Which is worse:
a) opposing gay marriage
or
b) abducting a mother of ten in front of her weeping children, suffocating her with a plastic bag, shooting her in the head and burying her in an unmarked grave?
Well, obviously we know the answer is a) because we can see it in the above heartwarming picture, taken during the recent Irish referendum on same sex marriage.
It shows gay rights activist Rory O’Neill (aka drag queen Panti Bliss) sharing a lovely group hug with David Norris (an Irish Senator who lobbied for the 1993 decriminalisation of gay sex) and, of course, with the unmistakably vulpine figure of Gerry Adams, the sinister Sinn Fein president who continues to deny he was ever a member of the IRA.
Aaaahhh. Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and gooey inside?
Well it doesn’t have that effect on me, I’m afraid. In fact, if I’d voted “yes” in the Irish referendum and someone had subsequently showed me that photo, I’m pretty sure I’d want to stick an orange in my mouth, tie a noose around my neck and top myself for the very shame of it.
For, if a picture is worth a thousand words, that particular one is worth more like a hundred-thousand-word book entitled “Absolutely Everything That Is Wrong With The Modern World.”
It refutes, far more articulately and unanswerably than any member of the hapless “No” campaign managed, every one of the arguments advanced by the “Yes” campaign simply by setting them cruelly in the context of the real world.
In this real world, an army of beheading, crucifying, rapist terrorists who slaughter women and children and chuck gay men off high buildings has taken control of another major Iraqi city and of one of the world’s greatest ancient sites (which it will soon no doubt strive to erase from the earth); the global economy succumbs to ever more burdensome regulatory capture by a self-serving cabal of lawyers, technocrats, corporatists and politicians over whom we have less and less democratic control; a mendacious, aggressive and supremely well-funded and well-connected green movement is trying to destroy free markets, drive up energy prices and impose on us one world government in the guise of a nebulous concept called “sustainability”; uncontrolled immigration is rendering many of our countries increasingly unrecognisable; the elderly (and not-so-elderly) are dying, parched, and neglected in their own blood and faeces in a healthcare system no longer fit for purpose; Muslim rape gangs continue to prey on vulnerable white girls with near impunity in towns all over Britain; the Mediterranean is fast reverting to the era of Barbary piracy; Putin is hotting up the Cold War; China doesn’t give a damn; across most of the “free West” defence spending is being cut to the bone is if there were no longer any more causes worth fighting for; in the wake of Prince Charles’s visit to Ireland we learn the happy news that the people who blew up his godfather may have been granted permanent immunity from prosecution. Oh, and the same is almost certainly true of the senior IRA commander who ordered the killing of Jean McConville (the mother of ten mentioned at the beginning) and who – if we are to believe this investigation by the New Yorker – may not be unconnected with the beaming grey-bearded fellow who posed for selfies with Panti Bliss and others at the recent “Ireland goes gay” bullying smug-fest.
Obviously my list of things that are seriously wrong with the world is by no means comprehensive. But it does, I hope, give an indication of just how many serious issues are being swept under the carpet today by a culture which would rather buoy itself up with feel-good gesture politics like the (technically entirely unnecessary) Irish referendum than grapple with the problems that really matter.