GAY RIGHTS
(Discussion contributions to: Tony.Papard@btinternet.com)
It is now considered politically correct to refer to L.G.B.T. (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) rights, or even ‘queer’ rights, the word ‘queer’ being a former term of abuse ‘reclaimed’ by gays. Well I still consider ‘queer’ a term of abuse and so refuse to adopt it, and I consider the convoluted LGBT abbreviation unnecessary. ‘Gay’ is a term which has been in use among the homosexual community for very many years, certainly since the early 20th century, and it is a very convenient word to describe lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. Transgender persons, by which I understand to mean persons who have changed their sex or who regularly cross-dress, may or may not decide to describe themselves as gay, it is up to the individual. Some transgender people will identify themselves as heterosexual.
There are certain rights which everyone should be entitled to. Gays have often been discriminated against in many ways, including being denied very basic rights other people take for granted.
For example, I was in a loving relationship with my same sex partner for 21 years, when we were parted by death. If we hadn’t had a joint council tenancy I could have been thrown out on to the street and been homeless when he died. I just couldn’t have coped with this as well as bereavement, I probably would have committed suicide. The home we’d built together over the years meant so much to me, it was all I had to show for our 21 years together. I still can’t bear to move 10 years later because here I am surrounded by my partner’s collages, and the little nick nacks we bought together, including souvenirs from our various trips abroad. Yet all these too could have been taken from me. Had he not made a Will his family could legally have claimed all the possessions of our flat which I could not produce receipts for to show I had paid for at least part of them. Gay partners have no legal rights of inheritance to either the property or the council tenancy of their deceased long-term partner. After long court battles, often involving the European Court, partners' rights have sometimes been successfully defended, but only after years of hardship and stress.
If my life partner hadn’t signed himself out of hospital during his terminal illness, I could have even been denied visiting rights if he was in intensive care. Only legal partners and relatives have such rights, and legally I couldn’t even claim the right to speak to his hospital doctors. In practice many hospitals nowadays respect gay partners’ rights, but they are not obliged to do so.
If you are in a stable gay relationship and work for a company which has a pension scheme, your partner may well not benefit from this should you die. I couldn’t even claim his pension contributions back when my partner died, let alone a ‘widow’s pension’. I could certainly have done with it as my expenses more than doubled overnight as soon as he died – more than double rent and there were all the bills which he used to pay half of which I now had to pay in full – you use just as much gas and electricity on your own as when you were a couple; you can’t light half a room, have a television half on or use half a gas ring or half an oven to cook a meal. Another gay friend who lost his partner was lucky and gets a regular weekly ‘widow’s pension’ even though he is still working. It is left to the whim of the pension scheme whether the surviving partner gets something or not. This is wrong.
Many firms have ‘perks’ which married partners are entitled to, such as free or heavily subsidized travel. Only lately have some of these perks been extended to gay partners, and this was the result of long court battles.
All these areas of discrimination could be cleared up in one go if gay people were allowed to register their relationshiops. It needn’t be called marriage, gay people don’t necessarily wish to ape heterosexual relationships. But when two people are in a steady relationship, whether they be a same sex or a mixed couple, they should be allowed to officially register this relationship and thereby have a right to inherit property, tenancies, pension rights, etc..
How far do we go with this? Should gay couples be allowed to adopt or have children by artificial insemination for instance? My own personal feeling is that children are not part of a gay lifestyle. I don’t believe anybody has the automatic right to adopt children, or even have children of their own. Children are a privilege, and I would withdraw all automatic child allowance and tax people for every child they have, whether adopted or their own (with exemptions for those below a certain income). There are far too many children in the world already, without gay men and women using artificial inseminination to produce even more. It is irresponsible to increase the population of an already over-populated world with all the problems this stores up for the future. Instead of encouraging people to sprog brats at the drop of a hat, birth control should be actively promoted with tax concessions for those who choose to have no children at all. Homosexuality is a very good form of birth control. As for adoption, well the interests of the child must come first. It is usually considered that both a male and a female parent should be in the home environment to act as role models. I was denied a father figure in my childhood, and I am sure this is partly why I turned out gay. It has not been an easy life, the gay lifestyle can be quite difficult to cope with. All adopted children should be given the best possible family background and role models, not given more problems to deal with than they already have.
Having two ‘parents’ of the same sex can only complicate the life of a child and it is just not natural. In some circumstances it can’t be avoided, any more than one-parent families can always be avoided if a partner dies or the marriage breaks down irretrievably. If one partner dies and the surviving partner later forms a relationship with a partner of the same sex, then of course the children should be brought up by both of them. But if the marriage has broken down it is not always so straightforward, and in these cases the interests of the children must be of prime importance. Some will be better off with same-sex parents, some with single parents or those who have re-married – it is not something which can be written down in advance, it depends on the circumstances.
As for adoption, there are cases, especially with adolescents, where a gay couple are a positive advantage. The child may be gay themselves, and feel happier in a gay family. However, these are exceptional circumstances, and as general rule I would NOT really be in favor of allowing gay couples to adopt children. If they ARE allowed to adopt, I would suggest a novel solution: two gay couples of either sex should be allowed to jointly adopt, so the chilren would have role models of both genders as parents – two mothers and two fathers. In other words, a gay male couple would need to team up with a gay female couple and jointly adopt and bring up children.
I am against the rights of gays to openly join the military services. This is partly because I am also a pacifist, and don’t believe anybody has a right to join the military, let alone gays. But I honestly believe most gay men are totally unsuited to military service, and I question the motives of many of those who want to join. Do they have a uniform fetish perhaps? (Most gay men do, and I’d be the first to admit it.) Or do they get a secret kick out of sleeping in a dormitory, showering and living in very close proximity with loads of other men? I can see real problems in this area, because even if the gay man did not have such ulterior motives, his heterosexual colleagues might well feel uncomfortable. However, under EU directives the military has been forced to accept gays, and they have to now deal with these accommodation problems. Separate dormitories for gays may be the solution in this area.
There are other problems I foresee with this ruling. If conscription were ever brought back, in wartime for instance, would gays now be included? Presumably so, yet this would mean millions of totally unsuitable people would be forced to join a military service. My advice to any gay men called up in this way would be to do what a friend of mine did when he was called up for National Service in the 1950s. He told the recruiting staff he was gay, they chose not to believe him, so he slept in a different bed in the barracks every night and corrupted so many soldiers he was thrown out within two weeks! There must be all sorts of other ruses one could use, or one could simply claim to be a conscientious objector. If faced with a so-called ‘enemy’ many gay men would rather ‘make love’ than ‘war’, so perhaps this should be pointed out to the recruiting sergeant in advance. Or one could simply faint every time a gun went off – you could camp it up gutless till they got fed up and threw you out. (Turn up on parade in high heels and make-up?) On a more serious note, why should the rights of a minority of gays who wish to openly join the military for whatever reasons trample on the rights of millions of others not to be conscripted into a bullying, aggressive, heterosexual war machine? They can join up without screaming their sexuality from the rooftops, which can only cause problems in a military environment.
Military generals would not want women or known gay men on the front line for the simple reason that the reaction between them and ‘the enemy’ would be unpredictable. Generals want aggressive fighting yobbos who they can train to see ‘the enemy’ as an inhuman machine, they don’t want sensitive and emotional people who might view the other side as attractive individuals, much less as individuals they might feel pity for or even fall in love with. At the other extreme, atrocities by conquering armies often include the raping of women, so including aggressive gay men in these armies would positively encourage male rape, yet another problem of the mindless war mentality we could well do without. Similarly, a conquering army wishing to humiliate a defeated army containing known gay men might decide male rape was a suitable method to do this. For all these reasons it is understandable military chiefs are reluctant to include openly gay men in the armed forces, certainly in the front lines.
Gay people should be granted many rights which others enjoy. Transgender (sex change) individuals should be allowed to marry, change their sex on all official documents, etc. Gays should be allowed partnership rights and all other rights which affect only themselves. However, when children or other people are directly affected by these ‘rights’ more care needs to be taken to insure that everybody’s rights are protected. Children too have rights, and so do heterosexuals. These contradicting rights often have to be balanced, and a compromise arrived at. Nobody, gay or heterosexual, should be allowed to join the military - but both gays and heterosexuals should be admitted into police forces and any armed world security force under the United Nations which would have a policing role rather than an aggressive war-fighting role. (See article on Pacifism for more on this kind of security force.)