If there was one piece of advice the Foreign Office was going to give to British citizens travelling to the USA you might think it would be to wary of lunatics armed to the hilt with semi-automatics. But no, our civil servants do not regard the possibility of having your ass shot off as you innocently backpack around the backwoods of North Carolina to be worthy of a warning.
There is one piece of advice the Foreign Office has put on its website, though. It states: ‘LGBT travellers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi.’ The laws to which it refers are House Bill 2 in North Carolina, which obliges transgender people to use lavatories related to their original gender, and the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act in Mississippi, which offers people protection against discrimination cases if, for example, they refuse on religious grounds to allow a gay couple to share a bed in a guest house they run.
The government may not approve of these laws, but do they really justify putting out a warning to British travellers? If the Foreign Office is going to warn people about minor inconveniences such as not necessarily being allowed to book the room they want at the hotel they want, then in the name of consistency it should list other possible minor impediments to an enjoyable holiday, such as parking laws in San Diego and fines for crossing the road in New York before the green man appears. The new laws do, after all, merely put North Carolina and Mississippi in the same position as Britain was 15 years ago, before a raft of discrimination laws were introduced in Britain. I don’t recall the government telling anyone then that Britain was an unsafe place to visit.
The Foreign Office’s advice is nothing more than a pathetic piece of grandstanding. It is just a political protest dressed up as serious advice for tourists. House Bill 2 and the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act have become cause célèbres for the gay rights lobby in the US, with Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams cancelling concerts in the states, and various businesses threatening to withdraw investment. The Foreign Office has jumped on the bandwagon.
All the Foreign Office will achieve is to devalue the genuinely useful advice it issues on war zones and specific terror threats. It should stop behaving like a student union and get on with the job it is supposed to be doing.
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