Daily Mail columnist Harry Phibbs is wrong on homosexuality

So I was reading the Daily Mail online last night (yes, I know, not a recommended pasttime!) and found a rather scary column by Harry Phibbs on Section 28, which is entitled "Councils should NOT be spending your money on promoting homosexuality."

Now, I haven't seen any leaflets from Waltham Forest Council encouraging me to take up homosexuality.

I haven't seen any banners strung from buildings, nor have I seen any display boards in Walthamstow Library promoting homosexuality. So I think it is fair to say that my local council is not promoting homosexuality.

This would doubtless come as a great relief to Harry Phibbs, who seems to believe that any positive promotion of homosexuality by local councils would lead to a mass forsaking of heterosexuality.

If this is true, there must be millions of people who are wavering on heterosexuality.

Does Harry Phibbs, as well as the backward Baroness Knight who helped draw up the law, really belive that people decide their sexuality on what they read in books such as the over-hyped Jenny lives with Eric and Martin, which "included pictures of Eric and Martin naked in bed", implying full nudity when in fact the picture with the Daily Mail story is tasteful?

People's sexual desires aren't ruled by propeganda. You don't choose to love someone of the same sex, it happens.

Most people understand this, unlike Baroness Knight who belives the video "How to Become a Lesbian in 35 Minutes" was shown to "intended to be shown in a school for mentally handicapped girls, some of whom were extremely young".

In fact, according to Lord Harris of Haringey, the area where the film was shown, it was shown to a lesbian youth group which happened to meet at the Blanche Neville school building in Tottenham.

As for the tedious comments of Daily Mail readers, Patrica Maugham says "councils should not be spending our money in promoting anything. that is not their job".

This is rated Yes by 5 people. Does this mean that anti-knife crime schemes and museum days don't deserve money spent on promotion?

Simon from Hampshire says "Section 28 is perfectly right. How we can possibly discussion homosexuality when we cannot even get heterosexual sex education right?" as if sex education can be seperated into hetereosexual and homosexual.

In Simon's world, the stork is the way to tell children about sex education.

Anthony Townsend from London says: "I was at school when section 28 came in, and it left me feeling isolated, confused, depressed and with no self esteem whatsoever. That is a good thing, is it? It took years to come through that. But guess what, I'm still gay."

Getting back to the vile, Stuart from Virgina, USA, seems to believe that there are "left wing councils" pushing a "Marxist agenda" and that "However there is a much higher percentage of private and home schooling and guess what? These kids aren't the ones getting pregnant or catching STD's."

Perhaps the latter point has to do with the different social pressures and parental attitudes rather than what is taught in sexual education.

I'm not going to go through thirty-eight comments, but I think it's fairly sad that people still believe that children are at risk of being "turned gay". No doubt many of these people are worried about "turning gay" themselves.

Harry Phibbs and his Daily Mail readers should visit some of the people bullied for being gay due to the difficulty teachers had informing children there is nothing wrong with homosexuality.