Boris Johnson’s first choice to be the next BBC chairman likened same-sex marriage to marrying a dog
Charles Moore on BBC Question Time (Screenshot: YouTube)
The ex-Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore is poised to become the next BBC chairman despite voicing a litany of anti-LGBT+ views, including the idea that same-sex marriage would lead to people marrying dogs.
The former boss of Boris Johnson is reported to be the prime minister’s first choice to take on the top BBC role after years of attacking the LGBT+ community in the pages of The Telegraph and The Spectator.
In one of his most egregious columns, written shortly before the UK Parliament passed same-sex marriage for England and Wales in 2013, Moore questioned whether the move for marriage equality would also justify marriage to animals.
“Looking forward, as one always must, I wonder if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one’s dog,” he wrote.
“Until now, this would have been considered disgusting, since marriage has been a law revolving around sexual behaviour, and sexual acts with animals are still, I believe, illegal,” he continued – before suggesting that the legalisation of bestiality would be an “unintended consequence” of removing sex from marriage laws.
“The justification for [same-sex marriage] is ‘equality’, buttressed by the idea that love must carry all before it. People often love their dogs very much and want to spend their life with them. So why should they not, chastely, marry them?”
Later in 2015, a year after the first same-sex marriages took place, Charles Moore insisted that they were just a “trend” like asbestos and communism.
In the same year he said it is “common sense” that married heterosexual parents make the best parents, and claimed that traditional views of parenthood were being drowned out by “a form of gay rights sharia”.
“If you start to speak about how babies should be made and brought up, you quickly find that no such tolerance is afforded,” he complained.
Moore is also a proponent of gay conversion therapy, writing in in 2018 that the government has no business banning the torturous practice because homosexuals should be “entitled to seek escape”.
Worries about his lack of impartiality are joined by concern of his open and repeated criticism of the TV license fee, with BBC veterans warning that his appointment could put the corporation’s independence at risk.
Alongside eyeing up Charles Moore for the BBC, Boris Johnson has also approached the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre to head the media watchdog Ofcom.
In his 26 years at the helm of the paper Dacre was responsible for countless homophobic headlines, including the infamous front page splash: “Abortion hope after ‘gay genes’ finding”.
