Homophobia is now met with the same silence given to anti-Semitism

Rolling news does not give its participants the option of shutting their mouths and biting their tongues, even when shutting and biting are the best available options. Silence is the producer’s greatest fear. The supposedly contrarian presenter has to keep talking. The supposedly tough-minded pundit has to show she is nobody’s fool. Better that than a hushed studio.

Last night, Owen Jones of the Guardian made the rather obvious point to Mark Longhurst, a Sky News presenter, and the Telegraph’s Julia Hartley Brewer, that a terrorist who slaughters LGBT people in a gay club hates homosexuality. The biggest single homophobic killing in the West since the fall of the Nazis confirmed what Jones already knew: ‘there are people out there who are sickened and repulsed by our very existence’.

His fellow guests could not just agree with an argument so clearly true it should not need to be made. They could not say that they had never seriously thought about homophobia, and hence had nothing useful to add.