“The response, however, exceeded even my expectations.”
For the last week, she said, “I have been subjected to an extraordinarily vicious outpouring of hate and incitement to violence” through emails, the internet and in mainstream media.
“If the gay lobby had set about trying to prove my point, it could hardly have done a better job.”
Phillips had asserted that homosexualists are now attempting to suppress any public opposition to their political goals. The reaction to this statement, she said, reveals a basic “totalitarian mindset” that is behind the homosexualist agenda.
“Indeed, the total inability of those who subjected me to such abuse to realise that they are, in fact, spewing out the very hatred, intolerance and incitement to violence of which they are accusing others would be hilarious were it not so terrifying.”
In her January 24th piece titled, “Britain’s New McCarthyites,” Phillips wrote that plans to insert references to homosexual relationships throughout the schools curriculum are nothing more than “a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.”
She pointed to the many cases in which opposition from Christians or others who uphold traditional sexual mores has been quashed through actions in the courts. “What was once an attempt to end unpleasant attitudes towards a small sexual minority has now become a kind of bigotry in reverse,” she wrote.
“Expressing what used to be the moral norm of Western civilisation is now not just socially impermissible, but even turns upstanding people into lawbreakers.”
Phillips said, “The response to this warning against an attempt by the gay lobby to silence dissent? An eruption of tweets on Twitter suggesting that I should be killed.”
She offered samples, including, “Someone just kill Melanie Phillips please”; “your homophobic rant equals that which comes out of a dog’s rectum. Kill yourself you ****”; and “throw her in the Thames.”
Emails she received called her a “vile, poisonous, horrible old woman,” and said, “people like you should be silenced as you insight (sic) bigotry and fear. Go and suck a tail pipe, get cancer, GET RAN OVER BY A TRAIN. I hope your ******* house burns down.”
Phillips, who is Jewish, is a libertarian conservative political columnist for the Spectator and comments widely on Israel, the global crisis of Islamic violence, and more broadly on cultural issues. In her new book, “The World Turned Upside Down,” Phillips has denounced the loss of and vilification of Judeo-Christian religious belief that “has meant the West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice, which it enforces in the manner of a secular inquisition.
“The result has been a kind of mass derangement, as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down.”
“Thus the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. It is succumbing to a ‘soft totalitarianism,’ which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression.”
