A Refreshing Change of Pace

Normally, when one reads about gay activists one can expect the normal brownshirt tactics of intimidation, crushing free speech, and trying to smash those who fail to celebrate homosex as the source and summit of all that it good. So stories like this are the norm on the gay activism front.

But now and then, some PC zealot manages to go so far overboard that a curious dog bites man story emerges from the front lines of the gay war on the normal. Take, for instance, this story of book-burning leftist zealotry, wherein some tin-horn bureaucratic dictator with delusions of godhood takes it upon herself to banish Dante’s Divine Comedy from polite society as “offensive and discriminatory”.

Dante, it turns out, was a medieval Catholic with medieval Catholic views about things. So condemns both sodomy and usury (since both are unnatural and sterile attempts to “breed”) and does not look kindly on Mohammed, whom he regards as a heresiarch. So some pipsqueak UN bureaucrat demands he be banished from the classroom.

Here’s where things get fun (and, in my view, hopeful):

The remarks prompted Italian cultural associations, actors who have performed the epic and even gay groups to rush to the defence of the poet.

It was wrong to judge Dante by the standards of today, said Giorgio Rembado, the president of an Italian head teachers’ association.

“Works of literature need to be placed in the historical context,” he said.

Banning the Divine Comedy would be “senseless”.

Franco Grillini, the head of Gaynet, a gay rights’ organisation, said the suggestion that Dante’s writings should be prohibited marked “an excess of political correctness”.

More like Mr. Grillini please.