Hey, all, sorry I haven’t been much of a blogger (or podcaster, or anysuch other) lately, but I have been moved to write by discovering this story. It’s been responded to here. Just a disclaimer: These are the only sources on this that I’ve seen, so it’s possible it’s not true. (I’m not familiar with NCLR, but I’m told by a gay friend that it’s a reliable source.) Sadly, my instinct tells me it probably is true.

An elderly gay couple in the US – surprisingly, in liberal California – have just been put through the most horrifying and inhuman series of loops that I’ve ever come across in a news story. The two men, Clay and Harold, had lived together for twenty years, and had secured all the legal paperwork ensuring that they were named on each other’s wills, that had power of attorney over each other, etc., etc. But when Harold was hospitalised after a fall, these directives were ignored, and worse. To begin with, Clay was refused hospital visitation rights.

It’s here that these gay rights horror stories usually stop, but it’s here that this one gets so much worse. The county ignored Clay and appealed to a judge to allow them to make medical decisions on his behalf. They referred in their appeal to Clay as Harold’s “roommate.” From the article:

The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

They then went to the house that Harold and Clay had lived in, moved Clay out to a nursing home against his will (and separate from the home in which they’d put Harold), auctioned off all of their belongings without “making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom,” terminated the lease on the house and gave it to a landlord.

Harold has since died, alone, in a nursing home. Clay has been stripped of all his possessions, except for a photo album willed to him by Harold. He has been released from the nursing home, and is now suing the county with the help of a lawyer, Anne Dennis, who was appointed by the court. I wish him the best of luck.

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I’m trying to be as fair-minded as I can with the following sentence, so I apologise for the qualifiers I may use:

I don’t see any way that anyone other than the most narrow-minded homophobic bigot could see this as anything other than a tragedy and an affront to the dignity of these two men specifically and to humanity generally.

Leaving aside for a moment the gay argument (I’ll come to it), these men had everything they owned taken from them, including their home, for the sake of medical bills. It’s the kind of story that can only come from America (and I don’t know how much the new health care bill will help), but that alone is outrageous. It is, in point of fact, robbery, by the state of its citizens. I often wondered when the tea party were marching in their idiot masses over the past year why they did not protest this kind of thing, because in the US it’s not an uncommon occurrence for healthcare costs to bankrupt a person or a family. In the case of Clay and Harold, as far as I’m aware, bankruptcy was not declared, but they lost their house and everything that made it a home. I do think, though, that if this were a straight couple, it would be all over the news, rather than reported on a couple of obscure blogs in the corners of the internet as it is now.

Because the gay issue is important here. There is no way that any straight couple, married or “civil partners” or otherwise, would be treated the way these men were treated. Hospital visitation rights are a common call among gay rights activists, and it seems like so small a thing, but it is utterly important. Think of someone in your life right now who you love; who means the world to you, and imagine they are seriously injured. Imagine being told, maybe a hundred feet from where they’re lying, that you’re not allowed to see them. That though you have lived with them for years (or in the case of Clay and Harold, decades), that you don’t count as close enough. This argument alone should stand as sufficient for gay marriage and equal rights for gay people to become law, but it is not the only argument that can be made. But time and again politicians at best refuse to touch it and at worst make abhorrent slippery slope arguments equating homosexuality with paedophilia and bestiality.

Certainly the refusal of visitation was not the greatest indignity forced upon these men. I read a novel (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Highly recommended. Amazon UK and US) a few years ago which told the story of a man imprisoned in a nursing home against his will. It was told comically, but was memorably frightening. I always assumed it to be, to some extent, hyperbole. Reading how Clay was ejected from his house and shipped off to a home so that his possessions could be sold to pay the medical bills of his dying lover, and how he needed the help of a lawyer to get out, makes me less sure. The state refused to acknowledge in court that they were lovers (the referral to Clay as Harold’s “roommate” I found particularly chilling), but this did not stop them from treating their possessions and property as those of a single unit, like, say, a family unit. Here the state has it both ways, neither of which works particularly to the advantage of the state – at best, what did they get out of it? A few hundred thousand dollars, maybe? – but both of which are disastrous to the men involved. The worst of both worlds. This was abusive, malicious and needless.

Creative interpretations of the law – remember that Clay, legally, had power of attorney and power over medical directives – allowed this abuse to take place. This is why in civilised countries gay marriage must be legalised, and must be given the same status as straight marriage. There must be one law for straight couples and gay couples, not “separate but equal,” but the same law. Remember that “separate but equal” must by necessity lead to “but some are more equal than others” (if you’ll excuse me misquoting Orwell). Clay is suing the state, and with any luck will be successful, but that will not restore the three months he spent imprisoned away from his dying lover. The only possible good that might come of this is if it mobilises people to get gay rights on the agenda and get some modicum of gay equality into law.

The extremity of this story has set a fire in me the way few things do, and I want it to spread. Please, comment, repost, retweet if you Twitter or link if you Facebook. Let this story grow.

The front-page headline from the Daily Telegraph screamed at me as I bought my milk and apple juice just now,

Hanging Crowd Bays for Blood as Blair Faces his Inquisitors

I mean, for goodness sake, Telegraph, at least pretend to be objective.

As much as this is a great sentence – try saying it in a fearsome, guttural voice, like this – it really leaves the reader in absolutely no doubt what side the article takes.

Besides, it’s hardly true. The crowd, which isn’t hanging (yes, I know what they meant, but they’re not, en masse, calling for his hanging either), is not baying for blood, and the use of the term inquisitors is obviously psychologically linked to the inquisition more than it is to the Iraq inquiry.

And let’s be fair. Blair lied, it would seem knowingly, in order to lead his country to an unjust, unnecessary and illegal war, which has further destabilised the middle-east and given countless muslims cause to fight what they see as an attempt at imperial rule from the west. He should be brought to justice for this, but he won’t. The Iraq inquiry, founded and staffed by the Labour party, is not a trial, and will not resolve any of the important issues.

Digging a little further into the article, we find:

A man grabbed a megaphone, with a let’s-get- down-to-business manner. “Tony Blair …” he shouted. The crowd answered, like the response in a Pentecostalist church. “War criminal!”

See? Those people protesting Blair have a religious fervour. They’re calling for blood, in the face of all rationality. They have “the same sense of seething resentment, and the hunger for justice – or revenge – that one sees at crown courts as child murderers are whisked past in prison vans, their heads covered in blankets.”

And how is Blair taking all this anarchic yelling? In a “narcoleptic” hearing room, after being treated to a description of his attire (“a blue suit, white shirt and red tie”) we find that “his expression [is] grave, with a flicker of apprehension.” Later, on facing a difficult question, he “assumed the bashful look of a schoolboy caught with his hand in the sweet jar.” The article comments later that this questioner is the only one who is not “polite, even courtly,” but cheerfully drops in the adjective “beady” to describe him.

Throughout this article, this simpering (I’m not writing a newspaper article – I’m allowed be biased), pity-Blair tone is adopted, often explicitly but sometimes subtly. The last couple of sentences, though, really do take the cake.

“And is there anything you’d like to add?” Mr Blair looked at him, as if to say, “Are you kidding?” “No”, he said. He walked quickly from the room. There was a smattering of boos from the audience, then shockingly, a shout, “You are a liar.” And another. “And a murderer.”

Outside the baying intensified – less a hanging crowd, it seemed, than a lynch mob. But the pontiff manqué had left by a side entrance. They hadn’t landed a glove on him.

So, after another attempt to vilify the protesters (poor Tony!), we even have this “journalist” putting words in Blair’s mouth. Lucky thing, too. If it weren’t for writing of this calibre, the Telegraph’s audience wouldn’t know what to think.