Day 3314: Holocaust Memorial Day – You May Avert Your Gays

Wednesday:


It's UNSUBTLE isn't it, to have to bring up the Equality Bill when we're remembering the ultimate HORRIBLE consequences of NOT just treating people as people. And yet here we are: STILL not learning the lessons of history.

Let's be fair, six MILLION Jewish people being murdered for NO REASON is way more than the quarter of a million Gypsy/Romany people being murdered for the identical NO REASON and the quarter of a million differently-abled people being murdered for not fitting into a BONKERS and completely-ignorant-of-how-evolution-works EUGENIC stereotype and the we-don't-actually-know-how-many gay people murdered that we DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW because when the surviving Jews and Romany and Polish Slavs and black people and prisoners of war and the rest got liberated the Allies DIDN'T liberate the gay mommies and daddies because being gay was STILL A CRIME!!!!!

But it shouldn't be the SIZE of your holocaust that matters, but the fact that it happened AT ALL. That some people could pick a community to blame and vilify and ultimately destroy is WRONG. IT doesn't matter whether that is a community of millions or one of hundreds. Every single person is uniquely different and that should be a reason for CELEBRATION not an excuse to put people in boxes. And then LITERALLY put some of them in boxes.

So now, the much trumpeted Liberaling of Britain revealed by the British Social Attitudes Survey, shows that since we've gone from the heady days of Conservatory Section 28 and Colin and Barry on EastEnders to swinging modern Civil Partnerships and, er, Christian and Syed on EastEnders so the public have swung from two in three agreeing that cuddles between people of the same gender is always wrong to ONE in three agreeing that cuddles between people of the same gender is always wrong… oh, we have a LOOOOOOOONG way to go.

And yet STILL the Bishops of the Church of England whine on about wanting SPECIAL RIGHTS so they don't have to follow the same laws as everyone else, just because they BELIEVE that they have a right to be NASTY. Suppose they demanded the right to fire people just because they weren't WHITE enough. No one, but no one would give them even a SECOND before ticking them right off. But if they want the special right to treat people as second class because they aren't heteronormative enough…

Sigh.

Steps towards treating people AS people have been made, sometimes in the face of the government kicking and screaming and having to be dragged to the European court and made to behave like a grown up. And, mark you, that's the CURRENT Hard Labour Government, never mind the preceding Conservatories. But it's FRAGILE and the forces of Conservatism are bringing their full evil might to bear. It would be all too easy for Mr Balloon – with his history of throwing bones to his right wing nutters, and his alliance with homophobic Parties in the EU Parliament – to cave and bring in Section 28 II this time it's personal… again!

So the BEST way to remember the Holocaust and all its victims is to ask yourself this: what are you doing to stop it ever happening again?


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