The Commonwealth Games opened in Birmingham on July 28th led by Sir Lenny Henry who doesn’t come from Birmingham, he’s from Dudley, but for the London elite perhaps all the towns in what they tend to call ‘The North’ are the same. Strange that they couldn’t find anyone famous enough and of the right ethnicity – non-white, actually from Birmingham to do it, but everyone loves Lenny. Olympic swimmer Tom Daley was interviewed, telling the BBC that he’s getting entangled with a jumper, a woollen one as part of his ‘knitting project’. He’s there to represent what seems to be the most important aspect of the games in 2022; promotion of LGBT+ rights.
The ‘Pride’ flag will be carried into the arena and flown until the show ends on August 8th. ‘It sends a message to those Commonwealth countries that do not have that inclusive policy,’ said Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries to Radio 4 Today, talking sympathetically of nations who haven’t yet seen the light and still don’t approve of gay sex. She said that the FO is now too busy talking about Ukraine rather than tackling the recalcitrant attitudes of African leaders about sodomy.
Gay rights has nothing directly to do with athletics but apparently it’s the most important issue they raise. Rather a puzzle as we’ve had it hammered into us for years that white western people cannot tell poorer post-colonial countries how they should think or what they should do. That is a ‘no no’ called neo-colonialism. That sin also takes the form of economic and cultural imperialism such as conditional aid to influence a developing country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control or indirect political control.
Cultural colonialism is now a much-studied academic subject; the duplicitous desire of wealthy nations to control other nations’ values and perceptions through media, language, education, religion, and sport for their own economic advantage. We also have post-colonialism theories in philosophy, political science, literature, history including film, where there can be no study without looking at the colonial past and its legacy.
British education is particularly geared to tackle the ‘post-colonial mentality’ harboured unconsciously by most white people. This influence is frequently referred to as ‘educational neo-colonialism,’ as western paradigms tend to shape and influence educational systems and thinking causing educationalists in non‐western countries to ‘borrow’ ideas which appear effective in a very different cultural context than their own. This is now seen as detrimental to indigenous culture and heritage, yet, as I know from teaching, Africans who insist on their children learning by-rote, respecting the teacher and adopting a traditional Christian outlook are seen as failing in a major way to be western enough, a paradox, as is their refusal to tolerate gay sex when told to, which the current Birmingham games hopes somehow to tackle.
Awareness of the ‘Post-colonial mentality’ has also warned us about the ‘White saviour complex’ where misguided whites try to rescue people in distress in poorer countries. In less enlightened times the charity Comic Relief was immensely popular and raised £1.4 billion for desperately poor people. Then in 2019 journalist Stacey Dooley published an Instagram picture of herself holding a black child while visiting Comic Relief projects in Uganda. Her moral mistake was obvious to everyone and such things had to be stopped! Last year the charity announced plans to modernise its international appeal films for Red Nose Day by scrapping ‘white saviourism’ and images of poverty overseas in favour of local stories that ‘empower and preserve the agency of their subjects’. Sir Lenny Henry, life president and former trustee at the charity, said Comic Relief had gone through an ‘evolutionary process’. In future the charity would ‘no platform,’ donor-centric fundraising that perpetuates ‘poverty porn’ and reinforces ‘white saviourism’.
The CofE is also meeting this week for its once in a decade Lambeth Conference, bringing together Anglican churches all over the globe, and they will also be discussing the alphabet people. Nothing to do with religion but now a pressing issue for the church in the west, as opposed to the church in Africa. In 2014 schism loomed when several large African churches put up determined opposition to any reform and helped unite traditionalists in a large faction ready to break away from the more liberal churches in Britain and America. ‘We cannot allow our time and energy to be sapped by debating that which God has already revealed in Scripture,’ said the then Archbishop of Kenya. They just won’t be told you see, perhaps having read too many critiques of colonialism.
Some of us share the archbishop’s frustration at so much time spent on LGBT rights and wonder why what was once a personal matter is now so profoundly political and divisive, but perhaps that hardly matters as the future may be African; according to figures from the World Christian Database, in 2008, the majority, fifty-five percent of the world’s Anglicans live in sub-Saharan Africa; while only thirty-three percent of them live in Britain. That number is now much lower. According to the CofE’s own estimate, church attendance during this decade has dipped to approximately 1 million, about four percent of the population.
The wider UK population may also be influenced by more socially conservative attitudes due to immigration. In London the proportion of people identifying as religious is sixty-two percent, compared with fifty-three percent outside. According to a report, Religious London: Faith in a Global City, Londoners are nearly twice as likely to say sex before marriage is at least sometimes wrong, twenty-four percent compared to thirteen elsewhere, and are more likely to say the same about same-sex relationships, twenty-nine percent compared to twenty -three percent. Another paradox then; in the heart of what was once an evil global Christian empire, the people once ruthlessly colonised are having their say about what people should believe and how they should live; and no white liberal can disagree with them – without becoming themselves one of the colonialists they detest.
I seem to remember that the last Commonwealth Games resulted in many of the participants seeking aslyum from sexual ‘persecution’ in their African, Middle Eastern and Asian homelands. No doubt the same reasons will be given and accepted, for this years claims. Will we introduce deviance diversity quotas to ensure a hetro/homo normative balance? What would or should such a quota be? Should the possible consequences, benefits and costs of importing homosexuals or indeed anyone, even be discussed?
Of course not!
Surely, Jane, there is nothing wrong with Tom Daley protesting about the lack of human rights across the Commonwealth? It might be inconsistent with what we’re told about colonialism, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and I think you know that, deep down. That London is less tolerant of sexual freedoms than the rest of the country is hardly a good thing, and the by-product of mass immigration, most notably from Islamic countries. I’m going to have to disagree with your stance on this one. Those countries which lack gay rights are places which I doubt many here would want to live in. They also tend to be poor on human rights generally, and are often poorer. I for one don’t want us to go the same way. Perhaps some readers here would be happier in Kenya. I actually found this article quite offensive, and not worthy of its author.
But what do YOU think about gay sex, Jane? Your gay fanbase wants to know.
Removed for being offensive Editor
A disgusting comment. There really are some vile homophobes on this site.
Removed for being really offensive Editor
Diversity. Staging post to the Afro-Asian Socialist Republic of Britain?
Equality? – The Lovely Lionesses? Not until they are matched against “men” (ugh!) and win.
@ Sandra Cooke
The Lionesses are now said to be “too white”. (I think they already have at least one lesbian, no surprise there though.)
Next they will accused of not having any “differently abled” players.
How about a vibrantly diverse team of one-legged one-eyed trans Mbuti, Inuit and Runasimi – call them English, of course – something to aim towards?
What would Penny Mordaunt want?
Removed for being really offensive – Editor
The second part of your comment is, frankly, horrible and incredibly offensive.
If you are referring to average biological differences between European and African population lineages, and their social customs, I suggest, quite frankly, you consult the objectively “horrible” but credible data.
For starters: Dinesh D’Souza, “The End of Racism” (1995), chh.10-12; Stephen K. Sanderson, “Race and Evolution” (2022); “Black v. White Crime Statistics”, July 10, 2022 online; Google/Bing “African Population Explosion” entries; Archyde, “…Mass rapes shock South Africa,” July 30, 2022 online; Richard Lynn, “Race & Psychopathic Personality,” American Renaissance, August 29, 2008 online; Chief Rabbi Sacks on plummeting western birth-rates, Lifesite News, June 8, 2016 online.
Also watch some of the “offensive” Black “Music” Videos, especially Drill, or just download lyrics and album covers.
I wasn’t referring to that aspect of your post. (No, drill music isn’t my cup of tea, either.)
@ Daniel Goldstein
Readers will never know.
Some people will find some of the features of (say) Gay Pride even more “offensive” than (say) Black Lives Matter demos.
I don’t think my views on either homosexuality or race any more disgusting, unreasonable or undocumented than (say) George Gilder’s “Sexual Suicide” when people were allowed to express them. He was mistaken, however, on immigration, unlike (say) David Starkey, Douglas Murray or Bruce Bawer, who do not flaunt their orientation like (say) Stonewall or the Fetish Fight Club.
Facts are facts, and likes OR dislikes should not be prevented from verbal expression.
I do not wish to interfere in a charming exchange, except to make a comment that the free individual exercise of certain activities can have anti-social impacts. For example, taking cannabis can produce psychosis and has effects on the roads. TV programmes like “Naked Attraction” can “legitimise” teenage nude phone selfies. Drill music can contribute to gang crime. There are “gay” behaviours that encourage undesirable outcomes, for example in public lavatories (I have experienced three such events in the course of a long life and a weak bladder, two in London and one in Oxford.) If people are free to enjoy these pleasures, others should be free to discuss and even deplore them.
When they deleted comments by “D D Tee” I said nothing, because I’d never heard of “D D Tee”.
But when they deleted a comment by Brian S. Rockford, who sometimes makes interesting comments, I was inspired by Pastor Niemöller to say something.
What I have to say is that deletion of comments the editor dislikes is the editor’s privilege, but that the replacement of such comments by a comment by the editor is incipiently totalitarian.
“Removed for being offensive Editor”
“Removed for being really offensive Editor”
“Removed for being really offensive – Editor”
I’m reminded of recent antics by the BBC, in which Celebrity X is accused of a “racist slur” and Celebrity Y is accused of an “able-ist slur”, but we aren’t permitted to decide for ourselves, because the celebrities’ own words can’t be mentioned.
Please reassure me that the SR isn’t turning into the BBC!
I listed various aspects of the promiscuous “lifestyle” described and celebrated in “gay” literature itself or reported as medical facts. Maybe the Editor shared my disgust and wished to spare every reader, sheltered or otherwise, of any gender, orientation or sensitivity.
“Is not every editor a ruler of the world?” (Carlyle).
If that’s the case, well done Mr Editor! We don’t want the SR to turn into Drag Queen Story Hour.
It will be a pity if this not very relevant controversy distracts attention from Jane Kelly’s valuable article.
A few comments:
1. Stacey Dooley was also reprimanded for describing some women in burqas as Muslim extremists even though Islamic State flags were visible in the background and some of them were pointing a single finger in the air (an attack on the Christian God).
2. Jesse Owens gave a much friendlier account of the Berlin Olympics than the leftist legend.
3. Amanda Platell (Daily Mail, 30 July) and Brendan O’Neill (Spiked Online) have written excellent articles on the Common-Woke Commotion aka Birmingham Bedlam.