15.05.1997
Stench of hypocrisy
SLP witch hunter calls for discrimination against homosexuals
“Lesbians, gay men and bisexuals are still treated as second class citizens because of their sexual preferences and orientation.
Socialist Labour is committed to abolition of all laws that discriminate against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals ...
Homosexual partnerships should be recognised including legally on a par with heterosexual ones. Sexuality should not be a bar to the custody of children, fostering and adoption ...
When it comes to any aspect of criminal law, homosexual behaviour should be treated exactly the same way as heterosexuality.”
(From the Socialist Labour Party’s policy statements April/May 1997.)
Any democrat would agree with much of the stated positions of the SLP on gay and lesbian rights. Yet as readers of the Weekly Worker know, a faction which actively promotes the most vile homophobia operates in the SLP with the full knowledge and approval of the SLP leadership. The creepy wretches around the journal, the Economic, Philosophic and Science Review - a scissors and cow-gum rag openly edited by one Royston Bull, Stockport SLP member - actually advocates “discrimination” against “sick” homosexuals and lesbians.
They are tolerated because they back the witch hunt against the left and have even fingered oppositionalists to the leadership. Yet this organisation openly sells a journal with its - sickening - “own programme, principles and policies, distinctive and separate propaganda” and is therefore formally “ineligible for affiliation to the party” (clause II, paragraph 4 of the SLP draft constitution).
In a number of areas, EPSR supporters even insinuated themselves into the position of being candidates of the party - specifically Dave Roberts in Leicester West. Presumably, these SLP super-loyalists purported to stand on the electoral policies of the party. How then do these people and - more importantly - the leadership of the SLP reconcile EPSR views on homosexual and lesbian rights with SLP policy?
The following is taken from the February 18 issue of this putrid journal:
“... weird people ... are currently running rampant in Vauxhall and Southwest London SLP, proposing scrappy ‘election manifestos’ to put to the working class in place of the SLP’s policy statements - which include such vital and ‘progressive’ immediate changes to working class life as ‘homosexuality to be treated identically as heterosexuality; sexuality to be no bar in the custody of children, applications for adoption, or IVF treatment; all consensual sexual acts should be legal - abolish the age of consent; armed workers’ defence groups against homophobic attacks’, etc, etc.
“And any criticism of this sick, self-seeking nonsense - a complete paedophiles’ charter - will be met with non-stop abuse in the Weekly Worker as ‘homophobia’.
“Those who cringe before the unbalanced hysteria of these ‘politically correct’ zealots and imbeciles, faulting the EPSR for its allegedly ‘insensitive language’ on the subject, need to come out from their own closets and declare where they stand in this sick stupidity reflecting the confusion, shallowness and lack of confident social aspirations of decadent capitalist society.
“Let everyone declare their positions publicly on ‘homosexuality to be treated identically as heterosexuality’, allied to ‘abolish the age of consent’, and then say honestly if they would invite an openly camp male neighbour or local council welfare officer, notorious for their promiscuous pederasty, to babysit for their children ...
“Paedophilia, pederasty and lesbianism will never not be described as emotional or sexual malfunctions or a major disruption of natural evolution. Persecution of such abnormalities is a barbaric instinct and will die out under socialism. But differentiation and discrimination on matters where sexual orientation remains a key factor in the outcome (child upbringing; all education; protection of minors; sensible use of resources; health concerns; acceptable public order and workplace conduct; practising and being susceptible to exploitation; counterrevolutionary agitation, etc) is a separate question entirely ...
“The understanding that in communist society the free development of every individual is the condition for the free development of all can obviously only mean that the full right to flourish for those with malfunctioning sexual and emotional orientation (if such phenomena persist, once clear of screwed-up capitalist society) cannot be at the expense of even the remotest danger or interference at all to the unhindered flourishing of everyone else from cradle to the grave. In other words, if malfunctioning sexual orientation persists, then it could only not be a problem if it continued in complete openness - ie, with the known proclivities to paedophilia of male homosexuals, for example (as well as of sick heterosexuals, obviously), universally openly acknowledged and the individuals at risk identified.
“If society eventually establishes that heterosexual procreation remains the basic natural evolutionary pattern for the species, then cleverly rationalised deviations from this by emotionally-charged male or female homosexuals in a position to strongly influence the education of minors is clearly going to remain a potential problem possibly requiring continued differentiation (or discrimination) within childcare and the teaching professions. In other words, ‘homosexuality to be treated identically as heterosexuality’ will always be nonsense. They are different. They will remain different.”
This stomach-churning chauvinism is the ideology of an officially tolerated section of the witch hunters in the SLP, peddled in a journal openly sold at SLP branch meetings. Meanwhile, others are being hypocritically purged for ‘crimes’ that these scum openly commit in the party.
A workers’ party needs the fresh, untainted air of democracy to thrive. At the moment the stench of hypocrisy is gagging the SLP.
Ian Mahoney