Love and Liberty

Astoundingly, our identikit Labour machine politician local MP Jim Fitzpatrick (aka Fitzpanic) has been in the national news after years of anonymity. He and his wife went to a wedding the other day, apparently, but they walked out on being told they had to be segregated to separate rooms. To see who was being rude to whom, though, there are two questions that need answering. Obviously, given that I’ve been getting my news from journalists, none of them have answered those key questions – instead just framing everything in inane ‘pro-or-anti-Muslim’ political arguments to whip up bad feeling all round (and that, ironically, they’ve all reported the decision as if it was his alone, and his wife silently obeyed his commands).

The two questions are:

• Did the invitation make it clear – or even give any indication – that couples attending the wedding were, ironically, to be forcibly broken up for the event?

And those idiots who’ve said ‘It’s the Muslim custom’, as if every Muslim practices rigorous sexual apartheid, are talking out of their apertures.

• Who told the press about this?

Because if we’re meant to decide who’s rude and who isn’t, blatantly the people dragging the wedding into the media are the ones who are the rudest. Was it the MP, grandstanding to get his face on TV? In which case, that was rude – he should just have left, and left it at that. Or was it the bride and groom, grandstanding to make their own political point? In which case, they’ve cashed in on their union in a tackier way than selling the rights to Hello! with product placement by Playboy.


So all the resultant media explosion about ‘rude MP’ and ‘all Muslims are the same’ is just so much eyewash. If Mr Fitzpanic and his wife didn’t know what was going to happen in advance, just decided to leave on finding out, and then found themselves exploded all over the press, then well done them. They did the right thing and shouldn’t be pilloried for it. If he went along with a plan in mind, tipping off the press he was making a stunt, then he’s a git. And much as I hate to defend my local Labour MP, the fact that this has all exploded after the fact rather than showing photos of him storming out does rather suggest the former.

What Would I Do?

Well, in a similar situation, I’d ask Richard, of course, or he’d ask me, and I hope Mr Fitzpanic asked his wife.

Then we’d tell our hosts to fuck off.

I can think of nothing more absurd, nothing more wrong, and nothing more calculatedly anti-marriage at a wedding than telling couples they have to split up. I mean, really. ‘Celebrate our wedding by denying that you’re together?’ I don’t think so. Even if you don’t share my own moral conviction that being together means you’re both equal.

What does telling a couple they have to be segregated into separate rooms at a wedding tell them:

• Our marriage is the only important one – yours isn’t?

• One of you is important – the other isn’t?

• We assume you’re so sexually insatiable that you’ll rip each others’ clothes off and frighten the horses during the ceremony?

Similarly, a mixed-race couple going along to a wedding where the bride and groom told them on arrival, ‘Look, we have no problem with you, and we’re not discriminatory, but you know, a lot of the older members of our families vote BNP, so one of you can be in the chapel but the other can listen from the servant’s quarters’ would at the very least be expected to walk out rather than bow their heads and accept that, ‘Well, that must be your cultural background which we’ll meekly accede to, rather than your own prejudices that you want to weasel out of responsibility for’.

If I were invited to a wedding but told not to bring Richard because people might be offended, not only would I decline, but I doubt I would speak to the people inviting me again (not without a lot of swearing, anyway). If we turned up and were told we had to sit apart, not dance together, not kiss or hold hands like most couples do at the key moments, because – not that the bride and groom were prejudiced at all, but you know, the families were very religious… Depending on how generous I was feeling, I’d ask them if they were joking, or tell them to grow a spine, or we’d just leave. What a thing to ask a couple.

It’s your choice how you stage your wedding, but if you choose to hold it at Bigots-R-Us, don’t act all offended if some of the people you invite won’t give up their choice not to like it.

The bottom line, surely, is that a wedding is a celebration of people getting together, and that nothing can be ruder and more bizarre than insisting that people do that by being forced apart.

We have, though, been to a wedding where the bride and groom have encouraged us to be as couply as we like and be tactile with the ostracized gay cousin just to make sure that the disapproving religious side of the family knew that the happy couple didn’t approve of them.

And all right, there was that one wedding where our presence was a bit of an issue and we were sat some way apart, but that was complicated and we laugh about it now… And even then, we knew in advance what it would be like. And no-one called the papers.

Nude Is Not Rude

I notice sadly that yet another council are prudishly forbidding people from being naked on a naturist beach (“warning: video contains tiny-minded locals”). Top marks to reporter Paul MacInnes, and he’s not “horribly ugly” at all – though rolled eyes to the Carry On-style music, and the predictably homophobic interviewees. Shame on Waveney District Council; there are few enough places you can get nude in public, and petty-minded so-and-sos are always trying to chip away at them. Not only should they get themselves lives and stop ordering people around, but it’s at times like these that I almost wish I was a Star Trek fan. Then I could turn up nude at weddings and bellow that traditional Betazoid dress was my ‘cultural tradition’.

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Gay, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Naturism, Personal, Religion, Richard, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen