May 21st

We live in a strange time. Just as our genuinely liberal and civilised values are making a real difference in society, the forces of reaction are growing stronger. This is good news and bad. It means we are getting somewhere, and it means that we must fight harder.

Right-wingers across Europe and in America are gaining ground. This is not because they represent the real feelings of 'ordinary people' or the 'petit blancs' as Le Pen calls them, but because they tap into the ugly side of all of us.
Let's face it - none of us is the true face of tolerance, each of us has our prejudices, but to live as a moral being includes avoiding the easy righteousness of blaming others.

The new right is full of blame and full of fear. According to them, our tidy world is a mess of asylum seekers, benefit scroungers, paedophiles, gay activists, feminist campaigners and teenage crime. Such problems are variously linked together depending on the lurid colour of the moment. Often women are to blame; we go out to work, so we don't look after our children properly. We are successful, so we undermine our menfolk.

We are single parents, so we drain the State.

Recently, the Right has gone in for the tactics of Soft Power. They only want women to go back into the home and have babies, because women are unhappy doing anything else. The Right wants to limit alternative lifestyles, because such lives are not emotionally satisfying. We're not anti-gay, we just don't want gays to marry or adopt children. It's for their own good, you know.

It was heartening to find that many Tories refused the Whip in last week's Adoption Bill. It was depressing to hear the hard Right mouthing the usual prejudices, masquerading as decency and common sense.

If two people love each other and want to adopt children, why does the act of marriage make them better parents?

If two women or two men want to bring up a child, why are they automatically less fit to do so, than any two people of the opposite sex?

The Right, which endlessly trumpets its commitment to the individual, free from State interference, always talks in generalisations when confronted by what it fears. Single parents, unmarried couples, gays, are uniformly BAD, while married couples, however dysfunctional, are GOOD.

I would like to live in a society where we all enjoy the same rights and responsibilities, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexuality. Only then, can people be judged on their own merits. No doubt some gay people and some unmarried couples would make terrible parents. They are plenty of married heterosexuals who are not fit to look after a pet mouse, let alone a child.

We are a society in transition. The old models have collapsed. The Church has little to offer. We are not stable in the way that our grandparents were stable. This is frightening for us, as individuals and as a culture, and it would be simpler to try and retreat. The truth is, it's too late to go back. We have to go forward, through this troubled time, and keep bright our commitment to change. Let's not forget that many of those women staying at home and having babies, were desperately unhappy. Let's not forget that nice children in nice families often concealed the worst damage behind the cleanest curtains.

There is no single solution. The 'alternative lifestyles' that so terrifies the Right, are the choices people should be able to make, without fear of discrimination. Marriage and children are not best for everyone, any more than a career is best for all women. Not everyone is suitable to be an adopted parent. Those who are will come from all walks of life.

I am adopted, and my parents thought that the best life for a child was to tour the seaside towns of northern England in a Gospel Tent.

My parents were everything Anne Widdecombe would like; religious, devoted and sober. They were also bonkers. The two women who made my life tolerable would never have been allowed to adopt me, even though they had books, pictures, and money. Perhaps those women were a role model for me, and Anne Widdecombe would not approve of that. Yet which is the better model for a child - a life of narrow extremism, or the quiet direction of thought?

I am guardian to my god-children, should their parents die, and what I could offer them would certainly be alternative, but I would do everything to make it true; that is, true to the best of human nature, wherever it is found. Gay, straight, single, married, the variety of life that the Right does not understand.