Listen / Read
Anne Atkins exists purely to enrage reasonable people everywhere. She wraps her bigotry in ostensible harmlessness and Middle English decorum and decants it in her best china. I think she’s probably the worst person in the world ever. Well, the worst woman at least.
Everything I’d want to say on the significance of race, specifically in regards to Barack Obama, I said yesterday. And I couldn’t care less who the bestest nippy car driver is.
It’s great how she slips the little I’ll have you know some of my best friends are gays comment in there. Smooth.
I feel a little ill-equipped to tackle the Anglican position on homosexuality right now. There’s been so much controversy over it I feel like it all turned out as a bit of an anti-climax. I’ll make it my mission over the weekend to inform myself of the specifics. For now though, I just wanted to briefly comment on an article published in the Independent in 1996, linked from Platitude of the Day. I’d only just started my GCSEs in 1996, so I’m afraid I don’t recall the controversy over comments she made about homosexuality on Thought for the Day. Something else I’ll try and follow up. Afterwards she had this to say :
There is nothing wrong with homosexual orientation, but sex outside marriage is wrong. Homosexual orientation is a fact. God’s word is clear that there should be no sex except within marriage. Homosexuality is not sinful, but sexual acts outside marriage are.
Hair splitting bigotry like this sickens me. Of course, the only kind of marriage allowed is marriage between a man and a woman (or a man and women, if you’re a Mormon). Thus homosexuality, by her own definition, is always a sinful act because it can never take place within marriage.
I realise the parallels I’m about to draw might not quite be tantamount, but I’m going to draw them anyway because twat-logic like this reminds me of the less veiled bigotry of the Civil Rights Era. Allow me to channel a typical example of such venom (I’m making this up off the top of my head because I’ve not got the time to find an actual quotation, but plenty like this have been documented) :
I like Negroes. Some of my best cotton pickers are Negroes. As long as they don’t sit next to me on the bus, eat in the same restaurant as me, drink from the same fountain as me, live in the same neighbourhood as me or send their kids to the same school as mine, I’ve not got a problem with Negroes.
Similarly there’s the statement of it being ‘nonsense to think [of Christians] that they were hostile to homosexual people, as opposed to homosexual acts’. Or, in the typically chosen language: we hate the sin, not the sinner. This is best china bigotry all over again. It’s like saying: of course I like black people, I love black people, it’s just their skin pigmentation I despise with every fibre of my being.
I hate all that Anne Atkins stands for and believes in. Ergo, I hate Anne Atkins.