A Salter which has lost its savour

A couple of friends sent me links for the the very silly article posted by Martin Salter, MP for Reading West, on his blog on 2 February. What a model democrat Salter is, opening his article with a joke about men in dresses. This could, one supposes, be applied equally to some Muslims, not to mention some rather butch Scotsmen, but these are constituencies I suspect Salter would not have the nerve to mock.

It would bore all three of us to list Salter's silliness in more than one or two details. I was struck though by his suggestion that the Pope's argument about the Equality Bill contravening natural law is 'code for saying “we want all the benefits of living in a society where religious freedoms are protected, just as long as we don’t have to afford those protections to others.”'. This is what happens when a world-respected, serious-minded scholar is analysed by a blundering philistine. If the pope's words were at all coded, it was in the sense of saying, 'You lot want the vocabulary of natural law but insist on using itas a platform for a Jacobin model of State-protected rights'. My gloss, my gloss.

Salter isn't really worthy of consideration but I must say I was highly amused by one of his arguments. I must quote it in full for all its delicious absurdity:

What the Bill seeks to ensure is that some 22-year-old applying for a job cleaning the windows of Our Lady of the Visitation Church will not automatically be rejected because he might be a fan of The Village People or, Heaven forefend, an out-and-out gay.

So that's what it's about! I hadn't noticed this but apparently Salter's government is moving to stop the oppression of gay window cleaners by homophobic Catholics. How did we not realise? We are all familiar with the recent case of the gay window cleaner drenched in his own water and run out of St Therese of the Little Flower, Little Bimpton. The shameful Poor Claire nuns who pushed a transvestite off those ladders in Throckmoreton just before Christmas have a lot to answer. And after that incident in January when a gay window cleaner was admitted to Nether Wallop Accident and Emergency with a soapy, wet leather stuffed down his left ear, we can understand why the government had to act.

If there is anything more depressing than the prospect of half the MPs in this country beind forced to cough up loot they had prised from the fingers of the tax payer for their Parliamentary Expenses, it is the sight of MPs, of whom Salter is but one example, totally unable to understand their own prejudices, the inner weaknesses of their justifications, and the silliness of their own emotional gut rot.