Comments on homosexuality (Iris Robinson)

When I first heard Iris Robinson’s comments on homosexuality, I felt embarrassed to come from the same part of the world as her. I mean, in this day and age, here’s a Northern Irish politician offering to refer homosexuals to a nice Christian psychiatrist who can (apparently) turn them straight. She also opposes gay parenting on the grounds that kids may be bullied by their peers, rather than, for example, calling for zero tolerance of homophobic bullying. But here’s my favourite quote of hers: “Envisage, down the road, a child […] going into their parents’ bedroom, as is natural for a child to do, and finding two women or two men making love.” The horror! Look, pretty much anybody is going to be horrified if they walk in on their parents having sex. Just as our parents generally like to imagine we don’t have sex, we like to pretend they don’t either. It’s best if everyone just doesn’t think about it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by her remarks, anyway - she’s in the DUP, the party that brought us the Save Ulster From Sodomy campaign, in which her husband took part thirty years ago. (“The campaign was ultimately unsuccessful,” smirks Wikipedia.) But I shouldn’t be all that embarrassed, either – it’s not like Scotland is glitch-free. This has been made fairly evident by Garry Otton’s work in Scotsgay. He’s got a scathing sense of humour, set against a nice backdrop of righteous anger, preventing the reader from getting waylaid by despair. Interviewing him this month was a really enjoyable experience, and the book he’s working on right now should be a valuable document, given that many people I know were too young – or not in Scotland – to remember the saga of Section 28. The fact that some of the stories he recounts already seem absurd goes to show how quickly things can change, and given the response to Iris Robinson’s remarks (over 15,000 signed an online petition calling for Gordon Brown to reprimand her), maybe things aren’t all that hopeless back home either.