It’s always amusing when two parts of the left/liberal coalition get into a shouting match over incompatible rights and demands. Today in the Guardian it is over the intense homophobia of much gangsta music. Put simply, Peter Tatchell, an often wearying and yet in many ways admirable single issue bore (he’s a founder of Outrage, perhaps an ambivalent acheivement, yet is to be wildly applauded for his attempt to make a citizen’s arrest of Robert Mugabe) on the subject of gay rights and anti-homophobia. He has noted that much of the current crop of black musical artistes use shockingly homophobic lyrics and that therefore a certain set of awards should not include such acts, or that if they do, the Beeb should not show said awards.
All of this is a side show to future eruptions of course: how can the same political philosophy be supported by both feminists and islamists? those in favour of sexual licence and those who would defend honour killings? those promoting abortion on demand and those to whom it is a sin against Allah? All of that is in the future and today we just get the response of a black journalist to Tatchell’s campaign:

Tatchell has waded in with a call to boycott the Mobos, and for the BBC to pull the plug on screening it – effectively a demand to put Britain’s biggest black awards ceremony out of business. And this is not the first time he’s acted this way. Previously he’s called for other Jamaican reggae artists to be banned from Britain or face criminal charges.
But the Mobos, and its voting academy of DJs, promoters and record industry insiders, are merely reflecting the fact that these acts are very popular; and in any case their audiences are far more interested in the bass, the beat and the rhythm than they are in the content of the lyrics.

Somehow I don’t think we will see The Guardian running a defense of the British National Party just because election returns show them to be popular.

What Tatchell doesn’t understand is that music is very important to black people.

Good Grief! Are we still allowed to use the stereotype of the happy singing darkie? What next? “Very good at dancing you know”?

Tatchell argued recently that the Mugabe regime was “worse than apartheid”, an astonishing denial of one of the world’s worst-ever suppression machines.

??? Well, Tatchell’s position is at least arguable, the idiocies, stupidities and cruelties of apartheid did not drive millions into starvation and they were not done for the personal aggrandisement of one man. One might also note a series of more effective suppression machines: Stalinist Russia, Red China, Pol Pot, Castro’s Cuba….all worse than apartheid, vastly more murderous both to people and freedom, but then this is the Guardian after all.
It’s worth reading the whole thing to see just how one has to twist and turn in order to defend rapper’s homophobia while still being right on. From what I can make out it is that music is important to blacks, (“happy dancing darkies”), black society is conservative because poor (but doesn’t poverty and injustice radicalise the toiling masses?) , anyway, it’s all the fault of the record company bosses (eeevil corporations!) and Tatchell is a racist for dissing any aspect of black culture.
Bugger that for a game of soldiers. Here’s hoping the left falls apart under the weight of it’s own internal contradictions, something which I think one K. Marx said about a rather different system of political and economic thought.