How Homophobes Are Helping Equality

Linda Harvey

From Pink News: 

Mrs [Linda] Harvey, who broadcasts an obscure radio programme, at the very least provides the most comical and deluded arguments you have ever heard against homosexuality. 

Mrs Harvey has recently claimed that gay people are not human, so are not protected by the US constitution. She also believes that Jesus could be forced to marry a man if he is resurrected and that gay rights is killing children. 

Listening to Mrs Harvey’s clap trap is not unlike the bizarre experience I had when the British writer Lynette Burrows debated me at the Oxford Union. She claimed that a child would be brought up better by a “drug addict slut” than the “pretend fathers”, my boyfriend and I would one day like to be. Her ludicrous and offensive comments made my victory over more mild mannered anti-equality speakers she was grouped with a lot easier. 

The reality is that around half of the readers of these sorts stories are not LGBT, they are people who have been shared them by their LGBT friends. Their sense of moral outrage is in my view incredibly useful in dispelling the more reasonable arguments of mild mannered homophobes. They share the stories on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit all with a sense of shock at what hateful people say about LGBT people. 

Remember the US judge who claimed that lesbians could be ‘cured’ by being forced to have sex with male soldiers? That was shared 62,000 times on Facebook and has been read more than two and a half million times over the past three years, primarily, we believe, by straight people.