Having Us For Breakfast

The vile Peter Tatchell is interviewed, and no one asks him about his campaign to lower the age of consent to 14 or even below. No one ever does.

Nor, of course, is anyone questioning the historically and anthropologically illiterate, scientifically baseless theory that an inclination towards homosexual acts is somehow any basis for individual or collective identity, comparable to ethnicity, or even to the sex that is written into every cell of the body. Acts are homosexual (or heterosexual), and between consenting adults in private they are no business of the criminal law. But persons are not. No one before the 1970s suggested that they were, and patterns of behaviour across great swathes of the earth continue to disprove that preposterous assertion.

Since civil partnerships do not need to be consummated, they cannot be the basis for expecting a double bed in a guesthouse. Furthermore, there is therefore no basis for restricting civil partnerships to unrelated same-sex couples. The legislation must be amended immediately to allow unmarried relatives, whether of the same or of opposite sexes, to register their partnerships. Then there would be no problem. If it had said that at the time of its enactment, then there would never have been anything more than a few newspaper stories about how same-sex couples were "planning to make use of a new law to protect elderly unmarried relatives living together from inheritance tax when one of them dies".

Meanwhile, anyone with a B&B should make it clear that double beds are only available to married couples, marriage being still defined in law as the union of one man and one woman.

Across the West, the campaign against the Pope by, of all people, the likes of Tatchell has had an effect, but not the one that those engaged in it wanted or expected. We are about to start fighting back. And when we do, then they really will know about it. Let's make a start.