"The worst discrimination has come from closeted gay men"

To the Guardian, Mark Harold wrote a letter and said, "The worst discrimination has come from closeted gay men." Following an interview with Lord Browne, the Guardian (@guardian) asked readers to share their stories about coming out as LGBT in the workplace. Here's what Mark Harold said in full:

"I am a senior executive of a FTSE 100 company in my early 50s, and have been out at work since my mid-30s. The worst discrimination I’ve come across has come from closeted gay men. They live with insidious lies, and are often ruthless in protecting those lies. It’s important that gay men support each other, so the more who come out of the closet in business, the better."

The story of Sam “Skelly” McCrory is remarkable. This is a racist, sectarian, homophobic skin-head turned open and activist homosexual. He said to Henry McDonald in the Guardian:

"Even before I joined the UDA, I used to pretend I was homophobic. I went along with the crowd who were then close to the National Front. I hated Catholics, blacks, Jews and gays - even though I was gay myself. I was hiding my true self. I used to lie to the rest of C Company that I was having a relationship with a policewoman. Only Johnny knew it was a man. The lads used to ask me "Who's that policewoman you are shagging?" I couldn't tell them it was a man, it was such a macho, homophobic culture."

Paul Berry of DUP was a similar character. A religious loud-mouth and virulent homophobic... who was caught with a rent boy. Wikipedia reports it like this:

"Just days before the [2005] election, the Sunday World newspaper claimed that [Paul] Berry had met a man for a massage, with whom he had made initial contact via a gay chatroom, in a Belfast hotel room booked by Berry under a false name. Berry claimed that he was seeking treatment for a sports injury, and said he was considering legal action against the paper. He was not elected and was the only DUP candidate to experience a fall in their share of the vote in favour of the Ulster Unionist Party. 

Weeks later the DUP who, since 1977 have maintained a Christian fundamentalist stance on gay rights, and launched a campaign known as Save Ulster from Sodomy, suspended Berry from membership and commenced disciplinary proceedings. Berry launched a legal challenge but in February 2006 dropped these proceedings and resigned from the party."

Christopher Hitchens - The "some Christians" excuse

In 2009 Christopher Hitchens & Stephen Fry stood in an Intelligence Squared Debate with the motion, the Catholic church is a force for good in the world. Christopher Hitchens tackle the classic Christian evasion and excuse for cruelty, prejudice and discrimination, that's just "some Christians." He said at 4 minutes:

"The same euphemism comes, in the term "some Christians". That is used in all the apologies about the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the anti-Semitic pogroms and all the rest of it. They say "some Christians" fell into error. "Some Christians" allowed themselves to be deceived in this way and to act against the gospel. Well, anti-Semitism was preached as an official doctrine of the Church until 1964. Do you think that might have something to do with public opinion in Austria, and Bavaria, and Poland, and Lithuania? That the Jewish people were accused collectively, as a people, of deicide. The crime of the murder of god, in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That anathema on them was not lifted until 1964, well after the perpetrators of the Holocaust had stood trial in secular courts and been rightly punished for their actions. How can this Church say it has any moral superiority? It has difficulty catching up to what ordinary people regard as common moral and ethical sense and it still can't make itself apologise properly."

Andrew Sullivan has done for homosexuality what John Stuart Mill did for freedom

Andrew Sullivan (@sulldish) began writing and campaigning for marriage equality in 1988 as an important moral argument. Kenneth Minogue produced a review of Andrew Sullivan's seminal publication, Virtually Normal (1995) in The National Review, he said:

"Andrew Sullivan has done for homosexuality what John Stuart Mill did for freedom: he has presented the whole range of social opinion about his subject with lucidity and fairness, and gone to work refuting most of it... Only those familiar with the deep wells of the history of political philosophy... will recognize the scale of his achievement."

Post in full here. Watch a video of Andrew Sullivan talking about same-sex marriage in 1997 here and below: