Section 28 wasn’t anti-gay. It was pro-children
by Paul Horgan, The Conservative Woman:
The 30th anniversary of the enactment of Section 28 has been marked in numerous publications and online postings, and all of them described it in disparaging terms.
They are wrong.
Section 28 was used as a hook by the lesbian and gay movements to argue that they were the subject of discrimination and state oppression, leveraging their identity for entitlement and advantage, as well as justifying the use of violence by some against people they did not like. There was little, if any, scrutiny over the aims and objects of the clause.
So permit me to set the record straight.
First, the text itself. This is what it said:
A local authority shall not –
(a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality;
(b) promote the teaching in any maintained [ie state] school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.
The background was a surge of genuine public concern about what was going on in schools. Modern commentators forget that in the 1980s, Labour local authorities were politicising education and indoctrinating impressionable young minds in socialism. The 1986 Local Government Act was designed to stop these authorities from using material promoting socialism or favouring organisations such as CND or the trades union movement. The introduction of Section 28 two years later extended the prohibition to organisations such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
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