Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Britain’s flawed definition of extremism is storing up trouble

Is Allah gay? The eventuality – as Jeeves might say – would seem to be a remote one. If such a being as Allah did exist and was gay then no harm could come from stating the fact. If such a being as Allah exists and is not gay then Allah would presumably be big enough to shrug off such insinuations. And if – and I only mention the possibility – such a being as Allah does not exist at all, then it really is neither here nor there whether he, she, they, ze or zir is alleged to be gay, bi, trans or anything else.

Certainly none of this should be cause for being banned from the country. Yet that is what happened last week when a Canadian journalist-activist called Lauren Southern got turned away at the UK border and refused permission to enter the country. Among the justifications given for notice of her refusal of entry was her earlier ‘distribution of racist materials’ which were said to represent ‘a threat to the fundamental interests of society and to the public policy of the United Kingdom.’ The ‘racist materials’ in question would appear to be leaflets which Southern and some friends of hers distributed in Luton a month earlier. In response to a piece in Vice magazine piece headlined ‘Was Jesus Gay?’, it appears that Southern and others decided to carry out a controlled experiment into whether or not it was quite as easy to state that Allah was gay.

It would seem that it is at least possible to say – as Southern and her friends did. They are still alive. But one can also see why the authorities might not relish people saying so. Nevertheless the allegation that saying that ‘Allah is gay’ is ‘a threat to fundamental British values’ is seriously stretching things.

However we would appear to live in seriously stretched times.

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