Gays under the bed

My parents told me that in Northern Ireland you used to see outside guesthouses ‘Catholics need not apply’ and I remembered this when I read about the case of the Bed and Breakfast owners who wouldn’t allow homosexual couples.

The law has traditionally been that a landlord can treat the place as his home and if he wants to ban you for whatever reason – big nose, mullet haircut – he can. But now there is a list of things over which he must be tolerant. The State tells him what he is allowed to have strong views about; it tells him what to think.

I often wondered how the B & B owners of Armagh knew their guests were Catholics; the smell of incense coming from under the door? Not wearing an orange sash over your pyjamas? And the thought occurred too that if two men asked to share a room purely on cost grounds (Nothing queer about us, I assure you!) the owners would presumably have no problem with that but ironically would be quite entitled to bar them.

No one wants to live in a society where guesthouses have signs outside saying ‘No Mullets’… sorry…. I meant ‘No Gays’, but when the law intervenes it makes an ass of itself. If you think that the owner is a pig-ignorant bigot, don’t stay there.

Stupidly, with an election coming up, Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, has felt the need to air his views on the gays-in-the-guesthouse issue, missing, as President Chirac once put it, an excellent opportunity to keep silent. The Guardian is not letting go (Shocked! Yes, shocked!) and the Conservatives are making a complete hash of rowing back. I suggest the tactic of Ken Clark who, when it was pointed out that a statement he made was completely at odds with a previous speech, replied ‘That was before I was exposed to the collective wisdom of my colleagues’.