‘It was a bright, cold day in Oxford and everywhere I looked, rainbow flags flapped and fluttered in the sharp wind.
They flew from the ancient colleges along the High Street. They flew from the Town Hall.
And what they said to me was ‘Your side has lost. There is nothing you can do about it.’
As I write this, I know that an apprentice Thought Police officer will certainly copy and store my words, to use them against me at some point in the future.
The mere act of suggesting that there is anything oppressive about these banners will ensure that I am convicted of ‘homophobia’. Those who condemn me will not be even slightly interested in what I actually think.
It is startling to recall walking down the same street more than 50 years ago, when nobody had ever thought of rainbow flags and this was still a free country.
At that time, just as I am now, I was strongly in favour of maximum tolerance towards homosexuals, and thought it ludicrous and wicked that only a few years before, they were being arrested and prosecuted for actions that were wholly private.
But in the years that followed, a strange thing happened.
Tolerance, which still seems to me to be the best way of coping with our many differences, was no longer enough. In fact, it became positively bad. Nothing short of total acceptance of the new thinking would do.
A huge change in sexual morality of all kinds was cleverly presented as mainly being the liberation of homosexuals from persecution.’
