News From Queens Land

In the 1970s, a British Sunday newspaper magazine revealed a scandal in which US Mormons were allegedly doing the rounds of often disused English country churches and buying old registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths.

The Telegraph report stated that the Anglican and other denomination churchgoers of times gone by were then being posthumously ‘converted’ to the Mormon religion and their details stored along with those of more legitimately recruited members in a vast nuclear-bomb proof repository beneath an American mountain. Among the reasons suggested for this was so that the Mormons could not only build up enough numbers to claim the status of one of the biggest religions in the world but also that, should the present civilisation be wiped out by nuclear war, future societies would find their records and wonder at the Mormon magnitude.

I must confess I’m working from memory here. The publication was either The Observer Magazine or the Sunday Telegraph Magazine.

But I was reminded of the report when reading a piece by Mark Steyn on more recent attempts by a special interest group to rewrite history even to the extent of recasting ordinary individuals in roles they did not play:

Major historical figures who built our country are discarded, but a minor 19th century magistrate has streets named after him and monuments erected to him at Toronto taxpayers’ expense because he “suffered a homophobic scandal”. That’s one way of putting it. In the course of investigating a rape case in which the victim claimed to have scratched the perpetrator in the old trouser department, Alexander Wood decided he needed to examine personally the distinguishing characteristics of extensive numbers of young men. On the basis of this very literal heavy-handedness, he’s been taken up as a “gay pioneer”, even though there’s no evidence he was. Nevertheless, the new memorial to him at the corner of Alexander and Church shows him inspecting the lunchbox of a fetching young lad.

Have these people no shame? Does their zealotry preclude no lie or fabrication to advance ‘the cause’?

For some in the homosexual community, it is too much. One of the greatest female thinkers of the 20th century, Camille Paglia, once bemoaned (I believe in her work Sexual Personae) the mainstreaming of homosexuality, positing that these one-time outlaws on the fringes of society were becoming just another whiny, needy middle-class group. And as Steyn notes:

I was at a big showbiz gathering the other day and got into a chat with a famous gay who suddenly embarked on a magnificent rant about how all these dreary political activists were completely ruining homosexuality. I wound up agreeing with him. “If Cole Porter came back today, he’d be straight,” I said.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

-- Nick