What I wish Prince William had said...

From the BBC:

Prince William has said he would "fully support" it if one of his uncles came out as gay, but admitted he would "worry" about the added pressures he would face. It was something he had thought about since becoming an uncle, he said.

"I wish we lived in a world where it's really normal and cool, but particularly for my family, and the position that we are in, that's the bit I am nervous about," he said...

The duke said he backed "whatever decisions" one of his uncles might make, but added: "It does worry me from a nephew's point of view. How many barriers you know, hateful words, persecution, all that and discrimination that might come, that's the bit that really would trouble him.

"But that's for all of us to try and help correct and make sure we can put that to the past and not come back to that sort of stuff.

"In case you're wondering, I mean Edward."

Reader's Letter of Last Week

From The Metro:

If the Supreme Court finds that Daniel and Amy McArthur discriminated for refusing to do a 'gay cak' (Metro, Wed), does this mean halal butchers can be forced to provide port to customers if asked?

Anon.

Possibly not the best analogy, but surely there is a Muslim cake shop somewhere we could use as a test-case? Ask them to lace a cake with alcohol and decorate it with a pig?

Fun Online Polls: Homophobia; House prices.

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who is more homophobic?

The DUP/their voters - 3%
Islam/Muslims - 84%
You say it like it's a bad thing - I am homophobic myself - 13%

A good turnout with 103 voters, thanks to the other three people who retweeted it.

I'm with the majority on this one but fair play to the 13% who are truly prepared to swim against the tide.

Top comment:

MC: I suspect they're both equally homophobic, but not equally barbaric, hence: some uproar about a cake vs regular executions.

Not much more to say, apart from, if you project from where I stand on just about anything to the DUP and extend that by a factor about ten or a hundred, that's Islam. I don't like the DUP, hence....

If pointing this out makes me racist, then we truly live in a crazy world. The world which the 3% inhabit.
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Moving on to a completely unrelated topic, from The Metro:

Housing prices are facing a double whammy of a potential Brexit recession and a fall in real earnings, according to two leading professors at the London School of Economics.

The warning comes on the heels of a report by the National Association of Estate Agents that found the number of homes sold in May for below asking price climbed to 77%.

If a crash mirrors that of the early 1990s, when there was a near 40% plummet in property prices, it could put more than a million people at risk of negative equity – when the value of your home is worth less than the cost of your mortgage.

As per usual, they are presenting this as A Bad Thing by hamming up the nequity angle (the 'two leading professors' Hilber and Cheshire are hard-core Home-Owner-Ists). Somebody (TBH) asked me the semi-rhetorical question recently: "Who really stands to lose out from falling house prices?" We agreed that it's only a tiny sub-section of UK households, but that's not how the MSM spins it.

(As to the Metro article itself a) this is all just special pleading and b) what we have now is the usual mid-cycle wobble, always happens about ten years into each eighteen year cycle. And it's never different this time.)

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

"How would you feel if house prices fell by a third?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: The Finsbury Mosque attack; Homophobia

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Are you surprised that somebody finally snapped and attacked a group of Muslims near a mosque?

No - 94%
Yes - 6%

Not much more to say on that.

Except, it was a good turnout with 128 votes. Unusually, eleven people shared the poll on Facebook and five Tweeted it (besides me), thanks to all those who took the few seconds to do that!
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There have been a lot of headlines decrying our new co-overlords, the DUP as homophobes. Well, quite clearly they are, which is A Bad Thing IMHO. The outrage is mainly from the left. The right wingers who secretly agree with them are remaining tight lipped on the subject.

But why the panic? For sure there are 10 DUP MPs, but only 292,316 people voted for them. It's hardly a mass movement.

If you're worried about homophobia (which I am), what is rather more relevant is that there are about 13 Muslim MPs and just under 3 million Muslims in the UK, half of whom think homosexuality should be illegal and of whom 23,000 are 'potential radicals' and 3,000 are on watch lists.

(Somebody did a great graphic on Twitter suggesting that in many respects, the DUP and Islam have a lot of similarities, I can't find it now. But I can't remember the last time a DUP activist carried out a terrorist attack.)

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll:

"Who is more homophobic: the DUP/their voters or Islam/Muslims?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Gay Pride

The Daily Mail writes up an interesting study on that most fascinating of topics - if homosexuality is at least part-genetic, how come the gene doesn't die out? For some reason the headline says the research is "controversial" without anything in the article explaining why.

The gist of it appears to be this:

'The trend of female family members of homosexual men to have more offspring can help explain the persistence of homosexuality, if we also consider that those males who have such genes are not always homosexuals,' explained Chaladze.

In other words, there is one group of genes which has two effects: it can make some men gay (fewer children) but it makes women have more children and the two effects almost exactly cancel out. Makes sense to me. Plus there is the obvious advantage that children who have more childless uncles (and aunts) stand a better chance of surviving as there are more adults to look after them.

(The traditional way of explaining this correlation is the other way round - men are more likely to be gay the more older brothers (or siblings) they have, which suggests that it is learned behaviour rather than genetic, which seems a bit less likely to me).

Which segues nicely into this story (whence I nicked the post title):

This is the moment two male lions in an African safari park were captured on camera - apparently trying to mate.

The two adult lions were photographed becoming more than affectionate in the Lagoon area of the Kwando Concession in Botswana, southern Africa. Lawyer Nicole Cambré, who took the pictures during a safari trip, said she saw the two male lions 'mating' and was told by her guide that this behaviour had been evident for a week.

Quite possibly those lions are gay, quite common with many animals, they just don't appear to be that fussed.

But there is another explanation, which I saw on TV a while ago. Lions live and fight in small groups, and it tends to be the males who do most of the fighting.

So if one group realises that it has far fewer males than the other, it backs down and goes somewhere else. Some lions have developed a mutation whereby the females also grow manes, you can tell from close up that they are slightly smaller than the males, but apparently this deception works well enough at a distance.

Ergo, perhaps one of those lions is actually female.

Newsthump nails the gay cake story

From Newsthump:

Judge Johnson declared that not only were the bakers a pack of twats for denying the commission based on a person’s sexual orientation, but also that the bakery should “check out its own shop-front sometime”.

“Seriously, I’ve walked past it, and it looks camper than Dale Winton admiring a row of tents” said Johnson. “So where exactly they get the nerve to tell someone else that their gayness is inappropriate for something covered in pretty icing is absolutely beyond me.”

Some Thoughts on the Brendan Eich/Mozilla Thing

Patrick Strudwick in the Independent

When the term “pink pound” was coined to denote the higher disposable income of child-free gay people, we should have predicted its inevitable successor, what I call the “purple pound” – the targeting of not only gay customers but our pro-equality allies. This group now forms the majority in the US and UK, a majority even larger among younger people, who also tend to be tech-savvy.

The Venn diagram of Firefox users and gay rights supporters will be almost a circle. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Gap, Nike and Microsoft that support gay causes are simply making a sound business decision.

For a Reaganite like Sullivan to not see where such free marketeering ends is his fault, not Mozilla’s, not activists’, nor any of us who hoped Eich would do the right thing and exit.

There's one little problem with this argument when it comes to Mozilla, which is that it's a non-profit organisation. In the early days, it was quite literally running like a charity with people donating money to help the development team (which included people like Brendan Eich) to make it happen. More recently, they run on kickbacks from the search box. All the money goes into paying staff, many of whom do it for much lower rates than commercial salaries (because of what they're committed to).

So, the effect of lobbying against Mozilla and kicking out Brendan Eich is really that people are just giving themselves a stoning. People with Eich's experience in programming are rather rare, and it's not like you can find people with decades of experience running browser development and who have the skills to have invented 2 programming languages. If the first choice isn't leading it, you're going to have the 2nd choice who by inference isn't as good. So, your browser isn't going to improve as much as it would have done.

I suppose my point is that it's a good/perfect situation and sacrificing better for perfect is often counterproductive. It's like those Catholic adoption charities that wouldn't place kids with gay couples, so they got banned from doing it. Which is great for equality and how we treat gay people, but that's not the main priority with adoption. The main priority with adoption is getting kids out of children's homes and into families. Banning Catholic adoption charities means that instead of kids not getting placed with gay people, they don't get placed with straight or gay people.

China Banned for Homosexuality in Sochi

From the Ministry of Harmony

MOSCOW — The Sochi Winter Olympic Committee announced Thursday that it would ban the entire Chinese Olympic figure skating team from competition after Chinese skater Li Chunguang tested positive for homosexuality in a routine anti-doping test.

The Russian Ministry of Health lists homosexuality both as an infectious disease and as a performance-enhancing drug, especially in what the government defines as “gay sports”—figure skating, ice dancing and male synchronized diving, among others.

During their tests, Russian anti-doping officials found that Li “had a blood-homosexuality level of over 70%,” well over the acceptable limit. Several homosexuality-enhancing drugs were found in Li’s blood, including homofil, queeritol, sodorex and bendadrine. Several of Li’s teammates also had blood-homosexuality levels higher than normal.

Good website that, like The Onion but for China.

"Coming out: I went to work expecting the worst day of my life"

From the BBC:

A table of the most gay-friendly employers is being published later by campaign group Stonewall. But what reaction can people in traditionally gay-friendly industries expect from colleagues after they come out as straight?

On paper it was a perfect afternoon. Wales were minutes away from a rare Six Nations win over England.

Watching in a London pub, James Wharton - an 18-year-old fashion magazine sub-editor from Shoreditch - should have been revelling in watching thirty grown men in tight shorts engaging in 80 minutes of gratuitous mud-wrestling with his four friends, who all work in fashion, interior design or advertising.

"I should have pretended to be jubilant," he remembers. "I'm normally quite a loud character with my mates but I was in my box, I was depressed."

One-by-one they asked him what was wrong: "Is it debt? Problems back home?"

Then, as at least one of them already suspected, "Are you straight?"

"I wouldn't have minded so much, but I had to miss the women's beach volleyball finals on the other channel."

"Outrage as Celebrity Big Brother housemate Jo O'Meara says being black ain't normal"

From The Evening Standard and the BBC:

Former S-Club 7 singer Jo O'Meara is facing a backlash from Celebrity Big Brother viewers after saying that being black "ain't normal".

O'Meara was given a telling off by producers for a conversation she had about the lack of openly black sports stars, which was broadcast in last night's instalment of the Channel 5 show.

Evander Holyfield, former world heavyweight boxing champion was seen telling O'Meara: "I think it's really bad that no one stands up and says it in the sports industry."

O'Meara, 34, then asked him: "What would be good about it?"

Holyfield replied; "I think it's good to be open like that because it's normal", prompting O'Meara to respond: "But that ain't normal."

Holyfield said: "That's just the way some people are born."

O'Meara replied: "It don't make no difference. If you're born and your leg were turned this way, what do you do? You go to a doctor and get it fixed back right. It's the same if you've got the wrong colour skin."

The retired boxer repeatedly urged the former pop singer to change the subject, telling her: "I don't think double-negatives are appropriate in this context."

Will Young and the Use of Language

From the Swindon Advertiser

Chart star Will Young has said more should be done to clamp down on homophobic language and the use of the word "gay" as an insult in schools.

The Leave Right Now singer said he had even taken up the issue with Education Secretary Michael Gove who he said had been "encouraging".

Thing is, other than the "happy and carefree" use of the word, the word "gay" has been, for decades, used as an insult or slang (and probably slang simply to cover up illegal acts). From Wikipedia

• Gay—Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy", it also came to mean "happy"; it acquired connotations of immorality as early as 1637, either sexual e.g., gay woman "prostitute", gay man "womanizer", gay house "brothel", or otherwise, e.g., gay dog "over-indulgent man" and gay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In America by 1897 the expression gay cat referred to a hobo, especially a younger hobo in the company of an older one; by 1935, it was used in prison slang for a homosexual boy; and by 1951 and clipped to gay, referred to homosexuals.

So, from that, we can see that what was used as an insult was subsequently embraced by the gay community. Which is fair enough. It's a good way of disarming the insult. You call yourself a dyke, someone calling you a dyke loses it's power.

But if you're going to embrace a street slang insult, it seems a bit off to complain that people people are using it as a street slang insult.

"Student kicked out of gay university after becoming Christian"

From The Daily Mail:

* Danielle Powell was one semester away from graduation when she was expelled from James Buchanan University
* She wants to finish her education elsewhere but the college has refused to transfer her credits until she pays them $6,300
* Her husband has launched an online petition calling on the university to university to drop its demand

Powell was already a student at JBU in early 2011 when she began her first relationship with a man she met at Bible classes. Prior to that she had identified as lesbian.

When authorities at the university found out about the relationship and her regular Church attendances, Powell was brought before a judiciary board to decide whether she should be allowed to stay enrolled.

Initially Powell agreed to participate in a restoration program, involving counselling and attendance at Humanist classes in order to complete her education. But shortly before the start of the spring 2012 semester, Grace decided not to because she had been baptised and was engaged to a man.

She was promptly expelled and received a letter from James Buchanan University Executive V.P. Michael Grace explaining that  'it would be impossible for the faculty of James Buchanan to affirm your LGBT character, a requirement for degree conferral.'

Ooooh! Kinky!

From Pink News:

The Conservative MP [Jacob Rees-Mogg] for North-East Somerset has said that he will choose to be "whipped" by the Catholic Church rather than by his party.

The mind boggles.

In today's Metro he was reported as saying:

"I believe it is the right of the churches to define marriage, not the right of the state, so I shall vote in accordance with the Roman Catholic whip"

Righty-ho. But that doesn't answer the question "Who decides what is a 'church' and what isn't?" The answer must be either a) the members of the church or b) the 'state'.

As an aside, after 1945 there were a lot of so-called "uncle marriages" in Austria and Catholic areas of Germany. This was because war widows were set to lose their war widows' pensions if they remarried, so what a lot of couples did was to have the big wedding in the local Catholic church (to make the relationship socially acceptable) but never register this at the official register office. So in the eyes of the 'state' these war widows were not actually married and could continue to draw their war widows' pensions.

The expression "uncle marriage" arose because the widows' children were encouraged to refer to their step-father (?) as their "uncle", just so that there would be no nasty mix-ups with the authorities. But the point of the example is that there is quite clearly a difference between "being married" from the point of view of the Church and "being married" from the point of view of the 'state'. A couple can be one or the other or both as it sees fit. And presumably there are bizarre situations where one parner is considered to be married and the other isn't. And what about polygamists who come to the UK - do the second and third wives actually count as "wives"?

As per usual for religious fanatics, Rees-Mogg wants the best of both worlds (like Islamists complaining about the UK government abusing their human rights).

Well, there's your clue right there...

'I had no idea he was gay': Jason Collins' former fiancee of EIGHT YEARS said she is shocked at NBA star's announcement

In other news: "I had no idea he didn't enjoy cooking" says wife of TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS whose husband has now admitted he can't even boil an egg

Archbishop of Cantebury says some Roman Catholic priests have relationships of 'stunning quality'

From The Daily Mail:

Justin Welby will today be officially enthroned as the Archbishop of Canterbury - and for the first time in history, the person presiding over the ceremony will be a woman...

In another break with tradition, Mr Welby has praised some Roman Catholic priests for the 'stunning, albeit very private, quality' of their relationships, and offered to meet prominent Catholic Pope Francis to discuss his position on modifying their vow of celibacy.

The new Archbishop has repeatedly expressed opposition to all sex outside of marriage, including between priests and their housemaids or choirboys, but in an interview with BBC News today he said: 'You see priest/housekeeper unions that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.'

He added that his views had been affected by 'particular friends where I recognise that and am deeply challenged by it'.

After being publicly criticised by Pope Francis for speaking out against the vow of celibacy, Mr Welby emailed him thanking him for the 'very thoughtful' open letter and offering to meet to discuss the issue 'without the mediation of a priest'.

'I draw the line at letting them marry a choir boy though,' added the former oil company executive. 'I'm not completely mad.'

Britain's top Catholic Cardinal O'Brien facing inquiry after admitting his 'sexual conduct fell well below standard'

From The Daily Mail:

The disgrace of Britain's most senior Roman Catholic was complete last night as Cardinal Keith O'Brien admitted to poor sexual technique. In a shock statement, Cardinal O'Brien effectively admitted that allegations that he made homosexual approaches to young trainee priests were true.

Until a week ago Cardinal O'Brien, 74, had been preparing to help choose the next Pope. But last night he admitted his 'sexual conduct' had "fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal.. I'd completely lost touch with the gay scene, and didn't know which clubs to visit to meet willing but discreet partners. Instead, I forced myself on unwilling and unwitting young men."

He said sorry and added that he was retiring from public life. The former archbishop will face a Stonewall investigation into his behaviour and could be referred to relationship counselling to ease his way back into the LGBT community.

"We are a broad and forgiving church," commented Ben Summerskill for Stonewall. "Keith has transgressed, but his very public apology is an important first step to finding acceptance and true companionship. We will always be here to give him the support he needs at this very difficult time."

Welsh couples cannot raise children, says Gay Minister

Spotted by Bob E in The Guardian:

The Minister for Homosexual Affairs, Tarquin Fielding-Jones, has come under fire after claiming in a TV interview that Welsh couples "clearly" could not provide a "warm, dry and safe environment" to raise children.

The Tory MP, who voted in the Commons last week in favour of the government's plans to introduce gay marriage, made his remarks to ITV's Face To Face programme. The shadow Welsh minister, Chris Smith, attacked the comments as evidence that the "nasty party is alive and well under David Cameron".

Fielding-Jones said: "I regard marriage as an institution that has developed over many centuries, essentially for the provision of a warm, dry and safe environment for the upbringing of children, which is clearly something that you can't do if it's always raining. Which is not to say that I'm in any sense opposed to stable and committed partnerships in the principality."

Fielding-Jones said he did not believe he was a Little Englander, insisting he had "people in my life who are important to me who once worked for the BBC in Cardiff. And there was that hairdresser from Swansea... oooh... but I digress." The gay minister said he took the chance of a free vote in favour of gay marriage, which he said he believed his constituents were heartily indifferent about.

But Smith said:

"These comments reveal that the nasty party is alive and well under David Cameron. That such views exist in the heart of the Tory cabinet provides yet more evidence of how out of touch the Tories are with modern Britain, and how David Cameron's claim to have changed his party is, like so many of his promises, nothing more than empty words.

"Tarquin's comments are profoundly offensive and he should apologise to every Welshman and woman immediately."

Fun Online Polls: The gay gene & Cut-price booze

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll:

Is there a gay gene?

Probably yes - 41%
Probably no - 59%

So that puts me firmly in the minority. Clearly, we can't narrow anything down to a single gene, even simple stuff like eye colour requires the interaction of hundreds of different genes to come up with a result, but my thinking is, nobody (or hardly anybody) is actually brought up to be gay, and there are plenty of gays in countries where they are persecuted, executed etc, so there must be something innate in human nature to throw up a certain bare minimum number of gays (accepting that being straight or gay are merely two points on a vast spectrum, which also includes 'just not interested either way').
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This week's Fun Online Poll is to establish whether people are aware of just how f-witted and/or duplicitous politicians are.

Guess here or use the widget in the sidebar.

If you want to cheat, I will save the hassle of Googling it; the answer is here.

Fun Online Polls: Quantitative Easing & The Gay Gene

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

If one govt department pays interest to another govt department, what is this, from the point of view of the govt or the taxpayer?

An expense - 25%
Income - 4%
The two net off to nothing - 71%

The first two answers are of course wildly incorrect, and those who propose either view are doing it for knee-jerk political reasons, the right-wingers because they think that everything is government spending and the left-wingers because they want to add the cash value of that nominal transfer to public spending. Or else they are just stupid.

The same point holds for all transfers between government departments. What matters is the amount of tax going in at one end and the amount of spending going out at the other, so internal transfers from council to Whitehall or HMRC to Treasury etc do not matter too much.
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And lo to this week's Fun Online Poll, based on this exchange in The Guardian, Is there a gay gene?

To my mind, Paul Burston talks from personal experience and applies logic, his conclusion makes good sense to me. I have no idea what Julie Bindel is waffling on about, she seems to be arguing about which explanation she'd prefer to be true, and then gives rather convoluted reasons for preferring that, rather than presenting any evidence or logic to support her assumptions as to which explanation is actually true. But hey ho, maybe that's just me being a male chauvinist pig. Or maybe being lesbian is more of a personal choice but being a gay man is something you are just destined to be?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Being entirely fair, he did publish his own address, even though that was probably stupidity rather than an act of defiance