Lowri Turncoat

There are many things about the modern world that we don't quite understand. The appeal of MySpace, for example, or why nobody else we know gets that strange feeling of nausea and shame when they read heat magazine. Another is the concept of giving an entire page of a newspaper over to somebody of no great importance, so that they can tell us all about the horrors of their most recent gas bill, or that person who was rude to them that one time on the bus. Who cares? Why can't these losers get a livejournal like the rest of us?

Our spiritual leader Media Monkey has drawn our attention to a particularly frustrating example, namely the Lowri Turner column in the Western Mail. Lowri Turner, for those of you who don't remember, was the erstwhile heir to the throne of daytime TV, who for some reason never quite reached her coronation and was overthrown by the infinitely more evil Lorne Spicer. Lowri, we're sure you'll be thrilled to discover, does not believe that gay men would make good party leaders or prime ministers, because apparently they can't have children (someone's not been reading the papers) and are "too divorced from the norm". After all, she points out, her gay friends' biggest dilemma is "whether to have a black sofa or a cream one."

While Monkey has already addressed most of the things that are inherently stupid in such a comment (and if we keep linking to people who can point out the stupidity of others better than we, we're going to blog ourselves right out of a job), we would like to point out to Ms. Turner that not all gay men are afflicted with terminal cases of soft furnishing-related indecision. Indeed, some of us wouldn't even buy a sofa for the sole reason of having sex on it. Gay men come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties of opinion (although of course they're all fabulous). We've met rather a lot of media types who consider themselves to be right-on with The Gays, but can only deal with them in an "oh aren't they cute?", distanced kind of way and will always privately admit that they consider the whole thing a bit wrong but they'll never get up the career ladder if they admit it publicly.

If we can further analyse her ramblings, she believed that gays can't be PM because they don't have children, and thus can't understand about MMR or schools. So presumably childless straights can't either? Her whole logic is that you have to have experienced something directly in order to legislate on it. Thus she wants a PM who has been a parent, a teacher, a dinner lady, a tube driver, a policeman, a fireman, a nurse, a doctor, a dentist, a solider and presumably a pensioner? It's not that we especially mind her having that opinion, we just object to how incredibly incoherent and poorly-argued the whole thing was.

Our best suggestion at this point is for Lowri to widen her social circle - perhaps to make some new gay friends with a slightly more informed world view. Then again, if her "friends" read her column, she might find she needs some new ones anyway.