Sexual politics
The second point of my life with Ian Paisley was in relation to the 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' campaign. As you probably know, homosexual activity was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967. The 1967 Act, however, did not extend to Northern Ireland (which had its own pseudo-Parliament) or Scotland (which had its own legal system). The Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association was established in 1975 and in the same year, Jeff Dudgeon took the British Government to the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg, which found in his favour in 1981 that the British law was an infringement of his right to a private life. It was in this context that in 1977, Paisley launched his 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' campaign.
The only point I want to make about this is that it was actually much less nasty than it could have been. I have discussed this with Jeff Dudgeon and Sean McGouran, who was particularly active in Cara-Friend, a befriending agency that was set up to help isolated or intimidated homosexuals to meet socially with other homosexuals. I myself was at the time founder-editor of the NIGRA journal, Gay Star. I haven't checked on this recently but so far as I know they weren't personally targeted. My involvement was much less prominent but it never occurred to me that it might be dangerous or that I might be subject to serious intimidation. Despite homosexuality being illegal there were two gay discos operating openly in Belfast at the time. One was a disco that could be described as commercial though it had been set up under the auspices of NIGRA. It was called the Carpenter Club after the Socialist poet Edward Carpenter who had also been an early advocate of homosexuality as a valid form of sexual activity. The other was a weekly night in Queen's University Students Union - 'Queen's - Queens'? - Disco'.
The Carpenter Club was in the centre of town behind the security barriers (we are talking about Belfast at the height of 'the troubles'). It was in a dark alleyway which ended in the security barrier. Anyone walking down that alleyway could only be going to the Carpenter Club. Again I haven't checked this but I don't know of anyone being attacked or of a picket being held at the club. A picket in those circumstances could have been very intimidating. The Queen's Disco was picketed. After a night's dancing we would come out all flushed and excited to be confronted by a group of Democratic Unionist Party students holding placards with slogans that one could, if one so wished, have found offensive. But they were perfectly well behaved, polite and even friendly. One could, and some of us did, converse with them. Most probably all of them were Free Presbyterians and the Free Presbyterian Church had, contrary to its reputation, an ethos of politeness, respectability, elementary decency. The line on homosexuality was like the line on Roman Catholicism that you detest the sin but you love the sinner. It was true that line might sometimes be blurred but broadly speaking I think it was held. I remember also a TV interview with Paisley in which he said that he wanted to maintain the law on homosexuality because he thought society as a whole should bear witness that this was not a respectable lifestyle. However, he was not calling for the law to be enforced with any rigour. Once the law was changed, so far as I know he accepted the situation, while of course continuing to preach against what he continued to regard as sin.
In his interesting book on Paisley, the sociologist Steve Bruce discusses the DUP's attitude to the relations between what might be called God's law and the civil law. He argues that the DUP took the 'democratic' part of its label seriously. Since its membership and particularly its active membership were nearly all fundamentalist Protestants it would argue for God's law - for example on the question of Sunday opening. But if they were defeated in the democratic process they would accept defeat, even quite graciously. In other words, they weren't arguing for a 'theocracy' that would impose God's law on people who didn't want it. They asserted what God's law was and they tried to live by it themselves and to persuade other people to live by it, but they accepted that the civil law was different, that it was and could only be decided by the will of the people. The great criticism directed against the Republic of Ireland was, after all, that it was, or Paisley believed it to be, a Church dominated theocracy.