Oh dear me, what could the matter be? The Catholic Herald fumes at diversity.

Article by Adrian Tippetts.

Christian fundamentalists have been seething with anger for the past month about Tesco’s decision to sponsor a tent at the 2012 London Gay Pride event. The value of the sponsorship is £30,000, a miniscule 0.05 percent of the supermarket’s £60 million annual expenditure on good causes. The announcement, however, coincided with the ending of Tesco’s partnership with Cancer Research Run for Life, which the supermarket had supported to the tune of £700,000 per year since 2002. This was originally highlighted on October 24^th by Rosemary Baker at trade rag Marketing Week, who carelessly failed to point out that the retailer had also become sponsors of charities such as Alzheimer’s Society and Whizz Kidz, in deals that dwarfed the Pride contract. Still, the tenuous link was made and that was enough for an extremist Church of England-affiliated group, Anglican Mainstream, to generate a myth that Tesco’s had supported Gay Pride at the expense of Cancer Research. However, even the most basic fact checking was beyond the powers of the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn and the Catholic Herald’s Francis Phillips, who were only too keen to repeat this nonsense. For that matter, neither did these newspapers bother to ask about David Skinner, quoted in the article. He is notorious in the LGBT blogosphere for his obsessive homophobic ‘trolling’ on Internet discussion boards over the past four years, especially on websites such as TheyWorkForYou and Pink News, where in 2009 he left this gem:  

“If I had been a kid fighting on the beaches of Guam in WW2 and I discovered that what I was really fight for was for queers to have the license to smash the rules underlying any civilised society – the freedom get AIDS, be promiscuous and destroy marriage and the family – I would have joined the Japs.”

TheyWorkForYou.com, dismissing reports about homophobic hate, April 2008: "If any one is guilty of violence it is the homosexual, indeed what are bondage and sado- masochism if they are not to do with humiliation and domination? Bullying is the very thing that gives them sexual excitement."

Fast-forward two weeks, and the Catholic Herald’s ex-editor, William Oddie (not the famous twitcher!), decides to check the facts, and discover there is no story after all. Instead of directing his fury at Phillips, he blames Tesco for remaining silent while his colleague is exposed as an incompetent fool who could not even as ask that most basic question ‘how do I know this is true?’ Oddie whines: “But there’s been no actual switch from one to the other. It just looks like that. So why don’t they say so more convincingly?” (Emphasis his)

Well, why should they? The fuss was entirely manufactured in the first place. Surely the most appropriate thing is for the Catholic Herald to act like adults, accept responsibility for propagating a lie, and apologise?  However, in Oddie’s imagination, there’s always an ulterior motive. What underpins his rage at Tesco is not the failure to support Cancer Research; it is that Tesco shows the slightest support for an ‘aggressive political organisation’. How Gay Pride remotely affects Oddie is not explained. He gives no example of how the event curtails his freedom of expression or religion in any way.

The reason why Pride and LGBT support groups are needed is that gay people face more than their fair share of abuse, alienation, rejection and violence because of who they are. According to Oddie, standing up against this is ‘aggression’.  He highlights as evidence for the retailer’s support of such an ‘aggressive agenda’, the existence of a support group, Out At Tesco, a website which Oddie must have actively searched for because it isn’t advertised to the public. Groups like these exist to counter homophobia in the workplace, which in the UK today is still all too common. Surveys show one in five LGBT people suffers from it. Ironically, this  revolting piece of hate mail aimed at gay Tesco staff, on Anglican Mainstream, is one such example. According to Oddie, Tesco is laughing all the way to the bank about all the free PR it has achieved from the furore that he and others manufactured. With homophobic hate crime on the increase to nearly 5,000 incidents in the UK per year, I rather think they would be shaking their heads in disbelief at the fanaticism and levels of hatred aimed at a small section of the public that just want to get on with their lives without interference from bullies like those on the editorial board of the Catholic Herald.

It must be remembered that most Catholics abhor the homophobia expressed by Oddie and his ilk. If only that majority would assert itself a little more. Meanwhile, Oddie has switched to Sainsbury’s, who, he’ll be enraged to hear, also believes in empowering its LGBT staff. So does ASDA. And the Co-Op. While fair-minded folk must still hold the big retailers to account about their records on food waste, fair deals with suppliers and carbon footprints, Tesco and co are at least to be commended for starving bigotry and poor fact-checking out of existence. Hurrah! Every little helps...