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I read your column [no. 81] on gay-o-matic-marriage (TM). It is too late, I think. Almost everyone I know (in England) seems to think homosexuality is a jolly nice idea and minoritarily legitimate, fudge, fudge, muddle, muddle etc: but dont mention what gays actually get up to. I confess that I rather enjoy talking to liberal friends about what exactly gays do get up to, and they beg me to stop, while holding on to their ideas all the same. But I had a thought, which might interest you.
It was about PRIME MINISTERIAL MARRIAGE. We are clearly in an age in which Prime Ministers not only have to be enwived but enchildrened: and, even better, getting on with the betrothal and begetting on 24-hour-continuous-televisual-feed. It is fairly common for people to say Now, Heath is impossible. But I thought that a good question for modern soft-shoed English liberals would be What would you say to a Homosexual Prime Minister? A poll would not reveal anything decisive; but the question would have a striking effect. I think people would divide on whether they would cling to their liberal principles (Why not?) and suppress their sense that it does not seem quite right (as illiberal), or find themselves making an apologetic admission that it would not be a good idea. I think thatll be the revolution: when our Leader is not only a Public Fornicator but Public Sodomite. My particular point is that our recent enthusiasm for procreative Prime Ministers (the last three) is in fact a sign that the homosexual lobby has quite a lot of work to do.
Perhaps the Prime Minister of the future and his Hairdressing Friend or Partner could adopt a child on television.
You are right about muddle. Everyone is torn between:
(i) tribal morality (i.e. dont be a love-rat, look after the kids, lifes a trial but you have to see it through)
(ii) hedonistic morality (i.e. everything is all right as long as it doesnt cause suffering)
and in the trade-off between the two they frolic in (ii) until experience beats them down a bit and they become tired and perhaps unattractive and settle into (i). But it is hard to state this morality, because it is ad hoc, and shifts from era to era of ones life.
I wonder if English puritanism is of the sort that the closet, hypocrisy, shame etc. are all destroyed once the cat gets out of the bag. It must be different in the hotter countries. It is here [Turkey], for instance, where I do not cause offence when I speak about these matters.
James Alexander
copyright © 2012 Brian Lee
. . . phone-ins about ME, youve posted-in by fax,
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brazen confessionals, sit.-coms of your angst,
quips, puns, pranks, whims, skits and twitches,
conceits, ideas, issues, brainwaves, itches
in scintillating diction, comical-hysterical,
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if its catchy and punchy and delivered with a grin,
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among the continuous tinnitus of shame
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Brian Lee