Thursday, September 23, 2010

Quote of the Day: Ben Summerskill


Earlier I saw a Tweet or two that mentioned that this month's Attitude had an article on gay equal marriage, including comment from Stonewall. They have this comment from, I'm sorry it is him again, Ben Summerskill.

"Anyone who's involved in campaigning [for equal marriage] should be very cautious about being seduced by politicians in any party who are looking for political advantage and have have different imperatives from gay people in the wider world."


Now I have a problem with that. I am a gay politician from the party that has just passed an equal marriage policy federally, after I was involved it getting it passed at Scottish level. Do I have be be cautious of seducing myself? I have been listening to the wider gay community, I even had a few thanks yous from various members of that community for the work I've already done on the issue.

Meanwhile, I'm reading from comments on PinkNews story of Summerskill's comments at Lib Dem conference is that Stonewall supporters etc are wondering just where is the consultation with their own 'members' a phrase that seems hard to pin down who it covers.

Update: The original PinkNews article was update and now contains the following disclaimer:

"Comments made during the 21st September have been suspended at the request of Stonewall. It is possible to post comments though on this amended version of the article.

PinkNews.co.uk is happy to publish the clarifications above and apologises for any confusion caused by the original report."

So Stonewall are trying to censor freedom of expression.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is intolerable! We can't possibly have democratically elected politicians trying to work with organisations to further a common goal!

Surely we should leave all the work like that to completely unaccountable organisations like Stonewall. After all, they do such good work in this area...

Tim Trent said...

A little bird tells me that Stonewall is working on drafting a response on the gay marriage issue. Of course they probably ought to have seen this coming on the basis that this has been an issue for... a while.

My source thinks that they may be struggling to reconcile... gasp... homosexual marriage... with some of their more upper crust heterosexual UK supporters on whom they appear to depend for funding and who might cut t off.

We should probably remind them of the source of their name, should we not?

Oh, and tell them that the upper crust is not as heterosexual as they might believe.

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