The DUP's closet policies

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It's time Ian Paisley Junior and his colleagues saw sense about gays

Henry McDonald
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer

Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party and their supporters should immediately stop using Belfast Citybus. The reason? Because Translink, the company that runs bus and rail services in Northern Ireland, has painted its fleet of metro-buses in the city pink. Given the DUP's near pathological obsession with all things gay, the party surely has no choice but to organise a boycott of this mode of transport. Their colour, after all, has long been associated with gayness. So to save Ulster from sodomy (again) the DUPers and their allies in the Free Presbyterian Church ought to demand that a more macho gloss be painted over the vehicles; possibly royal blue or maybe lily-white, the latter being the same colour as the clear collective conscience of all those true-believing homo haters.
Last Monday Paisley Junior worked himself into lather over a report in a tabloid newspaper that David Trimble's political adviser had married his boyfriend in Canada. Stephen King's civil union with his long-term partner across the Atlantic made the front page of the Daily Mirror 's Northern Ireland edition, complete with a wedding style photograph of the happy couple.

The picture was accompanied by a powerful dose of moral outrage that climaxed with Paisley Junior demanding Trimble sack his adviser simply because King had pledged his life to the man he loves. By Thursday this conflated controversy had extended to the north's Policing Board with independent members such as Tom Kelly demanding that Paisley Junior (himself also a member of the board) be censured for homophobic remarks.

Paisley Junior is normally a shrewd politician who has his finger on the pulse of the Ulster Protestant community. In December he was way ahead of other leading figures of the party in reading the proper mood of unionists in the north - that they wanted no deal with Sinn Fein to restore power sharing. His instincts and his opposition to that deal probably saved the DUP from fatal damage following the Northern Bank robbery. If the party had followed the advice of other ambitious devolutionists back in December they would have been caught in government with Sinn Fein just as the IRA carried out the record bank heist.

It is highly likely he relied upon those same instincts in a bid to score political points against Stephen King's Ulster Unionist Party. Appealing to a 'moral majority' in Northern Ireland, however, has not been as rewarding in terms of votes in Northern Ireland as it is in the United States. People are actually more tolerant of the gay and lesbian community in the north than the likes of Paisley Junior care to imagine.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1406936,00.html