More of the Daily Mail’s vile homophobia

By Richard Lane / @politicana

UPDATE: Moir says the record number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission was the result of an “orchestrated campaign” against her and that it is “mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones”.

UPDATE: As you can see from the image, advertising has been pulled from this article on the Daily Mail website, leaving holes where ads previously were.

Many of us are used to reading the casual homophobia of the Daily Mail on a regular basis. It has become almost as customary a feature as calls for women to be kept in the kitchen, kids to be kept in private school and Britain to be kept from hoards of Muslim immigrants.

However, today saw a surprisingly vicious new level of attack from Jan Moir, the paper’s ‘Femail’ columnist who writes about the death of singer Stephen Gately. Her article asks why “no one is facing up to the sordid reality of the Boyzone star’s demise”; the sordid details apparently being that Gately was gay.

She argues that:

“healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again…whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.”

Of course medical records will show us that healthy men in their twenties and thirties do, sadly, die of various medical problems. And indeed the coroner has ruled that Gately died from natural causes. This does not prevent Moir from speculating that “the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy”. These circumstance, according to Moir, are that Gately enjoyed an evening out with friends, may have smoked a joint and then returned home with his husband and a mutual friend.

Moir’s lesson from the tragic death of a young man is that there must be a fundamental problem with the concept of civil partnerships:

“Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael. Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions about what happened.”

I find this rather hard to get my head round. The argument here is that because one gay man died from natural causes whilst on holiday with his partner and another gay man decided to take his own life, there is a some flaw in the concept of equal rights for gay men and women.

Firstly, the simple fact is that the only link between Gately’s death and the death of Kevin McKee is their sexuality. What Moir is therefore implying is that the very fact that Stephen Gately was gay made his death in tragic circumstances all the more likely. By her logic we are then to apparently assume that this reckless lifestyle means the gay community simply can not handle the heavy responsibility that our heterosexual counterparts toil with everyday in the form of making binding legal commitments to one another.

Of course she misses out the point that by her logic we should assume she should be denied the right to marry her partner because the actions of Britney Spears indicate a heterosexual lack of appreciation for the commitment bestowed by marriage.

This article says much about what the Daily Mail is willing to print and the casual manner in which homophobia is still treated. Only last month Peter McKay of the Daily Mail unleashed a tirade against Iain Dale, accusing him of rallying some sort of gay army to his selection cause in Bracknell.

Just a small sample of the Daily Mails homophobic writings can be found over at Next Left.

I believe that this sort of writing should not go unchallenged; please try and take a few minutes to report Moir’s article to the Press Complaints Commission. This can be done simply and quickly here.