If it wasn’t for the tragic loss of dozens of lives, the intellectual gymnastics which have followed the shootings in Norway would actually be quite funny. As it is, they’re just the icing on a particularly depressing cake. It’s not just the screeching u-turn the punditocracy (and the editorial staff at the Sun) performed after [...]
TTE readers will probably be aware of the ‘It Gets Better’ internet campaign against homophobic bullying. This was started by the brilliant American sex advice columnist Dan Savage, reacting to the suicide of Billy Lucas, a fifteen-year old gay teenager who hanged himself after suffering intense homophobic abuse from his peers. His mission statement: “I wish I could [...]
Take a train to Wickford, Essex, and then drive for a half an hour beyond the edge of the town, and you come to Dale Farm, the biggest traveller site in the country. There are almost 100 families now living on the site, half of them in small, semi-permanent chalets, the rest in caravans. A [...]
This week’s overturning of Proposition 8 in California is obviously welcome news. Amending California’s state constitution to state that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” is nakedly discriminatory and Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike it down should be applauded. There is, though, something else that’s important [...]
Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still [...]
If you get the Independent you might have read Christina Patterson’s invective against her Orthodox Jewish neighbours in Stamford Hill. In an article entitled “The Limits of Multi-Culturalism” Patterson pours out all her gripes against the community. She would like, she tells us, “to teach my neighbours some manners”: I would like, for example, to [...]
A while ago I criticised Peter Tatchell for calling for statutory regulation of the press – or in other words state censorship. Yet he has got it absolutely right on the recent conviction of an evangelical preacher for speaking against homosexuality. Tatchell writes: The conviction and £1,000 fine imposed on a homophobic Christian street preacher in [...]
It’s an election year. Which means it’s time for the Conservatives to attack their favourite victimised minority. For such a tiny minority in British society, Travellers certainly attract a disproportionate amount of Middle England’s ire. Not content with passing the Criminal Justice Act in 1994, which removed the requirement for local authorities to provide sites [...]
The proposed equality bill has generated much debate – in particular the question of whether churches should be banned from discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation. Yet what strikes me is the sheer hypocrisy of these measures, from a government which has actively institutionalised such discrimination. Under laws that went into force last year, the [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman “You know, you already sent 21,000 troops. You might send 65,000 troops. That’s not a Peace Prize-acting activity.” That’s what the lifelong civil rights activist and cautious Obama supporter, Dr Cornel West, had to say about the president’s surprise reception of the Nobel Peace Prize whilst promoting his new memoir [...]
