THOUGHT POLICE ON GAYS

I guess I don’t need to stress my support for gay legal equality. So I hope I won’t be misconstrued when I say that the notion that someone can actually be prosecuted for offensive ideas about gays is truly noxious. There’s no real free speech in Britain, alas, so this case can happen there. A recent U.S. case that forbade a parent from indoctrinating a child with homophobia also struck me as a hideous precedent. There can and must be legal equality for gay citizens. But there can and must also be space for those who dissent to have their say. That’s the classically liberal message of my book, “Virtually Normal.” A free society will have space for both fundamentalists and homosexuals. An unfree society is one in which either group suffers from legal, criminal or civil restrictions. Our freedom is their freedom, which is why I’m also against hate crimes laws and attempts to coerce the Boy Scouts into doing the right thing by not discriminating against gays. It’s also vital for people of good will to understand that civil rights for gay people in no way should affect the rights of others, especially in religious denominations of all kinds, to loathe, disdain, pity or malign homosexuality. These people couldn’t be more wrong, but in a free society, you have the right to be wrong. That goes for religious groups hiring gays as well, in my book. They shouldn’t have to. There has to be space for all of us. Now, if only fundamentalists would live up to the same civic principles, this debate would be over.