An Anglican newspaper has defended the publication of an article that compares gay rights campaigners to Nazis, saying the author has "pertinent views".
Pertinent is a synonym for relevant. What are these views relevant to?
In his column [Alan] Craig referred to a number of high-profile legal cases where Christians claim to have been penalised for their views on homosexuality.
He wrote: "Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK's victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights stormtroopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners, registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors, and foster parents … find themselves crushed under the pink jackboot.
"Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police. Following a plethora of equalities legislation, homosexuals are now protected and privileged by sexual orientation regulations and have achieved legal equality by way of civil partnerships. But it's only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated."
Yes, before you know it they'll be sending heterosexuals to the gas chambers. Pertinent, in this case means relevant to Alan Craig's vivid imagination (as a side note - I hope, for the sake of sanity that Alan Craig is mixing his metaphors and doesn't actually think the Gestapo led the French Revolution).
It may not have always been the case, privileged, white, heterosexual men have insisting that they are the most downtrodden in society. It is a nice illustration though of the superiority/fear dialectic of bigotry. Bigots simultaneously feel superior yet consistently undermined by the object of their hate. They have the upper hand, yet everywhere they see inevitable doom, in this case hallucinations of pink swastikas. They may be dominant, but their enemy is vital and alive.
There's almost certainly a degree of projection here too. It's rather like Martin Amis's characterisation of Muslims as fascists, followed by thought experiments in a final solution.
We may want to give Alan Craig the benefit of the doubt on this account. I certainly have never heard of him before, and let's not forget for every one of him there may be many Giles Frasers are there?. But why bother? He sounds like an absolute scumbag.