Stop chasing the gay vote, Dave. You won't get it

By Damian Thompson Politics Last updated: September 14th, 2012

Leave the gay community alone, Dave (Photo: Reuters)

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph
There was a touching letter in the London Evening Standard on Wednesday. “I am the surviving civil partner of a long-term gay relationship,” it began. “The state has recognised this relationship fully in all my dealings since my civil partner’s death from cancer in 2007. I do not support 'gay marriage’ because the term adds nothing of substance to what I already have received and needlessly offends some members of certain religious faiths (which, incidentally I do not hold).”
I can imagine the look of incomprehension this letter would produce on the faces of David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg. Yes, I know: only Clegg has been caught referring to opponents of gay marriage as “bigots”, but the three are united in their determination to impose this innovation on the public.
The Economist this week pictures Clegg as a drag queen, Cameron as a member of The Village People and Osborne in bondage gear. That’s a risky piece of photoshopping for a right-on publication – isn’t it worried about offending its homosexual readers? But perhaps it was satirising the way the Coalition troika is whoring after “the gay vote”, in which case it has a point.
Most gay people broadly support gay marriage, as you’d expect. But the picture is more complicated than the Government realises. First, there are openly gay people such as the Standard letter-writer who don’t wish to trample over traditional religious beliefs that they don’t consider “bigoted”.
Second, there are gay men and women who, while supporting a change in the law in principle, are more ambivalent about it than they’d care to admit. They worry that the legislation will open up wounds between Christians and homosexuals that have only recently healed. They were unnerved by Clegg’s “bigots” remarks, from which he tried to distance himself in a typically slippery and disingenuous way. They fear that there will be many such arguments in future – not just in the media, but also around dinner tables and in the church porch.
Also, many homosexuals who want the right to gay marriage would prefer that the electorate had the chance to vote for it, rather than see it enacted by Islingtonian fiat.
What about gay people who demand the right to marry as soon as possible? They want to see the law changed during this parliament. They’ll give David Cameron and Nick Clegg credit for “bravely” enacting a historic, constitution-shaking change in British society. But that’s all.
Cameron is chasing a vote that isn’t coming his way. It’s a characteristic mistake: I wrote a few weeks ago about his useless cultivation of the Left-leaning tech community. Decades of identity politics mean that many young homosexuals truly are “glad to be gay”; it’s no longer a desperate slogan, more a statement of fact. Although there is a homosexual subculture in the Conservative Party, for countless gay professionals voting Tory is something you just don’t do. Ever.
But there are other factors to consider. One of the dirty little secrets of gay history, never referred to in “queer studies”, is that many gay people voted for Margaret Thatcher (and kept very quiet about it, as I recall). They did so because, despite Section 28, they knew it was in their economic interests.
Plenty of couples will gratefully take advantage of the chance to turn their civil partnerships into a marriage. But that gratitude won’t alter their assessment of the Government’s economic competence. They’ll sail down the aisle, dust off the confetti – then head into the polling booth to vote Labour.