Gay Rights or, UN, I Am Disappoint.

Article here-ish.

So, bizarrely, and worryingly enough, the UN have decided that being anything in the GBLT rainbow (the phrase you love to hate) is now punishable by death. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. What they've actually done is thrown out a bill saying that it's not okay to execute someone for being GBLT.
This is a Bad Thing, and should be recognised universally as such. Really.
I mean, what the fuck. When did this happen? When did this action become okay?
It's essentially along the same lines and justification as if you executed someone because of their creed or colour- it's not a choice, or a 'life decision'. Who the hell would choose to be something that faces so much prosecution, even in the world today? It's like the atrocities carried out against such people in the past (and we're talking proper people, with faces, like Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde) just never happened.
I mean, I'm lucky, I'm a middle-class white girl with a good education, and I'm straight. I'm pretty much safe from any gay-hate, right? Wrong. My best friend, the one who means the world to me, is gay. About fifty per cent, maybe more, of my friends identify somewhere on the GBL scale. The thought that I could lose them to something like this makes my blood run cold. It's not fair. If nothing else, it raises the question 'can you be executed for the crime of being straight?'- I mean, it's the same sort of thing right? If you can be executed for your gender identity or sexuality, who says it has to be a queer gender identity or sexuality? My 'safe' identity as a straight female could be as unsafe as my bestie's identity as a gay male.
So what can we do?
Fight. We can fight. While it is unlikely that in my tiny corner of the world, this law is going to become a problem (NZ was the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage and gay adoption) we still need to show support for queer people in other countries where it is likely to become a problem. It feels like one step forward two steps back, and it's not fair.

In other news, I started to knit a jumper. Hopefully it won't be completely fail.

On History

The thing I've noticed about New Zealand, in my five years over here, is the lack of history. In the UK we had these great ancestral anchors holding our feet to the floor in the form of ruinous old piles dotted liberally around the landscape- surviving weather, maurading Vikings, Romans, the might of Hitler's Luftwaffe. They were just there- some unnoticed, some made into tourist attractions, some just in a no-man's land in between- the bane of farmers and the delight of antiquarians. That's the interesting thing I guess- there are standing stones and cairns and burial mounds all over England, dotting the landscape like freckles, yet no one has thought to pull them down or dig them up. They'd be pretty good farming land, and while farmers allow their sheep to wander freely (one hasn't really experienced an English summer unless you've stepped in a sheep's little present to you) they still haven't destroyed these memorials. It gives people a sense of their own past, I guess. Doctor Who references aside, Stonehenge is as British as milky tea and rain in August.

New Zealand doesn't have the same reverence. Now, I'm all for progress, but the average New Zealander takes the word 'progress' and makes it walk up and down like a two-dollar ho. The city I live in has some spectacular examples of art deco and Victorian-Gothic decor, but if there was a chance that it would get in the way of revenue then knock that fucker down guys! Since there was a bitchin earthquake down here, it's got worse- the structural damage is being used as an excuse to knock-down all the lovely old buildings, and the facades that have fallen off the front of buildings are not going to be restored. Not to mention the Music Conservatory debacle* a few months back... I think it drives them mad, a little, not having history under their feet. In the UK, pull up any road or dig into any back-garden and one can unearth old roads, old rubbish heaps, even a cache of jewellry**- evidence of the people before us. It's not so in New Zealand, and I wonder if this is what drives them to smash their history before it's really began- a sort of schizophrenia, no concept of their own past or future. They smile at you, but there's no sense of the person behind. You have to wonder what it's like, having no national identity. Sure, they have their 'green' persona, rigorously defended and neurotically kept to- in fact, any

I miss the UK, at times like this. I miss the feel of the past beneath my feet. I know the UK isn't nearly perfect- I keep up via the BBC (today my RSS feed had druids celebrating Samhain*** next to fighting knife crime**** in schools)- though often I find the television shows (Sherlock, Life on Mars etc etc) give me a more accurate idea of what the country is like. I want to go back, in fact, I probably will go back. Hopefully. But more on that later...

*YouTube video. I know the guy who made it...
**Er, just a website.
***BBC news.
****BBC news.