Arrested For Calling A Police Horse Gay!
Response to comment [from a
Christian]: "Arrested For Calling A Police Horse Gay!
Ok, seriously?! This has to be one of the most ridiculous arrests I've read
about! What were Thames Valley Police in Oxford, UK thinking?! 'Political
Correctness' in the UK is reaching an all time high.
Quote:
As my colleague Sam Leith reported yesterday, late in the evening on Bank
Holiday Monday, Sam Brown, an Oxford University undergraduate, inquired of a
mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street: "Do you know your horse is gay?" Also,
"I hope you're comfortable riding a gay horse."
Within minutes, young Mr Brown was surrounded by six officers and a fleet of
patrol cars, handcuffed and tossed in the slammer overnight, after which he was
fined £80. A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told the student newspaper
Cherwell that the "homophobic comments" were "not only offensive to the
policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area."
"Offensive to his horse"? Well, you never know. If any constabulary is keeping a
full-time equine psychologist on staff, it's bound to be Thames Valley. Even
now, the horse may be on one month's stress leave at home on full pay, with his
feet up listening to Judy Garland on his iPod. Whoops, sorry. We don't know
whether the horse in question is, in fact, gay. It may be just the way he trots.
Whoops, there goes another 80 quid. What I'm getting at is that, even under a
generous interpretation of "homophobia", it's hard to see why simply identifying
the horse as gay should be a criminal offence.
Mr Brown didn't say: "Tell your gay horse to stop coming on to me" or "I
couldn't get near Royal Ascot last year because those gay horses were queening
around and backing up traffic." Few of us would appreciate inappropriate
speculation about the sexuality of our mounts, yet even in Thames Valley the
offence of hippophobia is surely a stretch.
Caligula made his horse a consul but only Thames Valley has made its horses'
sexuality a hate crime. Had Mr Brown gone on to slur one of the police cars as
obviously homosexual, would Thames Valley's spokesperson have complained that
the homophobic comments were deeply offensive to the officer and his vehicle?
Pondering Mr Brown's query about whether the copper was "comfortable riding a
gay horse", Sam Leith wondered whether the Balliol man was suggesting the
officer was an "unreconstructed homophobe". But the point is that, though the
"homophobes" and "systemic racists" of the constabulary have metamorphosed
virtually overnight into the most gung-ho celebrants of diversity, they are
indeed "unreconstructed" - thus, the somewhat unpleasant heavyhandedness that
has long been a feature of British policing is now deployed in the service of
zero tolerance homophobia crackdowns.
In these touchy times, are Thames Valley Police really the people you want
enforcing the more nebulous sections of an already poorly drawn "Incitement to
Religious Hatred" Act? With that in mind, remember that the mounted section use
mostly Irish Draughts. Things could have gone a whole lot worse for Mr Brown if
he'd said: "I hope you're comfortable riding a gay Arab."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/p...Neverland.html
Poor horse.
Lev. 18:22, 20:13, 1 Kin. 14:24, Rom. 1:24, 26, 27
