I mentioned in passing yesterday that the United Kingdom's new minority government is being maintained in power by Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Parity. Barely had the news emerged than the DUP, as we saw in the accompanying photo, instantly catapulted over previously reviled bogeypersons such as Katie Hopkins and Morrissey to become fashionable young London's latest two-minute hate. Two minutes, incidentally, is not an Orwellian allusion but the time between first hearing about them and painting up your placard. Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator:
One protester's comment summed up the flimsiness of the fury. 'I didn't know who the DUP were, I had to Google them,' he said. From Googling a party to railing against it in the space of minutes: the modern mindset summed up.
According to the slogans, the Democratic Unionist Parity is a "hate" group because it is "anti-gay, anti-green, anti-women". That's to say, they're opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion, and take a relaxed view of the impending climate apocalypse.
Oh, my.
Even worse, such views have made them Ulster's most popular political party - albeit that, for us old-timers of the Irish Question, the new DUP can seem frankly a bit milquetoast next to their continuously fulminating, firebreathing founder Ian Paisley. Still, you can understand why the mob has briefly roused itself from Google to take to the streets to protest this week's designated haters. It's certainly unfortunate that Theresa May's grip on power depends on such "anti-gay" and "anti-women" types, isn't it?
But surely it's also unfortunate that Jeremy Corbyn's grip on power in the resurgent Labour Party depends on "anti-gay" and "anti-women" types, too. As Brendan O'Neill points out:
And all the while we have Labourites like Jeremy Corbyn mixing with Islamist groups that share all these same social views, except in an even more extreme form. Yet the people beating the streets over the DUP say nothing.
That's true. Theresa May's more recalcitrant friends in the DUP think gays are godless sodomites who'll be spending eternity on a roasting spit in hell. Jeremy Corbyn's more recalcitrant friends are disinclined to wait that long and would rather light them up now - or hurl them off the roof. Hamas, which Mr Corbyn supports, is fairly typical. Sample headline from Newsweek:
Hamas Executes Prominent Commander After Accusations Of Gay Sex
Doesn't that make Hamas an anti-gay "hate group"? Well, no. You can bet that 90 per cent of the Google activists in the street protesting Theresa May's ties to people who think men who love men shouldn't be permitted to marry are entirely relaxed about Jeremy Corbyn's ties to people who think men who love men should be burned alive or tossed off tall buildings.
This contradiction exists all over the western world. Today's progressives cling to the most cobwebbed cliches: Polygamy? That's something Mormons do in Utah, not Muslims in Canada, France, Britain, Sweden, with the not so tacit connivance of the state welfare systems. First-cousin marriage? That's something stump-toothed Appalachians do after a bunk-up with Cindy Mae and a jigger of moonshine, not 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons in Bradford, and some 58 per cent throughout the rest of the country.
As for gays, forget Hamas and consider Jeremy Corbyn's supporters in the United Kingdom: Fifty-two per cent of British Muslims told Channel 4 they believed homosexuality should be illegal. Yet Mr Corbyn's Labour Party has so assiduously courted these "haters" that it's now electorally dependent on them. Mrs May didn't court her haters in Ulster, and she's wound up depending on them merely as an unintended consequence of her own ineptitude on the hustings.
Just to spell it out even more plainly, last year YouGov polled Britons in general on their attitudes to the aforementioned sodomites. Seventeen per cent thought homosexuality was "morally wrong". If that sounds unnervingly high to you, what's the reason? Over-sampling in East Belfast? A few rural backwaters not quite up to speed on the new gayer-than-thou Britain? No. In most parts of the country about 15 per cent declined to get with the beat. But in diverse, multicultural London, 29 per cent of the population regarded homosexuality as "morally wrong".
So all those ninnies in the streets of London protesting 300,000 Ulster haters they'd never heard of twenty minutes earlier are surrounded by two-and-a-half million haters every day of their lives - in the Tube, in the restaurants, in the shops and offices of their supposedly vibrant, progressive metropolis.
Now why do you think that is? Could it possibly be connected to the fact that London is more "diverse"? As Douglas Murray points out in his soberly provocative new book The Strange Death of Europe, by the 2011 census in 23 of the capital's 33 boroughs so-called "white British" people were in a minority. (You can bet it's even more boroughs now.) And you can't help noticing, sauntering around, say, Tower Hamlets, that the more "diverse" the community gets the fewer gays you see, and uncovered women, at least after dusk and walking about unaccompanied. It's not quite the "Gay-Free Zone" promised by the posters of the Sharia Patrols, but it's getting there.
So, if you think Ulster's homophobic now, wait till its population is as multicultural as London's. Boy, that'll be a real vote bonanza for the DUP haters, right? Except that, by then, Jeremy Corbyn will be posing in Fermanagh and Tyrone villages beaming next to body-bagged crones and full-bearded imams.
Thirteen years ago in The Spectator I wrote the following:
A few weeks back I was strolling along the Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal when I saw a Muslim woman across the street, all in black, covered head to toe, the full hejab. She was passing a condom boutique, its window filled with various revolting novelty prophylactics, 'c*m rags', etc. It was a perfect snapshot of the internal contradictions of multicultural diversity. In 30 years' time, either the Arab lady will still be there, or the condom store, but not both. Which would you bet on?
We are not yet halfway through that thirty years, but the condom boutique has gone. And in Canadian citizenship ceremonies the Muslim woman can now take her oath of allegiance wearing the full body-bag - while Justin Trudeau marches in the LGBTQWERTY Pride Parade. Like I said: In the medium run, which would you bet on? Forty per cent of five-year-olds in Germany are of "non-European" extraction: What do you think their attitudes to gays and women will be in twenty years' time? Or are you hoping you can hold the line on the "anti-green" thing and they'll still support the Paris Accords?
To reprise another old line of mine, the fools prancing in the London streets denouncing a benign and harmless Democratic Unionist Party are auditioning to be Islam's prison bitches. But they'll be obsessing about the last socially conservative right-wing redneck on earth even as the haters all around consume them.
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