More on Moir

Jan Moir, apologising (sort of) for that article:

Yet as the torrent of abuse continued, most of it anonymous, I also had thousands of supportive emails from readers and well-wishers, many of whom described themselves as 'the silent majority'. The outcry was not as one-sided as many imagine.

Their view, and mine, was that it was perfectly reasonable of me to comment upon the manner of Stephen Gately's death, even if there are those who think that his celebrity and sexuality make him untouchable.

Can it really be that we are becoming a society where no one can dare to question the circumstances or behaviour of a person who happens to be gay without being labelled a homophobe? If so, that is deeply troubling.

There is something wonderfully Nixonian about talk of "the silent majority." It is a way of saying you have oodles of support, without having to prove that people support you. Maybe Moir did get thousands of supportive e-mails - the naked homophobia of her article would certainly provoke a certain type of Daily Mail reader to write in to praise her. But readers of that rag holding ignorant opinions is nothing new. What was quite life-affirming about the response to her rant was that so many people were prepared to protest about the ignorance of her claims.

And as for Gately's sexuality and celebrity being the reason why people protested about Moir's comments, well, that's a little misleading, isn't it? The reasons why people protested included the fact that Moir was pruriently speculating on a very recently deceased person, using rumour and innuendo to fill in for the absence of fact. Gately's sexual orientation only became an issue because the tone of Moir's article - including her opinions on civil partnerships - was blatantly homophobic.

We are not in a position where someone cannot question a person's behaviour if that person is (or was) gay. However, Moir spread rumour and sleazy innuendo about a man who had very recently died without any facts to back up her assertions. That, in itself, is deeply troubling. It says a lot about Moir and the paper she writes for. And if Moir truly wants to avoid being classed as a homophobe, then she should avoid making homophobic comments. It wasn't the fact that she commented on the behaviour of a gay man that was so problematic; it was rather the fact that she judged a dead man and his bereaved partner as sleazy based on no facts whatsoever, and extrapolated from her made up factoids towards a negative judgment on other homosexual couples and on the concept of civil partnerships.

And I find it very telling that Moir's defence of her actions is to try to rewrite history and change what she said in the first place.