undoubtedly bear for its existence. As I used to say when addressing religious groups in the 1960s, what Christians owe homosexuals above all is atonement. They still do. It is not bestowed by endless strings of verbal platitudes.

By the time this equivocating document appeared, Michael Ramsey had been succeeded by Dr Donald Coggan, a pedestrian person who was worthy but dull. He was prone to making egregious gaffes such as calling couples who have sex before marriage “second-hand goods” and referring to “the gormless millions who watch television”. When asked why he had used such an insulting phrase, Dr Coggan responded that he naturally regretted any offence he may have caused, and pleaded forgiveness on the ground that he had not known what ‘gormless’ meant!

Coggan was succeeded throughout the 1980s by the more sophisticated and worldly-wise Robert Runcie, who found himself in the thick of the intensifying skirmish between traditionalists and liberals over homosexuality. By this time the Gay Christian Movement, which included some ordained priests, was growing in strength and assertiveness. While I admire the courage of openly gay Christians, and sympathise with their desire to be accepted by their co-worshippers, I am more than somewhat baffled why anyone who is homosexual would wish to remain within homophobic church structures, and they bring to mind Groucho Marx’s famous quip: “I don’t care to belong to a club that will have me as a member.”

Dr Runcie was obviously sympathetic to their predicament, and finessed the internal Anglican conflict with some skill. His successor at Lambeth during the 1990s, George Carey, was an evangelical traditionalist and held out fewer olive branches. The appointment by Tony Blair of Rowan Williams in 2003 was widely seen as a return to the more sophisticated liberal tradition of Ramsey and Runcie, and – as with Blair himself – high hopes were stirred, only to be sadly dashed as his talent for cloudy tergiversation was displayed. By the first 21^st century decade homosexuality had become an even more burning issue for the Church of England than the ordination of women. The strident voices of African and other conservative overseas bishops who seemed to view the Old and New Testament strictures against same-sex love as the most compelling of all the Almighty’s injunctions were loudly raised at successive Lambeth Conferences and other venues, and when the modernist US Episcopalian Church ordained an openly gay bishop the threat of schism loomed.

Dr Rowan Williams, though personally sympathetic to and privately supportive of gay Christians, deems it his prime duty to preserve the unity of the Anglican Communion, and all his recent efforts have been bent to this end with the result that he has virtually made himself a hostage to bigotry. In his latest “Reflections on communion, covenant and our Anglican future”, while he casts a cautious and reluctant eye towards the prospect of a two-tier solution – a sort of holy apartheid – he completely fails to grasp the nettles of prejudice and ignorance which bedevil the issue. He makes a perfunctory nod towards “the fundamental human rights dimension of attitudes to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people, and the impossibility of betraying their proper expectations of a Christian body which has courageously supported them” (since when? I ask myself; for the most part the Church has stubbornly clung to its traditional psychologically naïve and uncharitable attitudes towards human sexuality), and then piously intones that “no Anglican has any business reinforcing prejudice against LGBT people, questioning the human dignity and civil liberties or their place within the body of Christ. Our overall record as a communion has not been consistent in this respect and this needs to be acknowledged with penitence.” Not much penitence to be seen from the traditionalist bigots as yet, though.

The rest of his dissertation is a long rambling rumination about whether the church is ‘free’ to recognise same-sex unions by means of public blessings that are “seen as being, at the very least, analogous to Christian marriage”. Any change in this direction would need to be based on a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding, neither of which currently exists.

As Dr Williams rightly says, “a certain choice of lifestyle has certain consequences”. For a Christian homosexual, the consequence remains, as it always has, celibacy as the only proper course. Having spelled this out, the Archbishop bemoans “the particularly bitter and unpleasant atmosphere of the debate over sexuality, in which unexamined prejudice is still so much in evidence and accusations of bad faith and bigotry are so readily thrown around”. But is this really surprising in view of the official Anglican – and still more Roman Catholic – reluctance to move forward an inch after so many years of futile debate and empty promises? When Dr Williams smugly intones that “prejudice and violence against LGBT people are sinful and disgraceful when society at large is intolerant of such people; if the church has echoed the harshness of the law and popular bigotry – as it so often has done – and justified itself in pointing to what society took for granted, it has been wrong to do so” the key fallacy in his utterance is the word “echoed”: the Christian churches have not merely echoed harshness and bigotry towards homosexuality: they have been the fount and origin of such attitudes down the ages, and their penitence, if genuine, has to be shown not in mere words but in practical deeds. The aim, says the Archbishop, is “not to shut anyone out, but to intensify existing relationships”.

Whatever gay Christians make of all this, it doesn’t convince me. The Christian churches remain the prime culprits where bigotry, intolerance and mistreatment of homosexuals are concerned – witness their recent strenuous efforts to exempt themselves on grounds of ‘conscience’ from equality legislation. As I told them half a century ago, their imperative duty is atonement, which means standing up to and if necessary expelling the primitive bigots from their midst. Fine words butter no parsnips.

Politics in the mire

I know that Craig Murray is disappointed that he didn’t do better in the Norwich North by-election, but to scoop up almost 1,000 votes and come ahead of the BNP after only three weeks of campaigning on a skewed playing field is surely cause for congratulation.

We are at a turning point in British politics. The Blair-Brown New Labour project has lost its magic and many people who voted for it repeatedly since 1997 no longer believe in its empty promises. Its failure to effectively correct most of what has gone wrong during the past year in our economy and our political culture is damningly obvious. Clearly a majority of voters want fundamental changes to the way we are governed, but the lack of any clear lead from the two biggest parties despite the massive display of public anger caused the voters to stay at home in large numbers on this occasion.

Because of this abstention factor the Conservatives won the seat comfortably but they also dropped some 2000 votes on their 2005 general election score, so they have no cause to feel cock-a-hoop. They have still to convince a vital segment of the electorate that they are worth turning to at the impending general election. Given our unjust first-past-the-post system (which needless to say they support) they will probably win a majority of seats but not of votes. Those of us who want proportional representation may wish – as we always do – for a hung parliament which will give the Liberal Democrats leverage, but such slender hopes of a fluke outcome are not the proper road to giving the electorate what it is entitled to – a fair voting system. The opposition of the two large parties, and their record of broken promises on the issue, speaks volumes about their unfitness to govern.

But far more than electoral reform and a clean-up of MPs’ expenses is needed to restore public confidence in the political system, now at its lowest ebb that I can recall in 60 years of observing politics. We are living in extraordinary times; the danger is that for many younger people who have known little else and whose memories don’t stretch back beyond the 1990s the current low and dishonest state of politics will become the norm.

The euphoria of New Labour’s victory in 1997 already seems a world away. The prospect we were offered by the beaming Tony Blair amidst chants of “things can only get better” of more openness and honesty in politics turned out to be a mirage. In almost no time Mr Squeaky-Clean was in front of the TV cameras glibly assuring us that he was “a pretty straight kind of guy” after allegations of advertising rule- bending in favour of a large Labour Party donor had emerged. His performance had eerie echoes of President Nixon’s tear-jerking Watergate TV appearance cuddling the family pooch.

This was merely a banal prelude to the post-9/11 nightmare: Blair’s spineless cosying up to the most right-wing bellicose US administration since the Second World War; his insouciant brushing aside of at least a million marchers against British participation in the illegal invasion of Iraq; sexed up dodgy dossiers; the outing and consequent suicide of a decent and loyal public servant, Dr David Kelly; sofa government that largely by-passed a docile cabinet; endless intrigue and media spin by the Mephistophelian Alastair Campbell…..Even worse, the trashing of many of our centuries-old hard won civil liberties which used to be the proud boast of our democracy but which didn’t weigh in the balance against a largely spurious ‘war on terror’. And the torrent of unnecessarily restrictive legislation and petty rules and regulations imposed upon us by this government and its local minions would make the most hardened Stalinist apparatchik green with envy.

All this alienated many, though not all, of New Labour’s supporters, many of whom heaved a sigh of relief when the egregious Blair was at last displaced by the glowering, Heathcliffian Brown who promised to bring his much-vaunted moral compass to bear upon the nation’s discontents. After all the blunders and misjudgements of the past year, it is amazing that this tin-eared man still affects to believe that the nation needs him. It does – like a hole in the head.

But the only likely alternative doesn’t look all that much more convincing. Cameron, Osborne and co. are a lacklustre lot, and the only experienced ex-cabinet minister among them, Kenneth Clarke, is at odds with the party policy over Europe.

So it’s no wonder that far from having switched off from politics more and more people are too angry to participate while the current rotten system prevails. Thousands of independent-minded people are deeply concerned about this country’s future and are looking for a new deal. How that is to materialise, and whether the varied bunch of dissenters who want to trigger it off can combine convincingly enough to rally significant voter support, remains to be seen. But the darkest night comes before the dawn, and the first rustlings of significant change are audibly in the air. Now is the time for all good folk to come to the aid, not of the party, but of the country.

Oh really?

President Obama solemnly informed a Russian audience the other day that "State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order".

This is a bit rich, coming from the leader of a country which since 1890 has made more than one hundred incursions (many of them military) into the territory of other states. The full list is here; it does not include the systematic US economic penetration and domination of many sovereign countries described by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, or the global ring of American military bases established on foreign soil – including that of the United Kingdom - on the pretext of ‘defence’.

President Obama, unlike his abysmal predecessor, is an intelligent and well-educated man, and now he occupies the highest office he must be more familiar than most with the inside history of American imperialism during the twentieth century.

Why, then, does he adopt such a hypocritical tone? If state sovereignty and the integrity of independent states was indeed the cornerstone of American policy, there would have been no invasion of Iraq just to cite the most obvious instance. Nor would there have been a United States of America, because the colonists would not have presumed to rebel against the government of George III, nor would the North have fought a bloody civil war to prevent the secession of the Southern states who wished to leave the Union.

If the USA aspires to be an acceptable leader of the Western ‘free’ world, it should do some long overdue heart-searching and adopt a tone of greater humility and less blatant humbug when it lectures others on their shortcomings.

Muscling in on Gay Pride

Beefcake boys with big biceps weren’t the only muscle-men on parade yesterday, when an estimated half a million people took part in London’s Gay Pride March. The ever larger numbers of those taking part in ‘Pride’ each year bear testimony to the progress achieved by sexual minorities since the festival’s modest beginnings in 1972, when 700 bravely ‘out’ souls marched from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park. Fifty years ago homosexuals were all but universally shunned as abnormal, immoral, sick, frequently criminal, usually invisible, and always undesirable. So it’s wrily amusing, if gratifying, to see today’s political leaders eagerly jumping aboard the gay band-wagon and vying with each other to flaunt their gay-friendly credentials in a bid for the gay vote.

All credit is due to those who, like Peter Tatchell, were pioneers of the Gay Liberation Front whose flamboyant street theatre tactics in the early 1970s served notice on the paternalist politicians such as Lord Arran and Leo Abse – to whom credit is otherwise also due – that those whom they had liberated from the criminal stigma were not prepared to stay, forelock-tugging, in discreet ghettoes but were determined to demand legal and social equality with heterosexual ‘straights’ and, above all, equality of esteem. That the Prime Minister’s wife, Sarah Brown, marched alongside Tatchell yesterday is testimony to the clout the gay community now wields.

But although there is now an equal age of consent, and civil partnerships (nearly, but not quite, the equivalent of marriage) have been successfully put in place by Tony Blair’s government, all is not yet plain sailing for LGBT folk, and those in their community – especially its younger members - who assume that all the needful battles have been won could not be more wrong. There is still widespread virulent and vocal homophobia evident in the stance of religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and Islam, and also among many who aren’t primarily religious - just prejudiced. Readers of political blogs will be aware that there is a copious flow of anti-gay vitriolic bile and smutty personal smears towards known and alleged homosexuals in politics and other areas of public life. The old canard that all queers are evil child-molesters at heart is still alive and well. Toleration of the non-heterosexual may nowadays be ‘Politically Correct’ – that in itself is a mixed blessing with the sagging popularity of New Labour’s ‘Nanny Knows Best’ bossiness – but it is often only skin deep.

Those who smugly say, as gay Tory ex-MP Michael Brown did in yesterday’s Independent newspaper, that there’s really no more need to bother any more, because being gay is now accepted as normal, are wide of the mark. The faith-fuelled bigots never let up. Only today, the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali – a senior spokesman of a new evangelical fellowship within the Anglican Church - is calling on homosexuals to “repent and change”. Even as Gordon Brown was preening himself on his government’s gay-friendly stance (having absented himself from the relevant Commons votes), it is reported that Baroness Scotland, his Attorney-General, who is a ‘prominent Catholic’, is conniving with church groups to water down forthcoming equality legislation so that they can continue peddling and promoting negative attitudes towards gay pupils in their schools and youth clubs without seeming to discriminate. The General Teaching Council, too, has bowed to religious pressure exerted through a mass letter-writing campaign and has watered down its regulations obliging teachers to treat all pupils, including gay ones and those who have unmarried parents, with equal respect and to proactively challenge all discrimination, stereotyping, and bullying. (National Secular Society Newsline, 3 July.)

What Tony Dyson - who was instrumental in forming the Homosexual Law Reform Society in the 1950s - wrote in a 1978 manifesto (‘Towards a Charter of Homosexual Rights’) which he drafted, and which was signed by almost 200 well known people, still remains in large measure true today: “We believe that fear or hatred of homosexuals is a social evil, akin to anti-semitism, racism, slavery, and with the same evil consequences. It harms the victimised individuals and the society which tolerates it….Homosexuals are the ONLY natural minority who are still regarded, by some, as intrinsically evil, and who are still liable to be mocked or persecuted by people claiming to represent ordinary social opinion, or the Christian church….The analogy with anti-semitism and racism seems, here, an exact one.” If this is correct - and I believe it is - there remains a great deal of educational work to be done in schools and throughout society generally if we are to create a truly tolerant society in this respect. Not only ‘out’ LGBT people themselves, but all people of goodwill who desire to live in a civilised and humane society, are needed for the ongoing task.

It therefore strikes me as particularly inept and mean-minded that Gay Pride has been seized upon by some New Labour politicians to claim the exclusive moral high ground and start a petty party squabble, even though David Cameron and other leading Conservatives have been making increasingly forthright pro-gay statements recently. Such statements are welcome, though belated; and to question their sincerity is petty party point-scoring. The unseemly spat sparked off by gay government ministers Ben Bradshaw, Chris Bryant, and Angela Eagle inevitably elicited an angry response from gay shadow cabinet minister Alan Duncan from the other side of the House. If politicians are patronising enough to think that gay rights is the only issue that gay voters care about, and that our votes can be bought en bloc by favours which were long overdue when finally granted, they really are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Yes, we can all be grateful to the progress secured thanks to Tony Blair’s laid back attitude to gay issues (in contrast to Harold Wilson in the 1960s, who did everything he could to distance himself and the Labour Party from the original Sexual Offences Bill while it was passing through parliament with the backstage blessing of that most civilised of 20th century Home Secretaries, Roy Jenkins). But legislation on gay issues – or on any other social reform – has never been a tidy matter of clear-cut party divisions. In the 1960s, vociferous opposition to law reform over both homosexuality and abortion came from some formidable Labour figures, and the Arran/Abse Bill would never have passed the Commons without the steadfast support of around 60 Conservatives (including Margaret Thatcher).

There was, of course, abundant hypocrisy in all parties; and closet doors were by no means all painted blue. It was galling to be working flat out lobbying parliament for reform when the unorthodox sexual proclivities of a good many of the Bill’s most vociferous opponents on all sides of the House, as well as those of some of its braver supporters, were widely known but unmentionable. The tactic of ‘outing’ had not been devised then, and so even the worst hypocrites had to be suffered in silence.

It is true that primitive homophobia was more entrenched in the Conservative party during the 1970s and ‘80s – largely due to what I dubbed the ‘lace curtain’ vote skilfully mobilised by Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, and their ‘Moral Majority’ allies (of whom it was rightly said that they were neither moral nor a majority). This holier-than-thou bunch assiduously spread misinformation and drummed up a succession of scares about sex education and mythical hordes of predatory paedophiles prowling every neighbourhood. But the Labour Party was by no means a shining beacon of enlightenment and eager progress - it took patient and persuasive work over many years by all sections of the LGBT community, both radicals and more demure elements, to convince the Blairites that more should be done, and could be done without undue political risk. Unfortunately, when New Labour finally got around to legislating a 21st century overhaul of the United Kingdom’s antiquated sex laws, years of preparatory work and consultations which had held out the prospect of a realistic, modern, liberal framework was swamped at the last lap by a coalition of cautious officialdom and reactionary feminism, with the sad outcome that, in terms of the law, all teenagers and not just gay ones are now in a more perilous position during their experimental adolescent years than they were in the 20th century. But that’s another story.

So by all means let us celebrate Gay Pride - but never complacently, and always remembering that rights won by the efforts of earlier generations can all too easily be lost by the ignorance, complacency, and negligence of their successors, and that the glib utterances of professional politicians should never be swallowed whole.

Unspeakable hate

When the King of Saudi Arabia paid a state visit to Britain in 2007, I choked over my breakfast on reading that Her Majesty the Queen, hosting a banquet for him at Buckingham Palace, had referred to “our two countries’ shared values”. Such obvious twaddle beggars belief. What shared values? Saudi Arabia is a male-dominated religious tyranny. It imposes the death penalty not only for sodomy (which term includes all same-sex contact, not just anal intercourse) but also for a wide range of other offences including murder, adultery, highway robbery, drug smuggling, sabotage, witchcraft, apostasy (renunciation of Islam), and “corruption on earth” – an extremely vague charge that featured during the Iranian Islamic Revolution as an excuse for executing political opponents of the Khomeini regime. Severe floggings, torture, and lengthy imprisonment in degrading conditions are all common features of the Saudi state theocracy – none of these, we trust, are Saudi values shared by our own dear Queen and her advisers. Now the Saudi monarch has provided ample confirmation that what Elizabeth II’s speech writers made her say was dishonest twaddle by declaring that “the democratic system that is predominant in the world is not a suitable system for the peoples of our region... The system of free elections is not suitable to our country”. As if we didn’t know already.

Freedom is not only about elections: in Western democracies it is seen as an individual personal right, subject to a just rule of law. It can only exist and flourish in a social and political climate of tolerance which has to be constantly cherished and vigorously preserved. This has been borne in on me by one of the most harrowing and degrading books to come my way recently – Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East by Brian Whitaker (Saqi Books, 2006). It is harrowing because it vividly recalls a phase of my life, half a century ago, when I was in a similar, though less perilous, situation to many of those the author describes in Middle Eastern countries today; and it is degrading because it so vividly depicts the bigoted intolerance and cruelty of human beings who have too much power, fanatically held groundless beliefs, inadequate knowledge, and too little innate kindness.

It is also about a kind of holy humbug which is peculiar to systems of religion - not just Islam, but Judaism and many Christian denominations as well - which claim direct insights from their preferred god in order to justify laws, social codes, and behaviour which even the perpetrators must know in their innermost hearts are inhumane and senseless. How strange it is that those who believe in a loving spirit-god reckon the sins of the flesh to be so much more heinous than those of the spirit - sins which they themselves manifest all too often through implacable cruelty, lack of charity, and vicious hatred. These repulsive attitudes aren’t the sole preserve of Islam, but in the present age they are especially intractable in a religion which is still more rigidly bound by literalist interpretations of its scriptures (maybe because it is several hundred years younger than the other two).

As I pointed out in an earlier post, homosexuals are, by and large, a peaceable, inoffensive lot who just wish to get on with their own lives as they choose without interfering with or interference from others, and who are unlikely to get militantly aggressive even when viciously attacked: an ideal victim-target, in fact, for the pharisaical holier-than-thou, "thank God/Allah we are not like these people", bigots of all religious stripes who seek a public platform on which to strut their superiority to the common herd.

For much of my life I have fought publicly and strenuously against this primitive bigotry towards same-sex lovers, which largely emanates from religiously motivated folk. So far as Christians in the UK are concerned the battle has been largely won, and in the United States vehemently anti-gay protesters are dwindling in numbers and increasingly marginalised. But now we in the West have in our midst a growing population of Muslims whose preachers and government ministers in Islamic countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia think nothing of advocating torture, stoning, and hanging for those who are caught in the act. At an official level, at least, homosexuality is fiercely persecuted throughout the Middle East.

The hypocrisy of all this is staggering, as in addition to their sexism and male chauvinism Arab men in particular have always been notorious for their widespread indulgence in same-sex activity. Yet in these countries, and even in Britain, gay Muslims live in fear and are mostly unwilling to speak out about their predicament. Even so, throughout North Africa and the Middle East, as this book makes abundantly clear, there is a vibrant gay life, albeit no visible gay culture. Even under such oppressive regimes, a few seeds of openness have started to sprout in recent years, though in Islamic societies the concept of ‘gay liberation’ is almost universally dismissed – even by those who make love to others of their own sex - as decadent Western cultural imperialism. As the ongoing tussle in various UN and other international forums between Western democracies and the 57-state strong Islamic Conference who strenuously seek – sometimes with the connivance of the Roman Catholic Church - to water down the post-World War Two Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows, homosexuality and equal rights for women are both crucial sticking points in the contrasting Western and Islamic concepts of what human rights are.

Whitaker gives a fascinatingly well-informed analysis of the social, political, and religious differences over these issues in and between Muslim countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran - differences which extend to the attitudes of the gay people (hardly yet forming a ‘community’) in these countries. He recounts some horrifying stories of official and family-inspired cruelty and persecution, and also remarkable instances of great bravery and defiance on the part of those who have been brutalised, and in some cases had their lives ruined and even ended, because of their refusal to conform to traditional Islamic mores. One finishes reading Unspeakable Love stunned and dismayed by the primitive morality and sheer sadism of all too many worshippers of Allah, and at the same time heartened and humbled by the personal bravery of those who refuse to deny their own natures despite almost intolerable pressure.

Fifty years ago there was similar, though not quite equivalent, ignorance, bigotry, and official persecution of homosexual men in Britain. No one who was born after about 1960 has any real conception of the atmosphere in which I and others like me lived – as if we were resistance fighters in enemy-occupied territory. Most regarded the legal and social hazards as a theoretical risk about as serious as being knocked down by a bus when crossing the road. But there were increasing numbers of casualties, and the minority who were caught up in legal proceedings, or were ‘outed’ to their families and employers, had their lives wrecked, usually irretrievably. Following publication of the Wolfenden Report in the 1950s a few of us set out to change this state of affairs, and after ten years of hard struggle we succeeded in achieving the first step along a long road to legal equality and social acceptance. Would a similar reform movement be even conceivable, let alone remotely successful, in Muslim countries in the foreseeable future? One simply doesn’t know. The potential, and the mechanisms, for significant or swift social change in Islamic countries are, on the surface at least, lacking. The notion of an Islamic Wolfenden Report seems bizarre. However, contemplating the increasing interaction between people around the world stimulated by modern communications, and especially the internet, Brian Whitaker ends on a cautious note of optimism, and a guarded “Perhaps”. One can only hope he is right.