On final day, Theresa May re-hires adviser sacked over anti-LGBT comments
Roger Scruton attends the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 15, 2016 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Awakening/Getty)
In her last full day as the UK’s Prime Minister Theresa May has decided to re-hire sacked government adviser Roger Scruton, who opposes teaching children about gay people and described gender confirmation surgery as “mutilation.”
The outgoing leader was accused of burying the news of Scruton’s controversial reappointment to head the government’s housing commission, by announcing it just hours before Boris Johnson won the Conservative leadership contest on Tuesday (July 23).
Roger Scruton was sacked over ‘racist, homophobic’ remarks
Scruton was initially hired in November but was sacked from the role in April, after an incendiary interview with the New Statesman in which he defended his history of racist and anti-LGBT comments.
In the interview, he had claimed: “I don’t like the idea of preaching homosexuality as a lifestyle in schools… You’re introducing children to something at an age when they can’t possibly understand it.”
He also described gender confirmation surgery as “mutilation” and claimed that that affirming trans children is “playing with fire,” adding: “A lot of this is due to displaying in front of children all these complexities that adults have about their sexual identity and children pick it up and begin to wonder in a strange way well, am I a girl or am I a boy? And then this creates all kinds of traumas in children.”
Theresa May will officially resign as the UK’s prime minister at Buckingham Palace on July 24. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Scruton added of being transgender: “It’s obviously a kind of theatrical obsession which is being imposed upon children whether or not they understand it.”
The New Statesman has since retracted some portions of its original feature, but published the full transcript of the interview which confirms Scruton made the anti-LGBT remarks.
Government adviser has a long history of anti-LGBT comments
Scruton’s on-record derogatory comments about gay people span much of his career.
In a 2015 interview with right-wing outlet Spiked, Scruton claimed: “Lesbianism is usually an attempt by a woman to find that committed love that she can’t get from men any more. Because men exploit women and move on. So it’s very often a reaction to that sort of disappointment.
“Whereas male homosexuality, because it’s not constrained by a woman’s need to fix a man down, is hugely promiscuous – the statistics are quite horrifying.
“And there’s also the obsession with the sexual organs rather than the relationship, this vector towards phallicism, the obsession with the young, all kinds of things like that, which means that, as I see it, homosexual desire, especially between men, is not the same kind of thing as heterosexual desire.”
Writing for the BBC the same year, he claimed: “The orthodox liberal view is that homosexuality is innate and guiltless. Like the Islamists, the advocates of this view have invented a phobia with which to denounce their opponents.
“Deviate in the smallest matter from the orthodoxy, and you will be accused of homophobia and, although this is not yet a crime, it is accompanied, especially for those with any kind of public office, by real social costs.”
Roger Scruton poses at his home on September 28, 2015 in United Kingdom. (Andy Hall/Getty)
Writing for the Telegraph in 2007, he described gay parenting as a “moral inversion that is infecting modern society,” complaining of gay people: “What was once regarded as an intolerable vice is now regarded as an ‘orientation’, no different in kind, though different in direction, from the inclinations that lead men to unite with women, and children to be born.”
In a 2001 essay for City Journal, Scruton claimed the then-Labour government was trying to “introduce propaganda into junior schools that will legitimise the ‘gay’ alternative,” adding that “people live longer, happier, and healthier lives… if they adhere to the traditional sexual code.”
In the City Journal essay, Scruton described religious belief as a “miracle cure” and asserted that homosexuality is more dangerous than smoking.
Scruton wrote: “Our own government is… lowering the age of consent for homosexual intercourse and censuring as ‘homophobic’ those who would alert us to the known medical consequences.
“Nanny is… eager to protect young people from smoking and cites the health risk as her argument. But she does not wish to protect them from homosexual adventures and therefore forbids all discussion of the risk, far greater though it is than the risk attached to cigarettes.”
Despite his record of publicly outlining his own opposition to LGBT+ equality at length, the 75-year-old appeared to deny any knowledge of his own remarks in April.
He claimed: “Apparently I once wrote that homosexuality is ‘not normal’, but nobody has told me where, or why that is a particularly offensive thing to say.
“Red hair too is not normal, nor is decency among left-wing journalists.”
