.. Roger Scruton, the "traditionalist conservative" writer, died over the weekend and just in case you see someone talking about him and not using all the words "homophobic", "racist", "sexist", and "shit", feel free to point them here.
In queer circles, he's most known for calling homosexuality a "perversion" on the.. odd basis that the bodies of homosexuals are too similar to their partner's. He was also repeatedly in print with the equally odd idea that because 'homosexuals' have no children, they have no interest in society and are too busy having casual sex, so "we should continue instil in our children feelings of revulsion" towards same-sex behaviour.
To add to the WTFery of that – plenty of people who identify as lesbian or gay have children, plenty of straight people have casual sex, and you don't need to have children to be interested in society and its future – at the time, he didn't have any children either. Despite that, various right-wingers kept listening to him.
He attempted to back down on this in 2010 when he conceded that, perhaps, comparing homosexuality to incest in terms of neither being in the "long-term interest of society" was too simplistic. ("It's such a complicated thing, homosexuality".)
Given that he'd been virulently against same-sex couples adopting just three years earlier, some of us were never convinced by that.
Similarly anyone who doubts his racism should look at his 2006 article, Should He Have Spoken?
It's a defence of Enoch Powell's 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, the one the Times condemned at the time as "the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history."
Just as with the speech itself, it is utter racist crap.
Let's see, what did the person the Tories knighted in 2016 and appointed to chair the 'Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission' in 2018 say about immigrants and housing in 2006?
Oh yes, that "Modern immigrants don’t, on the whole, behave so badly [as Aeneas]. They don’t need to. They come as the heads of families, and even if the family might comprise four wives and twenty children, it arrives to a red carpet of legal privileges, eagerly unrolled by publicly funded lawyers, and to a welcome trough of welfare benefits that few indigenous citizens can claim, however much they have contributed to the common fund. ..
Indigenous people can claim no precedence, not even in this matter in which they have sacrificed a lifetime of income for the sake of their own future security. Immigrants are given welfare benefits as of right, and on the basis of their need, whether or not they have paid or ever will pay taxes. And since their need is invariably great—why else have they come here?—they take precedence over existing residents in the grant of housing and income support. Those with a handful of wives are even more fortunate, since only one of their marriages is recognized in European systems of law: the remaining wives are 'single mothers,' with all the fiscal advantages which attach to that label. All this has entailed that the stock of 'social housing' once reserved for the indigenous poor is now almost entirely occupied by people whose language, customs, and culture mark them out as foreigners.
It is not 'racist' to draw attention to this kind of fact."
Erm, it's not only racist crap, it's factually totally wrong crap.
Never mind that in 2006, only around 5% of UK social housing was occupied by "immigrants", UK law does recognise polygamous marriages, provided that they are between people 'domiciled' in (i.e. more than just visiting) a country where polygamous marriage is permitted and entered into the marriage in that country.
The rant was also republished here in The Roger Scruton Reader in 2010, so as well as seeing it's something he didn't back down from, it's also proof that the 'I couldn't say this in the UK' bits were crap too.
Add his undisclosed paid shilling for the tobacco industry and his virulent sexism (in his world view of sexuality, women "yield" to a man's advances, rather than having any agency or desire of their own) then there's only one sensible obituary for him:
'Sir' Roger Scruton? A homophobic racist sexist shit.
In short, Roger Scruton was Alf Garnett with a bigger vocabulary.
— Bi Furiosa (@BiFuriosa) January 14, 2020
