Heterophobia

If next year I am beaten up, the thug who attacks me will be punished more harshly than he would be if he vented his anger on 90 per cent of the population. Provided, that is, he punches me not because I'm fat or aggravating or mouthy, but because I'm gay.

It is hard not to sympathise with the gay rights group Stonewall when they laud the forthcoming amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which increases sentences for thugs who attack gay people. A few extra years for somebody who beats up a lesbian just because she is holding hands with her girlfriend seems appealing at first. It signals a much-needed official admission that homophobic crime is at epidemic levels. A recent survey by the Crown Prosecution Service's National Advisory Group showed that 38 per cent of the gay and transgender community suffered at least one homophobic incident in the previous 12 months. Yet the fight for hate crimes laws is totally irrelevant if we want to stop these crimes rather than just signal our loathing of them.

There is no academic research I could find anywhere indicating that hate crimes legislation (now common in the US) actually reduces crime against gay people. If anybody can produce some, I'll think again. Yet such findings seem unlikely: if you are a bigot who is about to beat somebody up because they are gay or Muslim, are you going to hesitate because you will get four years in prison rather than three? None of the crimes that are having an extra "hate" penalty tacked on go unpunished today; their perpetrators all get sent down.

The real way to tackle these homophobic crimes is not new gesture- laws, but by a renewed focusing of police resources on places where hate crimes are most intense - often around cruising zones like Hampstead Heath in London - and by encouraging gay men to come forward. Only 18 per cent of the people surveyed by the CPS who have been victims of homophobic crime reported it to the police. We have to deal with the underlying reason for this: the perception (sometimes, sadly, based on reality) that the police are unsympathetic to gay people.

The recent Metropolitan Police poster campaign aimed at gay people has been a terrific step in that direction, as are changes in police training. Far from helping with these initiatives, hate crimes laws risk draining political energy and money away from them.

There is another, crucial reason why hate crimes laws are a mistake. They are wrong in principle. If you beat somebody up, either you hate them or you're mad. The gay rights movement I belong to has always been a fight for equality; yet hate crimes laws entrench difference in legislation, and privilege one group over another - the very opposite of equality.

Gay-hating conservatives always sneer that we are asking for "special privileges". Of course we must never trim our agenda to appease bigots; but we must always be able to rebut this argument with hard facts. Skim articles by Richard Littlejohn, Richard Ingrams or Simon Heffer and you'll see persistent hostility to gay people displayed as though it were a brave stand in favour of poor, embattled heterosexuals. At the moment, any such claim that we want to be treated better than straight people can be slapped down with reference to the simple fact that all our campaigns - the age of consent, Section 28, gay marriage - are for equality and no more.

If we argue for hate crimes legislation, however - if we say that stabbing me because I'm gay is worse than stabbing Richard Littlejohn because he spreads poison about asylum-seekers, Richard Ingrams because he is obsessed with sniping at Jews and gays, or Simon Heffer because he is, well, Simon Heffer - we lose our ability to take that stand. The same goes for the introduction of special penalties for racist crimes. Creating a system where white, heterosexual men really are second-class citizens when it comes to punishing their attackers will lend reality to the whining misanthropy represented by this ugly trio, without helping any real victims.

Nor is this the only wrong turn that the gay rights movement has taken in the past few years. I feel for the Christian liberals who are arguing for the Church to accept gay people as parishioners, priests and bishops. I obviously like them far, far more than the crazed evangelical bigots fighting against them, who describe homosexuality as "a disease". Yet I have to reconcile this with the fact that I have no doubt the Bible does condemn homosexuality. We can try to wish away all the hateful passages about gays, imagining that they are metaphors for something else, but we are kidding ourselves. "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22) is pretty clear. God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (along with other psychotic acts committed by Him throughout the Old Testament) is not the act of a gay rights campaigner.

Rather than contort ourselves trying to argue that somehow these are not acts of extreme homophobia, why not just accept that the people who wrote the Bible were homophobes? Given the time and culture, how could they be anything other?

That doesn't mean I accept the "God Hates Fags" evangelical message; instead, I think we should admit that the whole idea of deriving our morality from a 2,000-year-old text based on a fictional deity is absurd. Rather than reform Christianity, we should abandon its Bible as an anti-gay (and anti-Semitic, and anti-women) piece of fiction. The gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was right when he recently declared: "The Bible is to gays what Mein Kampf is to Jews. It is the theory and practice of Homo Holocaust." We should not hate Christians (or religious Jews or Muslims, whose faiths are just as homophobic). As Tatchell says, we must hate the sin of homophobia but love the Christian sinner. We should no more crave acceptance into the religion that has persecuted and murdered us for millennia than Jews should seek to join the Nazis.

The tragedy is that, while so much energy has been siphoned away by the bishops and hate crimes fights, many of the real issues affecting gay people have been neglected. We still do not have an explicit law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexuality. (This would not be biased in favour of gay people in the way hate crimes legislation is, because it would outlaw heterophobia too. Those appalling signs which have started to appear outside some gay clubs banning straight people would quite rightly become illegal.) We still do not have full gay marriage (although the Government's civil partnerships legislation will be a huge step towards it). Gay kids are still bullied in every playground in Britain, where the word "gay" is used as an insult. And - most importantly - in many parts of the world, gay people are being persecuted in a manner so savage that we can scarcely comprehend it from the dancefloor of Heaven. We need to pour our energy into fighting all this, not on a decaying Church and an irrelevant law.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.