A day or so after writing a column, when the horse has certainly bolted, you read it in print. Now you are hit by l’esprit d’escalier. Ideas you left out stare you in the face. Friends call with arguments you never thought to include — obvious, once mentioned — and again you kick yourself.
My Times column last Saturday is a case in point. I wrote after David Cameron had warned Phillip Schofield (on a TV programme called This Morning) against giving a stir to the unfounded belief that there’s a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. I suggested this was one of three great subterranean public prejudices that campaigners for homosexual equality have had to combat over the past half-century. The other two, I said, were that gays are more prone to treachery and secret recruitment by foreign powers; and that there’s an inherent link between same-sex attraction and promiscuity, furtive and loveless sex, and (therefore) sexually transmitted diseases.
I’m glad to have developed these arguments and their rebuttals, and won’t repeat them. But now I see how the argument could have been taken forward. It’s possible to explain why such errors of fact or erroneously circular reasoning have proved so hard to fight. The reason is obvious. We’ve lacked witnesses.
Homosexuality is but one example — a rather stark one — of social and cultural practices which, because the practice has been regarded as a matter for shame, and because it’s possible to hide it, have lacked for volunteers to step forward and tell the world what it is they do; what it is they feel; and how the stigma has affected them. Another example would be addiction to hard drugs, around which I’m sure many myths circulate.
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