It might have been better for the killer of the flamboyant Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn if he had been a priest – certainly if it had happened further back in a history stained with the blood of “sodomites”. , who lives in Amsterdam, tells us why.
“Sodomites” haven’t had an easy time in Dutch history. Either because of Calvinism or, more recently and in the case of Pim Fortuyn, when an animal-rights campaigner decided he needed to make a stand for “vulnerable groups”.
The good news is that detractors tend to get their comeuppance nowadays. So Volkert van der Graaf, who shot down Pim Fortuyn last year, received an eighteen-year prison sentence in April – subject to appeal – for dispatching the maverick politician. I find myself wondering: Why eighteen years (plus a fine of 34,000 euros) as opposed to the maximum twenty the judge could have imposed?
Incidentally, life really does mean life in the Netherlands and is rarely handed down and virtually never for first-time offences. For Van der Graaf, however, according to the polling organisation NIPO, 65 per cent of those questioned favoured a life sentence. So why not the full twenty? Was it because Fortuyn was a politician and introduced an element of fair game into the equation”? Makelaars (estate agents) must be feeling vulnerable.
Pim Fortuyn’s murder was described by Expatica, the English language online newspaper, as “a defining moment in Dutch modern history”. It was, says Expatica, “the first political assassination in 300 years”, and had an effect on the outcome of the general election that Van der Graaf didn’t anticipate. Nine days before polling day, it helped Fortuyn’s party (LPF) gain 26 seats, double that estimated, in the 150-seat parliament and a hand in coalition government. LPF lost most of these seats in the general election this January as a result of party in-fighting. There has been a political vacuum since, although things may have moved on by the time you read this.
For Fortuyn, of course, being gay seemed not to matter. This is a far cry from the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, which witnessed an unprecedented degree of persecution of “sodomites” in the Netherlands. A book review in the March edition of the Dutch magazine Gay News included the grisly details. After prosecutions had started in Utrecht in 1730, governors throughout the country started passing laws and preachers publishing books in which sodomy was described as a deadly sin. Holland was a Calvinistic republic, having hundreds of courts with fundamentalist judges and the similarity to contemporary Islam was not lost on the writer of the article, Gert Hekma.
One problem seems to have been understanding what sodomy actually was! Well, they had an idea, of course. Some experts at the time thought it included all non-coital sex, including masturbation, although most courts saw only anal sex as a capital crime and considered homosexual conduct as foreplay (!) to be punished less severely. It seems that some men were put to death, though, for mutual masturbation.
In the small town of Faan, near Groningen, the peasants didn’t have much idea, either. They were all at it, apparently, but it came as a nasty surprise when it was brought to their attention that what the local preacher, H. C. van Byler, had probably long been fulminating against was what most of them had been innocently perfecting since the dawn of time: men and boys had few scruples about having sex with each other, whether they were married or not, and didn’t have the slightest idea that their behaviour was either wrong or punishable.
In 1731, Van Byler had added to the collective hysteria with the publication of his book, Helsche boosheyt of grouwelyke zonde van sodomie (Hellish Wickedness or [the] Horrifying Sin of Sodomy) – a title that doubtless ensured brisk sales. He was a good friend of the equally fundamentalist district chief, Rudolf de Mepsche, whose combined functions included that of mayor, judge, officer of justice, chief of police and chief warder. In short, he was an absolute ruler, accountable to no-one and against whom there was no possibility of appeal. Torturing suspects was also allowed.
This deadly Calvinist cocktail appears to have been responsible for 23 men and boys from Faan (one as young as 15) being executed, by torture and throttling, out of almost a hundred brought to trial on charges of anal sex. It might have been even worse, as in the larger cities where such horrors went unchallenged, but for the commotion that arose around Groningen when wives and friends in the close-knit community started to protest. This led to an impasse in provincial government that was only resolved with the revolution of the House of Orange in 1748 and when the last of the Faan prisoners were, among others, released from prison, where they had languished without trial for seventeen years.
Needless to say, the preacher, Van Byler, seems to have escaped justice for his part in this crime against humanity, although for De Mepsche things didn’t go so well. The high costs of the trials and executions, usually billed to the condemned, were now mainly referred to him, resulting in both his bankruptcy and the ruin of his reputation.
The moral of this story: should Volkert van der Graaf have become a priest before he shot Pim Fortuyn?