Why I, as a gay man, agree with the Pope - Harriet Harman's equality mania only promotes intolerance



Mission: Harriet Harman has called her Equality Bill an 'opportunity not only to build a new economic order, but a new social one as well'

For the first two years of my life, I was raised by nuns in a Catholic orphanage. Back then, I was named baby Patrick, the son of an Irish woman who was a devout Roman Catholic.



As for the father, it was 'name unknown', according to the birth certificate.

I don't remember my birth mother, even though apparently she was a regular visitor to the home, until she, or possibly the nuns, decided that there was no prospect of her ever bringing me up as her own.

It was, after all, the early Sixties - a harsh unforgiving climate for single mothers.

Decades on, I wonder sometimes if she would have coped as well as my adoptive parents did when, at the age of 22, I told them I was gay.



Though they, too, were Catholic, they took the news in their stride and loved me just as much as before, and as much as their three birth children.

You might assume then, as an out, proud, gay man that I would be appalled by the Pope's extraordinary public attack on Harriet Harman's Equality Bill.

The Pope has warned that the Bill poses a threat to freedom of religious expression and faith because it means that the Church could be forced to employ openly gay members of staff or face being sued, and that Catholic adoption agencies will henceforth be required to give children to same-sex couples in contravention of their beliefs.



But, actually, far from being angered by his intervention, I agree with much of what he said. More than that, I find myself wishing that our tonguetied Anglican bishops had the courage to speak out more often on the great moral issues of the day.



Quite simply, I believe that the Government's decision to force the Church to abide by its equality legislation could hurt some of the most vulnerable members of our society - those whom I thought ministers had a duty to protect.

Indeed, children such as me, raised for two years in a Catholic orphanage, could be the real losers of Harman's obsessive drive to force the Church to embrace her doctrine of legalised social engineering.

In any given year, the 12 Catholic adoption agencies in England used to place a minimum of 200 children with adoptive parents. They have, by tradition, also handled a third of the boys and girls who have been judged 'most difficult to place'. Some of those children have to wait years before they are found a home.

Point of view: Despite being gay, Andrew Pierce agrees with much of what the Pope said about Harriet Harman's Equality Bill

But the effect of the legislation from Harman is that those Catholic adoption agencies now have to consider placing children with gay couples, even though it goes against their spiritual teachings, or inevitably close down.

Some of the Catholic adoption agencies have reluctantly complied with the new legislation. But if others decide they cannot sacrifice their principles and bend to Harman's diktats, decades of experience will be lost and many vulnerable children will lose the care and dedication that has served them so well in the past.

What madness! In my own case, the nuns of Nazareth House in Cheltenham looked after me until I was safely placed into the protective arms of adoptive parents who loved me from the moment they first took me to their home.

It is shocking even to contemplate taking that privilege away from hundreds of other children just to satisfy one politician's dogma.

That's not to say that I agree with all of the Pope's edicts. In particular, I find the Church teaching that homosexuality is 'intrinsically disordered' deeply offensive. But imposing legislation is not the answer to countering such outdated views.

First, it needs to be asked loud and clear: why would any gay people hoping to adopt children go to a Catholic agency? They don't need to.

Rightly or wrongly, these days gay couples invariably have first place in the queue for an adopted child from state-run agencies because politically correct local authorities are attempting to make up for the years when gays were barred by the law from being adoptive parents.

Nor do the majority of gay men and women feel discriminated against by the Church, whether as employees or as members of the congregation.

I know gay teachers who work harmoniously in Roman Catholic schools, just as I know many gay men and women who regularly go to Mass and take the Holy Sacrament. And if we're being honest, it's hardly a secret that for decades, if not centuries, many clergy, both Catholic and Anglican, have been privately gay.

Attack: The Pope has said that Ms Harman's Bill poses a threat to freedom of religious expression

So why do we need the state to dictate the Church's employment policies?

The political fall-out could be far more far-reaching than Ms Harman imagines. For the Pope has not just delivered a wake-up call to Labour MPs mindful of the potential five million Catholic votes at stake in the coming General Election.

He has also crystallised a growing fear among many gay people that far from helping to promote tolerance, Harriet Harman is in danger of undermining the great strides forward made in equality in recent years by provoking a backlash.

Since 1997, the law has - rightly, in my view - been changed to make the age of consent for gays the same as that for heterosexual couples.

Gays can enter into legally binding civil partnerships, and they can adopt children. I still smile when I see grannies in card shops asking for civil partnership cards.

The world has changed beyond recognition for the better for gays in the past decade. So why do I fear that all that good work now risks being undermined?

It is precisely because the very intolerance that was once targeted at gays is now being directed at those who have sincerely-held - if, in my view, misguided - objections to gay equality.

My doubts were underlined last year by the case of Pauline Howe. The 67-year- old had written a letter to Norwich Council, her local authority, objecting to a planned gay pride march.

Mrs Howe described gays as 'sodomites' whose 'perverted sexual practices' were responsible for spreading sexually transmitted diseases.

The response? Two police officers visited her at her home to warn her that she had committed a 'hate crime'.

Really? Against whom? It's not as though Mrs Howe had incited an angry mob to take up arms against homosexuals.

Even though I went on a gay pride march last year, I absolutely support Mrs Howe's right to express her opinions, obnoxious though they were.

Then there was the case of the pensioners Joe and Helen Roberts, devout Christians, who wanted to distribute Christian leaflets alongside the gay rights literature promoted by their council.

They, too, had a knock on the door from the police. The council thought they 'displayed potentially homophobic attitudes'. Sorry, no. Just an alternative point of view.

What sort of society are we becoming that people are threatened by burly police officers with criminal prosecution for daring to utter outmoded opinions?

It all began with the right and admirable intentions. The Government was anxious to make amends for the years when homophobia was officially sanctioned via Section 28 - the piece of legislation which prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.

But now, in the drive to impose the equality agenda, even if it conflicts with an individual's religious beliefs, ministers risk fostering the view that they give gays precedence in all matters.

Surely the idea of equality is that we would all be treated as equal - those who support gay rights and those who oppose them. Moral victories are won by argument, persuasion and example - not legislation.

I'm afraid Ms Harman is a zealot. She has called her Bill an 'opportunity not only to build a new economic order, but a new social one as well'.

So what next? Order the Roman Catholic Church to lift its ban on women priests? Quotas for women bishops?

Or perhaps, as she plots her own takeover of the Labour Party leadership, she is even now planning legislation that at least one contender for the next Archbishop of Canterbury will have to wear a skirt.