The last three years have seen an unprecedented level of parliamentary discussion relating to lesbian and gay rights in the UK, not least as a result of the impasse between the House of Commons and the House of Lords over equalising the age of consent for gay men with that for heterosexuals. According to government sources, that topic alone took up 48 hours of parliamentary time – a far cry from the Labouchère Amendment that started it all in 1885, when the entire non-debate was dispatched in half a column of Hansard. The recent proceedings included no less than five full-scale debates in the House of Commons and four in the House of Lords, all of them available via the UK Parliament website. They began with Ann Keen’s amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill on 22 June 1998 and culminated with Baroness Young’s final attempt on 13 November 2000 to scupper the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill with her ingenious Buggery Amendment, a somewhat futile manoeuvre in view of the Government’s undertaking to the European Court of Human Rights to implement the will of the Commons using the Parliament Acts if necessary.
The Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act was duly enacted on 30 November 2000 – ironically the exact centenary of Oscar Wilde’s death – and came into force throughout the UK on 8 January 2001. It was narrowly beaten by the War Crimes Act 1991 as the second Act available on the UK Legislation website to have been passed without “the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal”, thanks to the extension of the site last September to encompass the text of Acts going back to 1988. Incidentally, as a result of that extension, the infamous Section 28 is now officially published on the Web for the first time.
Although in theory the age of consent is not a party political issue, in reality attitudes are strongly polarised along party lines. Among MPs voting in January 1999, 95% of Labour members and 90% of Liberal Democrats favoured equality, while 93% of Conservatives opposed it. The influence of religion is less clear-cut. Over the last few years, no-one has done more in Parliament to defend lesbian and gay rights than Evan Harris, a vice-president of GALHA and supporter of the National Secular Society, who has well exceeded the call of duty as a Liberal Democrat spokesperson, as has his humanist colleague Earl Russell, whose dry wit – reminiscent of his father Bertrand’s – has helped to enliven a number of dreary Lords debates. Conversely, no-one has done more to attack them than Baroness Young, who has repeatedly made it clear in doing so that she speaks “as a Christian”. And old warhorses such as the Protestant Ian Paisley and the Roman Catholic Earl of Longford remain as vehement as ever in their denunciation of “homosexualism”, as Longford likes to call it. Yet the most eloquent speech of all in favour of equality came from an Anglican – the then Conservative MP Shaun Woodward, whose involvement in Childline no doubt equipped him better than most to counter the spurious arguments of some of his colleagues that a high age of consent somehow protects children. Non-religious opponents of equality are rarer, the most notable perhaps being Lord Stoddart.
The “Lords Spiritual” continue to live up to the delightful 1979 Gay News headline “Gay Sex Splits Bishops”, with the Bishops of Chelmsford, Gloucester and Norwich speaking out against equality and the Bishops of Bath and Wells and Birmingham speaking out in favour. Even so, the Bishop of Bath and Wells felt the need to describe anal sex as “quite unacceptable” and “dangerous and demeaning”. With such friends, who needs enemies! The official view of the Church of England opposing an equal age of consent was formally relayed to the Lords by the Bishop of Winchester and to the Commons by Second Church Estates Commissioner Stuart Bell.
Like the UK Legislation website, the online edition of Commons Hansard has now been extended back to 1988. It doesn’t yet stretch quite as far as the debates that led up to Section 28 but does take in Edwina Currie’s unsuccessful attempt to equalise the age of consent back in 1994. There are sporadic skirmishes over the ban on lesbians and gay men serving in the armed forces, which was firmly upheld by Conservative and Labour administrations alike until its enforced withdrawal in January last year. More recent ongoing threads include attempts to reverse the effects of Section 28, and the European-inspired moves towards implementing anti-discrimination legislation.
For the last two years, the UK has had a second parliamentary website, that of the Scottish Parliament, which was reconvened on 12 May 1999 after being adjourned since 25 March 1707. Unencumbered by an obstreperous second chamber, Holyrood has been steaming ahead of Westminster on lesbian and gay rights issues, most recently considering repeal of the law that criminalises sex between men when more than two people are present, following the judgment delivered by the European Court of Human Rights on 31 July 2000 in the case of A.D.T. v. UK that this violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Scottish site contains a good deal of most interesting material which lack of space prevents me from elaborating on here except to mention a couple of sessions of the Equal Opportunities Committee. In one, a number of Christian and Muslim groups give their respective views on so-called “promotion of homosexuality”. The other begins with an increasingly bizarre interview with supposed representatives of the Keep the Clause Campaign and ends with a delegation representing several groups within the Scottish lesbian and gay movement finally managing to inject some sense of rationality.