Rod Liddle
You shouldn’t be arrested for ...
Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him
Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him
‘If a man has sexual relations with a man, as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’
Britain’s most energetic and entertaining bigot, Stephen Green of Christian Voice, has at last managed to get himself arrested. His crime was to hand out leaflets, which quoted the above passage from the Bible, in a park in Cardiff. Stephen believes that Leviticus got it right about homosexuality, although perhaps it does not go far enough, all things considered. He will, if you press him, tell you that homosexuality is an abomination and wicked and evil and so on. It’s all in his book The Sexual Dead-End.
Anyway, what happened in Cardiff was this, Stephen told me. ‘We were there handing out these leaflets when a couple of coppers turned up, wearing fluorescent jackets with “Minority Support Unit” on the back. One of them came up to me and said, “stop handing out those leaflets.” I asked why I should stop and he said that if I didn’t, he’d do me for littering. I told him I had no intention of stopping and handed a leaflet to the next person who passed by, at which point the copper said, “right, you’re nicked,” and carted me off to Cardiff police station where I spent four hours in the cells.’
Stephen, with some justification, finds all of this very funny indeed and we had to break off our conversation for a while because he couldn’t stop giggling about the policeman ‘prancing around in his fluorescent jacket’. The upshot was, Mr Green got charged under Section Five of the 1986 Public Order Act and there was, as it transpired, no charge relating to the alleged ‘littering’. He is due back in court on 28 September and, I dare say, will be fervently hoping to get banged up.
What a terrible thing it is to find oneself unreservedly on the side of a chap like Stephen Green, a man who serves to remind us that Islam does not have a monopoly on intolerance and mediaeval opinions (or, indeed, pre-mediaeval in Stephen’s case). But one cannot always choose one’s allies. So much about this case is simultaneously ludicrous, offensive and hilarious that it is difficult to know quite where to begin.
There’s the comparatively minor infringement of human rights in the actions of that puffed-up rozzer bullying and threatening Stephen Green with a wholly fictitious charge of littering (assuming, for a moment, that Stephen was telling the truth. It sounded as if he was and — remember — God speaks to Stephen on a daily basis so He would be mightily aggrieved if He discovered Stephen had lied to The Spectator).
It was not Mr Green who was doing the littering, of course, but sentient members of the public who read the leaflet and found it so stupid that they immediately cast it to the ground, unable to wait until they found a suitable receptacle. Then there’s the mere existence of these Minority Support Units; the chest-beating pomposity of the name; the knowledge that your local police force, wherever you are, is compelled to divert its manpower and capital into these fatuous and fashionable cadres, while the statistics for real street crimes, i.e., crimes where you get stabbed or smacked about and your wallet is nicked, continue to soar.
But the real point, the crucial piece of lunacy, is that these days one can be arrested for simply quoting from the Holy Bible, the book upon which our society is based, which has given us our language and our code of morals. Stephen Green knows that this is an absurdity and is as likely to provoke outrage in hell-bent sinners like me, who believe that homosexuality is absolutely tickety-boo, as in loads of other people who think sodomy is frankly a bit rum but not necessarily deserving of the death sentence — just as it is in those fellow travellers of Stephen’s who believe that stuff written by some anonymous priest shortly after the wheel was invented is still vitally relevant today.
It is more outrageous, even, than the threatened prosecution of the former boss of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme that he believed homosexuality to be, by and large, detrimental to civil society. In fact, Mohammed’s hadith on homosexuality (often regarded by Islamic liberals as a ‘weak’ hadith) is almost identical, both syntactically and semantically, to that quotation from Leviticus: ‘Kill the one who does it and the one to whom it is done.’ Liberally minded multiculturalists would probably aver that the persecution of Green and Sacranie is equally nonsensical; but my argument is that, for better or for worse, we are still at least nominally a Christian country and that effectively to outlaw part of the book on which our society is based is a palpable and clear absurdity.
Have homosexuals been protected by the arrest of Stephen Green? What danger did he pose to them? My suspicion is that their position in British society remains untouched by his prosecution or, maybe, has been made infinitesimally worse — because, of course, your average person will find himself instinctively on the side of Stephen Green and some may be inclined to blame the gay community for foisting iniquitous legislation upon us. In reality, of course, nobody cares one jot what Stephen Green or Sir Iqbal Sacranie thinks about buggery; but at the same time few of us are so convinced of our own inviolable rectitude that we would prevent, by law, other people from having their say.
It seems so obvious as to be almost unworthy of mention that Stephen Green must have yearned with every inch of his being for the predicament in which he finds himself. The slightly irritating thing for someone like me — who finds both the man and his views as daft as a brush — is that he has done us all a favour by highlighting the terrible mess we have got ourselves into, through trying to make everybody love, respect and cherish everybody else by law. We have found ourselves in the bizarre position of outlawing opinions that are most likely held by a good 50 per cent of the population of the country. Who has the right to decree that Stephen Green — and Sacranie, Mohammed, that anonymous priest from Leviticus et al — are not merely mistaken, but should be arrested for stating their views? The prosecution of Green would have shocked the liberal intellectual of 150 years ago:
‘We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.’