“We’d better get back, ’cause it’ll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night…mostly.”
– Newt from the movie Aliens
Imagine, you live in a nice neighborhood with nice neighbors surrounded by the beauty of nature. Each lawn, nicely manicured. The bushes trimmed to perfection. Everything in its place, well almost. There is a public area near your neighborhood that is becoming overgrown. So you and your friends, through your local government, decide to trim and prune the area to beautify it and perhaps even encourage some of God’s little critters to scamper about playfully. So if you and your friends lived in a suburb of Bristol in the U.K. you know what you would be called if you wanted to trim those bushes? Environmentalist? No. Good stewards? Nope. Horticulturists? Nuh-uh. No, you would be called homophobes and bigots.
You see, in the nice neighborhood of Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, the particular overgrown area is the local hot-spot for homosexual men to have public sex with each other.
[Telegraph] Bristol City Council wants to prune bushes and remove cover from an area known as the Downs to improve the landscape and encourage rare wildlife.
But its own gay rights group has opposed the move, claiming that cutting back the bushes was “discriminating” to homosexual men who used the area for late night outdoor sex known as dogging.
Work on the beauty spot has been temporarily delayed while talks with gay rights groups take place to try and break the deadlock.
I don’t know what dogging is and I don’t wan’t to know. So now these “Friends of Dorothy” are not content to battle for equal rights, they want rights that nobody else has as well. They want the right to have undisturbed “sex” in public. To oppose this absurdity means that you are discriminating. Indeed!
Now you may be tempted to think that this absurd claim to a right that nobody has would not be taken seriously. Think again. Last year this very same spot was in the news. At that time, four firemen stumbled upon the rocking bushes and shined their flashlights on the men in flagrante delicto. The Firemen, for their trouble, were fined £1,000 each and transferred to other firehouses for being “homophobic” for embarrassing the dogging male malefactors. You can’t make this stuff up.
So now in the name of fictitious rights of discourteous criminals, all right thinking people should stay at home at night and if you do venture out the door, do not bring a flashlight. This place has gone to the dogs.
July 11, 2008 at 12:23 pm
First they get you to tolerate.
Then they get you to accept.
Then they get you to embrace.
If you had told me 10 years ago that the UK (Where I have spend many months of my life) was going down this slope I’d have laughed at the notion. Because of that I can easily see the same thing happening in the US. It sickens me.
July 11, 2008 at 12:26 pm
It is coming here. Please God help us to stop it.
July 11, 2008 at 3:39 pm
While in college I worked for the Salt Lake City Parks Department one summer. A significant part of the job was kicking cruisers out of the restrooms. These days we likely would have been fired for doing it.
They don’t want the overgrowth trimed? Fine, plant some poison ivy.
July 11, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I can top that, unfortunately. The men’s bathroom in the CITY HALL(!!!) in Malden, MA was in the news because it is a known cruising spot for gays.
There have also been complaints because of the increase of sex on the beach in Provincetown, the gay mecca (should those 2 words go together?) on Cape Cod, MA.
July 11, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Darn it Fr. Erik, you beat me to suggesting the poison ivy!
July 11, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Father Erik is too nice.
Poison ivy? I’ve got some nice Texas fire ant colonies I’d be happy to send over to the good folks of Clifton.
July 12, 2008 at 10:10 am
OY GEVALT! For the record: I am a (mostly) gay man who has wholeheartedly embraced celibacy, chastity and Catholicism. These sort of perverts (we used to call them ‘trolls and bushwhackers’ back in the day) are precisely what drove me away from the “out and proud” club and forced me to re-evaluate the whole socio-political package I’d hitherto ingested. Equality under the law is one thing. To think “gayness” entitles them to do whatever, whenever, wherever, and to whomever is entirely another. Fr. Erik: I’m a fellow Utard who works as a paralegal in criminal defense. No, you wouldn’t be fired. You probably would be called as a witness, though. Even in Salt Lake and Summit Counties park wankers are diligently prosecuted. It’s called Lewdness and it’s a class B misdemeanor.