UKIP: Stop Raining on my Parade

As I am sure anyone who has seen me out on a Friday night at Plush will attest, Oxford has a vibrant LGBTQ community that is more visible that the jackets worn by our city’s conscientious cyclists. Oxford LGBTQ students were therefore shocked last week by claims from an Oxford politician, David Silvester, a UKIP councillor for Henley-on-Thames, that the same-sex marriage bill passed by Parliament last year was to blame for the recent flooding.

In a long-winded rant, Silvester claimed that “it is [Cameron’s] fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods”, and that the institution of same-sex marriage was “arrogantly against the Gospel”, heedless of the irony as he attempted to push his opinions on an entire country. Thankfully, UKIP have responded as we would hope – Silvester has been suspended.

To hear of an Oxfordshire politician expressing such views was shocking and utterly at odds with Oxford’s vibrant LGBTQ community.

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I spoke to Stuart O’Reilly, a Pembroke student and press officer for UKIP Oxford about the Silvester scandal and to find out if Oxford Univeristy UKIP-ers were just as appalled as me.

O’Reilly told the Tab that, “The unanimous response of UKIP to David Silvester’s comments is one of condemnation. Cllr Silvester is perfectly entitled to his personal religious beliefs but these are certainly not the views of the party and must not be presented as such”. He went on to expressly condemn Silvester’s comments and helpfully directed me to the national party’s LGBTQ division, while apologising for the lack of an LGBTQ section in the Oxford University UKIP society.

However, O’Reilly also commented that the coverage of Silvester’s comments is an example of national bias against UKIP. He cited a case in which a Labour councillor claimed to have been intimate with an extra-terrestrial being, yet the story did not get the same level of media scrutiny.

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While I accept that UKIP is not explicitly at fault here, I think that attempting to downplay this kind of bigoted statement is a mistake. Believing you have had relations with a little green man from Mars is almost certainly proof of one’s insanity, but it doesn’t really harm anyone. Statements such as Silvester’s, which includes the sentence “my prayer for gay people is that they will be healed”, are actively harmful to the LGBTQ community, and especially to those who are struggling to accept their sexuality, as many students in Oxford are.

As a new LGBTQ representative for my college at Oxford I have already been approached by students who are discovering their sexualities and are unsure of how to feel about it, in no small part due to the residual societal stigma that Silvester’s comments reinforce.

Just as it is no longer acceptable to defend racist or sexist ideologies as personal belief, I would move that it should be equally unacceptable to express homophobic or transphobic ideologies, whether they come from millennia-old texts or not – they cause immeasurable harm, and anyone who believes otherwise is only deluding themselves.