The Christian Legal Centre’s Roger Kiska comments on a recently-released report by campaign group FairCop showing the bias of the police.
Fair Cop, an organisation of individuals who have come together as a result of their shared concerns about the increased politicisation of law enforcement and the knock off effect it has on freedom of speech, has published a scathing report, ‘Policing through the looking glass’, about just how deep the influence of the campaigning group Stonewall goes into the nation’s policing efforts. The report paints a very troubling picture of the institutionalisation of LGBT campaigning ideas in law enforcement and how this can affect their neutrality over sensitive moral and political matters such as gender ideology and Pride.
Premise 1: Stonewall is a political campaigning organisation
An objection may arise among some that there is nothing wrong with our law enforcement supporting Stonewall or embracing its ideas. After all, ‘love is love’.
The reality, however, is that Stonewall’s mission has very little to do with ‘love’, and a great deal to do with politics, enforcing its very narrow and partisan view of legislation through law enforcement, and stifling dissenting viewpoints as homophobic or ‘non-crime hate incidents’.
Stonewall is about creating a cultural metanarrative where LGBT life is celebrated and sacrosanct. For example, they expend a huge amount of effort in engaging schools with the purpose of winning the hearts and minds of young people. Stonewall posters telling us that “some people are gay…get over it” or “I am gay and Christian…you can be both” hang on the walls of schools across the country. Many secondary school students will be shown the Stonewall video ‘Fit’, which suggests that God did not write the Bible and that David and Jonathan were gay, as were Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi.
In 2019, the Stonewall Manifesto was published in the lead up to the election, calling for a number of new legislative and policy changes on LGBT issues. Among them were the update of police guidance and compulsory training on LGBT issues, liberalising the Gender Recognition Act, update hate crime legislation to reflect gender identity (i.e. compelled gender pronoun use), and changing gender markers in official documents to include X for non-binary identities.
As the Fair Cop report highlights, the police Code of Ethics restricts any activity which gives the impression of being politically partisan: “The office of Constable bestows upon an ordinary citizen an extraordinary range of powers. The impartial execution of these powers, free from political influence, is the cornerstone of the criminal justice system and the non-negotiable key to maintaining any civilised democracy.”
The problem is that Stonewall, Pride and LGBT ideology in general, are all political creatures at their core.
Premise 2: LGBT is just as much about ideology as it is about sexual orientation
On 13 October 1971, the first meeting of the UK Gay Liberation Front was held, seeking to create a parallel group to the United States’ Gay Liberation Front which began on the heels of the Stonewall Riots. That same year, the group published the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, a political document calling for the creation of new rights for the gay community and offering an acerbic critique of the heteronormative status quo.
The movement was set anew in 1989 by Kirk and Madsen’s After the Ball: How American Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s (Plume, 1990). In that book, the authors’ called for a “planned psychological attack on the public consciousness in the form of propaganda via the media” (p. 153). The author activists note that propaganda relies more on emotional manipulation than upon logic as the goal is to bring about public change. (p. 162) They suggest linking opposition to the homosexual agenda in any form with historical aggressors such as the Nazis (p. 221). They also insist on the abolition of all sexual morality (pp. 64-67). The early leaders of perhaps the most internationally recognized LGBT campaigning organization GLAAD have been very open in expressing how Kirk and Madsen influenced their campaigning. (See e.g.: Vincent Doyle, Making Out in Mainstream: GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.)
Today, universities across the country offer courses in Gay and Lesbian Studies, where things such as ethics, queer philosophy, political science, sexology and the ‘social construction’ of sexual identity are discussed. The outworking of these ideological positions has been mainstreamed into both education and culture.
The entire premise, for example, behind the controversial ‘No Outsiders’ PSHE programme is that it seeks to deconstruct heteronormativity. (See e.g. Renee DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson, Interogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools: The Work of the No Outsiders Project, Trentham Books (2009)). This has led some LGBTQ academics to call for the ‘queering up’ of the primary school classroom.
Popular LGBTQ campaigner Peter Tatchell has also credited the Gay Manifesto for shaping him and forming his campaigning goals to, as he himself says, radically critique heterosexualism and male privilege. He has gone so far as to call heteronormativity a form of ‘straight supremacy’.
To deny the existence of LGBT ideology would in fact be wholly upsetting to any number of LGBT academics and activists who have spent their careers studying and publishing in support of the aforementioned desire to recast society in its own image, where heteronormativity would be a thing of the past.
Premise 3: law enforcement has compromised its duty of neutrality
In the introduction to its Service Delivery Toolkit, a training manual for LGBT inclusion, Stonewall boasts of cooperation with among others, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Ministry of Justice and the College of Policing. In a section headed ‘what the law says’, which a reasonable person would assume draws upon the legal expertise of the aforementioned public authorities, Stonewall in fact creates a wish list of what they believe the law should be instead of what it really is. It suggests, for example, that the term gender reassignment is outdated and not fit for purpose, and that service providers should really protect gender identity to be truly inclusive. The distinction is far more than semantics. Gender reassignment and gender identity are not synonymous, the former is legally protected whereas the latter is not. As the Fair Cop report notes, “for Stonewall, legality is an ambition, not an obstacle.”
The result has been law enforcement getting erroneous and ultra vires training in gender ideology, giving them a wholly inaccurate perception of what is actually legal and what is not. Some police, as the report highlights, have been open in their belief that misgendering can be a form of abuse.
The police have also been very open in their support of Pride events, through actual participation and support through social media.
One of the hallmarks of a functioning democracy is the separation of powers. In the United Kingdom, government makes the laws, judges resolve it and police enforce it. This separation has been compromised by law enforcement’s acquiescence to LGBT campaigning aspirations and their increasingly chummy relationship with Stonewall and Pride. Its political neutrality on issues of intimate moral concern and genuine public debate has been horribly compromised.
Premise 4: some of your hard-earned money is being re-directed by the police to LGBT campaigners
It is becoming commonplace to see entire police forces celebrate their co-belligerence with LGBT campaigners. Many have become Stonewall allies or champions, sometimes spending tens of thousands of pounds for rainbow themed promotional items, flags, car decals, lanyards, t-shirts, and even rainbow epaulettes. The cost to a single police force for becoming a Stonewall ally is £2,500 p/a per force. In other words, police forces are using your hard- earned money to fund an LGBT campaigning organisation, and in return becoming walking billboards for that same campaigning organisation. All of this while police staff are facing cut- backs and violent crimes are surging at record rates with too little law enforcement to cope.
The report lists the following police departments as Stonewall Champions or allies: Avon and Somerset Police, Cheshire Police, Derbyshire Constabulary, Dorset Police, Durham Constabulary, Dyfed Powys Police, Hampshire Constabulary, Hertfordshire Constabulary, Humberside Constabulary, Lancashire Constabulary, Leicestershire Police, Merseyside Police, Metropolitan Police Service, North Wales Police, Northumbria Police, Nottinghamshire Police, Police Scotland, Staffordshire Police, Suffolk Constabulary, Surrey Police , Sussex Police, West Midlands Police, West Yorkshire Police, Wiltshire Police and North Yorkshire Police.
Recasting culture
Beginning with the Gay Liberation Front manifesto of 1971, LGBT activists have done the seemingly impossible. They have recast culture to celebrate their lifestyles and enforce their belief systems. No corner of society has been left unaffected, not churches, the arts, media, schools, or our courts. Not even our police.
The conflict of interest is clear. LGBT activism, participation in Pride events and direct financial and moral support of LGBT campaigning organisations is a flagrant deviation from the Police’s Code of Ethics prohibition on partisan political action. By compromising itself in this way, more and more police are being trained about what LGBT campaigners wish the law to be, rather than what it actually is. The effect is that police are increasingly enforcing campaigning goals rather than actual laws. And the victim in all of this is society at large.
Fair Cop’s treatment of these issues, and the immense amount of research they put into uncovering the facts and financial figures involved makes Policing Through the Looking Glass a highly illuminating piece of investigative journalism. What is clear from the report is that much reform is needed to regain the public confidence in police neutrality. The separation of powers depends on it.
Watch more from Harry Miller, director of Fair Cop:
