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I never cease to be amazed at the number of people who believe a life is well spent if it is dedicated to preventing other people, the wrong people, the people who don’t agree with them, from living.

With fresh debate on gay marriage last week, out came the Christians who believe sodomites are damned to hellfire for all eternity by God, in his great mercy.

Many of them may have been the same Christians who believe women are not equal to men in the eyes of God, so arranged that women could not become bishops. The Christians who believe men had better get on with running the church, because they’ve made such a good job of it all these years.

Meanwhile, Tory MPs are convinced gay marriage would threaten the sacred institution of heterosexual marriage – you know, the institution that, at the moment, is blighted by record divorce rates.

Maybe gay marriage would be as much a threat to the institution of heterosexual marriage as, oh, I don’t know, say – poverty? Unemployment? Housing difficulties? Health problems? Children’s needs? Bereavement?

Maybe Tory MPs who want to shore up the sacred institution of marriage may think these areas a little bit more worth addressing than homosexuality… but don’t hold your breath.

No, instead of working out ways to enable married couples (or unmarried couples, singles, straights, gays, clerics, bishops, black people, pink people, any people) to live happy and fulfilled lives, right-wing Tories and evangelical Christians would sooner spend their time, money and energy preventing all those people from doing the things they think should be reserved to themselves, the good people, straight, law-abiding, Christian people, right people.

You could spend a lot of time quoting passages from the Bible at these freaks. You know, the ones in which Jesus preaches a gospel of inclusion, love, forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance.

They don’t want to listen. They only want to listen to their Old Testament God, the smiting one, the one the bigots have quoted all these years to make sure anybody who doesn’t agree with their plans for making money gets a big sharp merciful spike up the jacksie, pronto, and hurry up with the kindling round the stake, Reverend Father.

I want to tell them: if you are so convinced you’re right and I’m wrong and you’ll go to heaven and I’ll be damned to the lakes of fire for all eternity by your loving Deity, why don’t you just shut the fuck up and let me get on with it? What’s it to you?

Let us marry in your churches, worship your god, help manage your church, me and all the Sodomites, the women who want to be Bishops, the gays who want to go to your church to have your God bless their love, the sinners – what’s it to you? Do you think you’ll win extra time in eternity if you stop us? Will God be even more pleased with you? Will you go to some sort of executive lounge extra special heaven if you stop us living our lives?

Why don’t you just rejoice in your conviction of rightness, because you’ll have the last laugh, won’t you? Your God will fold you in his arms, and together you can sneer and jeer as the rest of us take the down escalator to meet the guy with the horns and the goat’s arse. You’ll be happy for all time, I’ll have a red hot poker where the sun don’t shine. Won’t you be happy then?

No. You want to save sinners, don’t you? That’s because you know best, isn’t it? But hang on a minute – isn’t it your God who knows best? Isn’t the general idea that you leave all that judging and forgiving stuff up to him?

Judge not lest ye be… oh alright then

Or should judging be up to the great British media, post-Leveson, responsible, mature, considerate?

Perhaps not.

There are plenty of people with plenty to say about the witless Australian DJs whose so-called ‘prank’ phone call to the Duchess of Cambridge’s hospital may have led to the tragic death of the nurse who put the call through.

There’s virtually nobody to say that the role of the British media in the poor woman’s sad death may have been far, far greater.

If the media hadn’t been enslaved by Royal forelock-tugging, if the media hadn’t been camped outside the hospital ward of a sick pregnant woman, if the media hadn’t howled with righteous moral indignation over the ‘prank’ call, thereby making it a far more serious issue than ever it deserved to be, maybe a nurse and mother would still be here today.

The media judged the ‘prank’ phone call to be more important than deaths in Syria, civil unrest in Egypt, the loss of hundreds of disabled people’s jobs in Britain through the ending of Remploy, the deaths of British pensioners who can’t afford heating… when a woman hears what she’s involved in is far more important than any of these crimes, what is she to think? If anybody had laughed, said “oh, don’t worry about it, it’s only a dopey Australian stunt” and encouraged the media to leave the issue, and the nurse, and the expectant mother, well alone, maybe tragedy would have been averted.

But no. Royal babies. Big news. Important news. News worth hounding somebody over.

Take much more than five

Dave Brubeck, one of the remaining giants of the 20^th century, died last week.

Well, I was sad. They shouldn’t just let news like that seep out willy-nilly: there should be doleful music and solemn warnings and somebody kind on the telly to say: “I think you’d better sit down and have a strong drink to hand…”

Brubeck wasn’t just a jazz musician. He was a writer, a pacifist, a civil rights activist who defied racism and bigotry, a composer, and a friend to his quartet bandmate Paul Desmond, whose alto sax produced some of the most beautiful music in all human history. Together, they were beyond compare: listen to their takes on The Duke, or All The Things You Are, or Some Day My Prince Will Come, or When You Wish Upon a Star. That there could be such beauty in the world is a legacy few can ever dream of achieving.

It was Some Day My Prince Will Come that the good Captain Kay played to me, approaching  30 years ago, pushing a cassette into the stereo of his Ford Escort, sparking up another Dunhill, as we journeyed to an assignment, with the words “I’m not letting you out of this car until you’ve listened to this.”

Well. Half a lifetime later and few days, and certainly no weeks, go by without Brubeck and Desmond, together or apart, in my life. They have been as close to me as friends and family, as important to me as only music and art can be. I have loved them, truly. They have brought great joy to my life.

The Captain and I shared a cry on the phone on hearing the news of Brubeck last Wednesday, and I know, to him, it is a real loss.

But we do know it’s no tragedy to shuffle off at 91 like Brubeck, especially having achieved all he achieved. As long as there are things like friendship, love, the will to good, the will to create beauty, his genius will endure.