Homosexuality in Politics

‘Don’t go there’ is what most people would say, but I am going to.

Philip Lardner, the Conservative candidate for North Ayrshire and Arran, has been suspended, in the middle of the election campaign, for saying that homosexuality was ‘not normal behaviour’. In fact he wrote on his website ‘I will support the right of parents and teachers to refuse to have their children taught that homosexuality is normal behaviour or an equal lifestyle choice to traditional marriage.’

Conservative Party policy is to give a tax break to ‘traditional marriage’, which will not include people who live together or homosexual couples so they must think it different, that is to say ‘not an equal lifestyle choice’, surely?

Here is Ian Dale, openly gay Conservative blogger: “He apparently thinks homosexuality isn't 'normal'. It is in fact quite normal. It's just not the 'norm'.”

Normal: Constituting, conforming to, not deviating or differing from, the common type or standard; regular, usual (OED)

Of course homosexuality isn’t normal. That doesn’t make it wrong, or undesirable or worthy of condemnation. It means it is ‘differing from the common type or standard’.

The Conservative Education policy encourages people to start their own schools. What would happen if I started a school which did not teach that homosexuality was normal behaviour – not taught the kiddies to discriminate, which would be illegal, but which simply did not teach that it was normal. In fact I was never taught that it was normal. I was never taught anything about it at all, which seems like a good idea for the modern school.

Of course it was an idiot thing to say in the middle of an election campaign and there is a case for suspending Mr Lardner on grounds of low IQ, but he seems to have been following Conservative policy, no more, no less.

So, what are we to make of all this?

Don’t ask me.