'Columnist' writes 'column'

With a sense of grim inevitability, Pete 'Peter' Hitchens yesterday waded into the gay adoption debate and surprised us all by siding with the homos in the name of liberty. No, of course he fucking didn't, he wrote We show tolerance to ‘gays’ and get tyranny in return. The best part of this article is the opening three lines, where Pete insists that he really doesn't want to write about the gays, but they just kind of force him by constantly thrusting their hot groins in his face or something:

If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don’t want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know.

It's not entirely clear what the bit about homosexuals forcing Pete to read intimate details of their sordid, lubed-up depravity has to do with gay adoption, or indeed anything, but it's an intriguing argument, and one I read a lot; this idea that yeah, gays can do whatever they want behind closed doors, but 'we don't wanna hear about it', as if the whole gay rights movement is about literally providing Pete Hitchens with pornographic details about the act of man-to-man bumsex.

It's tempting to conclude that whenever Pete hears the word 'homosexual' or 'gay', his brain is immediately filled with thoughts of actual gay sex. I'd like to meet him and see if he feels the same about being introduced to the idea of heterosexual couples...

Me: "Pete, I'd like you to meet my girlfriend..."
Pete Hitchens: "Hold on a second there! What you and your 'girlfriend' get up to behind closed doors is your own, disgusting, business. If you must talk to me, please bear in mind that I have no desire to hear about the disgraceful carnal sins that you and your girlfriend presumably commit. For goodness sake, have a sense of decorum, young man! I didn't come here for an orgy!"

The rest of the article is similar to Phillips' piece from my last entry, lots of [citation needed] type stuff about a mysterious gay agenda that apparently says he can't call homosexuals 'homosexuals', even though he does so on five separate occasions in this article alone:

And that’s another thing. We can’t even call homosexuals ‘homosexuals’ any more. This neutral word is not considered enthusiastic enough. We have to say ‘gay’. Which is exactly why I don’t, apart from in inverted commas.

Hitch's inverted-commas revolution starts here! His main point about the whole adoption story is the bit about how the grandparents were forced to pretend they liked it:

Next, the grandparents are informed that the children are to be put into the care of a homosexual couple. And – this is the crucial moment – they are warned in the most terrifying terms that if they object to this arrangement they will never see their grandchildren again.

Leave aside the rest of it. It is this demand, that they mouth approval of the new regime like the defendants at some show trial, which is the bit that ought to make your flesh creep.

Of course, we have no idea if that was true. This idea was based entirely on a quote from the grandparents themselves, but as I mentioned in the comments to the last entry, the reason this story is gold dust to the likes of the Mail is that the rules prevent social services from talking about specific cases and hence having any kind of comeback to allegations made. So the only version of the story we get is that of the aggrieved party (the grandfather in this case), who said:

When he protested to social workers, the grandfather alleges he was told: "You can either accept it and there's a chance you'll see the children twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again."

I would be staggered if that were a verbatim quote, but we'll never know. There could be a nugget of truth there, but it could be hugely exaggerated and paraphrased. Still, Pete hangs his entire piece on this allegation. But then Pete is always resolutely sure of his own ideas, and who is to blame. If you've never read Hitch before, the thing to bear in mind is that his entire worldview is based on the notion that everything went irreversibly to shit with the Sixties, and that most of the things that have come since have damaged our nation's soul. Including rock music...

First, their daughter ends up as a drug abuser, like so many others in a country which permits the endless promotion of drug use by rock stars and refuses to punish the possession of narcotics, the only measure that would work.

...and, of course, everything else including comprehensive schools, atheism and video games (which are to blame for a story of horrendous violence in the next bit of his column):

The callousness of fatherless, comprehensive-educated, Godless, TV-entertained, computer-game desensitised, cannabis-crazed and lagered-up Britain is perfectly demonstrated in the pictures of Johnathan Robinson, a pub landlord whose robbers dragged him from his car, ran him over, broke his leg and then stamped on his face for fun (since he was by then helpless).

The problem with this is, the reason the Johnathan Robinson case made the news is because it was an abnormally violent act. This is a trick the media likes to use; the promotion of the idea that something so extreme is actually broadly representative of where the country is going. Of course, Pete knows exactly where this one incident is clearly leading our society:

We have bred a generation of concentration camp guards, and if as a society we later turn to mass murder, nobody will need to wonder much why and how it happened.

Video games, right?