Nick Cohen’s Observer column today is an outpouring of praise to mark this week’s sixtieth birthday of Peter Tatchell. My London Progressive Journal colleague though he now is, Tatchell would lower the age of consent to 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused. Furthermore, in The Guardian on 26th June 1997, Tatchell wrote:
“The positive nature of some child-adult relations is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.”
In 1981, Michael Foot refused to endorse Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons. In 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords.
Well into the 1990s, the word “straight” had no colloquial meaning beyond “honest”, except perhaps in homosexual subcultures, so that what is now its almost equally familiar use might then have been known to Tatchell and to Simon Hughes, but would not have been known to the general electorate of Bermondsey or anywhere else.
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Good heavens, Mr. Lindsay, the company you keep in your old age! Tatchell, Monbiot, Jeff Bigelow, and all the rest. But if you can get the message out there, you can get it out anywhere, fair play to you. None the less, a few organs of our own are desperately needed, rather than only hoping for the best from other people's. I so hope you are right that 2012 is our year.
ReplyDeleteI am doing more than hope. Watch this space.
ReplyDeleteWhy should David Cameron offer a seat in the House Of Lords to Peter Tatchell?
ReplyDeleteA man who believes in the destruction of the nuclear family,the legalisation of sex in public toilets and the lowering of the age of consent to 14.
But he did. Tatchell declined. But Cameron made the offer. He is no Michael Foot.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know Cameron had offered Tatchell a seat in the Lords. Can you post a link to any coverage of this?
ReplyDeleteGoogle it. It was in the papers at the time, and Harry's Place posted something bemoaning Tatchell's decision to decline.
ReplyDeleteHe also tried to arrest Mugabe and has stood up and defended those who have been arrested for speaking their mind on homosexuality.
ReplyDeleteAnd?
ReplyDeleteYou wouldn't accept those as excuses from, for example, a Catholic priest.