Since 1979, the UK-based Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) has been promoting an awareness and understanding of the Humanist ethical outlook among lesbian and gay people, bringing lesbian and gay rights issues to the attention of its kindred Humanist organisations, and playing a full part in the campaign for lesbian and gay equality.
Modern Humanism is much misunderstood. Some think it’s just another religion. Some relate it to Renaissance Humanism, though “humanists” like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were committed Christians. Some think it’s atheism and nothing else.
Humanists today are atheist or agnostic and they are sceptical about supernatural beliefs, including “God”, gods, astrology, New Age, the paranormal, spiritualism, and fairies at the bottom of the garden. They do not prostrate themselves in the worship of any supposed deity or follow the teachings of any guru. Nor do they have an ancient “holy” book like the Bible or the Qur’an on which they base their moral values. What they do have, however, is a great concern for the welfare of their fellow human beings and for human rights, including those of minorities like lesbians and gays. They try to follow the principles on which good human relationships depend, observing the Golden Rule “do as you would be done by” as taught by atheistic philosophers like Confucius who lived hundreds of years before Jesus.
Nothing annoys Humanists more than the belief widely promoted by religionists, and still slavishly accepted by the establishment and much of the media, that religion per se has to be a good thing and that you have to be religious to be moral. Nor is this view uncommon in the lesbian and gay media, despite all the hostility which continues to be directed at gays from religious sources. Gay News, which had to defend itself in 1977 against a prosecution for blasphemous libel by Christian moral crusader Mrs Mary Whitehouse, featured for years a presumptuous column called Our God Too – as if all its readers were committed Christians! Perhaps no lesbian or gay publication would have the effrontery to do this today, but some still have widespread coverage of religion (until quite recently Gay Times sometimes read like the Church Times) and have uncritically assimilated the gay Christian propaganda that the religions themselves cannot be at fault, only some of their practitioners.
It was the prosecution of Gay News by Mary Whitehouse in 1977 which led to the birth of the Gay Humanist Group (GHG). Whitehouse became the target of vociferous protest, not least from the National Secular Society which had been campaigning for years for the repeal of the blasphemy laws. She began declaring in public that “everything good and true” that “every decent person believes in” was being undermined by “the humanist gay lobby”. This was enough to set a few gays in the Humanist movement thinking. Although any formal lobby of this sort was at the time just a figment of Whitehouse’s imagination, it seemed like a good idea to set one up.
A launch meeting of GHG was held in August 1979 during the Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s annual conference in Brighton – an event which attracted 600 people. A speaker at the meeting sounded a warning that the small gains which the gay movement had made within the previous ten years could quite easily be wiped out as a result of the growing influence of evangelical Christians in the corridors of power. No doubt he had in mind the Nationwide Festival of Light – later to become Christian Action Research and Education (CARE) which, together with the Christian Institute, is still very active today in lobbying against lesbian and gay rights. It is this sort of malign Christian influence which succeeded in getting Section 28 included in the 1988 Local Government Act, strenously opposed attempts to get it repealed, and did its utmost to thwart attempts to lower the male gay age of consent to 16.
Before the 1979 CHE conference began, a half-page advertisement appeared in the Brighton Evening Argus. This was sponsored by 22 local Christian clergymen who stated their strong opposition on biblical grounds to the town hosting the conference. The founder members of GHG were in the vanguard of protest at this hostility, taking part in a demonstration outside the church of one of the clergy responsible. And this was to be the first of many such direct actions which the group (later to change its name to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association – GALHA) became involved in over the following years.
GALHA’s activities include lobbying on gay and Humanist issues, making submissions to government bodies on issues such as reform of the criminal law and the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation, arranging monthly public meetings in central London on topics of gay and Humanist concern, and holding annual weekend gatherings in various parts of the country.
GALHA is one of the few national lesbian and gay campaigning groups which is democratically run. It has acquired many loyal members and supporters all over the UK and abroad whose moral and financial support has sustained it. It has no external funding. Its administration is carried out, and its activities organised, on an entirely voluntary basis. It has good reason to be proud of its long and continuing contribution to promoting a rational Humanist approach to lesbian and gay rights.