UK Fact-Checker "Full Fact" Is not Impartial

This post is also in Italian: Il Sito di Fact-Checking Inglese "Full Fact" Non È Imparziale


Like me, you may have been attracted to the reassuringly-named Full Fact website and non-profit company.

It's a fact-checking group, whose tagline is "Promoting accuracy in public debate".

After hearing about it from David Dimbleby on Question Time, I was immediately interested in this site, which I believe follows a trend set by Americans whose fact-checking after, for example, televised presidential debates becomes frenetic.

I am a firm believer in evidence-based reasoning in every sphere, using the scientific method of investigation whenever we can.

In politics as much as in health, in sociology as much as in the environmental subjects, empiricism and logic are what we need.

Therefore I welcomed the existence of this British site, and I read it. Certain things in it didn't seem too impartial to me, though, for example about Portugal's drugs decriminalization laws' outcomes.

So I checked who is behind Full Fact. I discovered that its "core funding comes from three independent charitable trusts: the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation".

A look at The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust's site reveals that it has a strong focus on "racial justice" and "Islamophobia". Its pamphlet The Quest for Racial Justice has the picture of a hijab-wearing woman on its cover, so we know immediately what kind of "racial justice" we're talking about.

It doesn't take much to realize that this is a charitable, Quaker in origin, but politically not unbiased organization, believing in multiculturalism and seeing things only from the perspective of ethnic groups and immigrants, legal or not, and not the indigenous population of Britain.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust does not define what it means by "racial justice", probably assuming that it should be obvious, and indeed it is obvious what it intends when you see that it is in full support of the Macpherson Report on the death of Stephen Lawrence, which accuses the police of being "institutionally racist" and contains a pearl like this: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person" opening the door to any abuse of the term. Or when you read in The Quest for Racial Justice statements like this:

"Stephen Lawrence died at the hands of racists in 1993... In the meantime, many others have lost their lives in a similar way"

without any mention of the many white victims of non-white racism, about whom the national media are totally silent, a situation so scandalous as to prompt even Muslim multiculturalist and leftist Yasmin Alibhai Brown to write an article whose headline says it all: "When the victim is white, does anyone care?" (The article has then been removed from the website of London newspaper Evening Standard, apparently the only link left is on an online library).

It's clear that for this organization victims cannot be white. Yet, the mentioned article reports, "Almost half of the 58 known victims of racially motivated murders between 1995 and 2004 were white".

Yorkshire Conservative Councillor Roger Taylor called JUST West Yorkshire, a group affiliated with The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, an "ultra-left organization".

Discover the Networks gives this description:

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) was founded in 1904 by its namesake, a prominent Quaker entrepreneur and philanthropist. Viewing the unequal distribution of wealth as a defect inherent in all capitalist countries, JRCT aims to change “the existing power imbalances in society” and create “a better world.” Led by a board whose members are guided by the principles and values of Quakerism, the Trust focuses especially on eradicating the “root” causes of poverty, “social injustice,” and “political inequality”—and not merely on treating “the superficial manifestations” of those problems.

The second major funder of Full Fact, the Nuffield Foundation, has a website that welcomes you with talk of class divide and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The third, finally, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, supports "vulnerable migrants" and "social change".

The jargon is revealing, the picture is clear.

Full Fact is a bit like Wikipedia, pretending to be impartial and just offering "facts", but the people giving this information have a very specific, culturally Marxist, ideology colouring their fact-checking. I suspect that Dimbleby wouldn't have advertised it otherwise.


PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay

TV and Hollywood Subtle Hidden Persuaders: The Killing, The Final Destination

Both the television and Hollywood subtly manipulate - in a way reminiscent of the advertising industry with its "hidden persuaders" - what people think to establish a form of cultural Marxism ("political correctness" is nothing other than that) as the dominant ideology, the current orthodoxy.

Subtle, hidden persuasion used in fictional, visual stories is much more effective than direct attempts to persuade through argument. If you see the argument openly, you can also spot its faults by using reason, logic and evidence. But if you are not allowed to see the argument, you are more vulnerable to it via the power of imagery and emotionally-charged human tales.

So viewers are influenced by professional persuaders into buying an ideology or a world view as they would an advertised product or service.

These days we can watch so many shows, films and telefilms for free and in the comfort of our homes. We are lucky, yes, but just as we have to somewhat pay for all this luxury through enduring commercial breaks, similarly we also have to pay for it by being subjected to ideological and political brainwashing, more often than not without even realizing it.

I'll give two recent examples of British TV broadcasts, one of which involves a Hollywood film.

Since I mentioned "orthodoxy", a term often used in relation to religion and whose opposite is "heresy", and remembering that heretics were sometimes burnt at stakes, I'll start with the American movie, for reasons that will become clear.

The film in question is The Final Destination, the fourth in the series, made in 2009. I didn't watch the whole film, but I saw a scene in which a drunken guy, an obvious villain of the piece, calls a black man "nigger". At that point I knew, for having seen a similar thing umpteen times in Hollywood productions, that this chap was doomed. He couldn't say that word in a US film and survive unscathed: he had to die.

Sure enough, he did die. And how is also interesting. The character, Carter, caught fire in an accident involving his truck. The vehicle started moving while he was trying to burn a cross on a front lawn, and as he chased after it, his foot got caught in the chain, dragging him along the road with the truck and starting a fire through friction. So he was burnt alive, just as the heretic that he was, for having used a wrong word according to the Hollywood orthodoxy's diktats.

The important thing to consider here is that the term "racism" has become so broad and all-encompassing in its meaning, and is misapplied to so many irrelevant, inappropriate situations, that it now creates a real confusion in its usage.

Real, serious acts or demonstrations of racism - very rare, now, except those directed against whites - are put by this prevailing liberal (in both senses of abundant and leftist) use of the word in the same category as trivialities, like calling people names in a moment of irritation, so whoever commits the second kind of "offence" is treated with almost the same severity as who is a real racist.

A good instance of that is the case of former England football team's captain John Terry.

My second example from UK TV programs is the Danish detective drama The Killing, Series 3. Here a huge corporation, the biggest in Denmark, shipping and oil giant Zeeland, is the villain. Its owner Robert Zeuthen is a man who has destroyed his family for being too absorbed in his multinational empire. His young daughter is kidnapped and her life is at risk, all because Zeuthen's personal assistant and Zeeland's top executive Niels Reinhardt, a real corporate man who worked all his life for the company and in the drama personifies it, is a paedophile who raped and killed a child whose father is exacting revenge.

In the end Zeuthen, after his daughter is rescued and safe, decides to retire from running the business in order to spend all his time with his now reunited family. The corporation is seen throughout the story as an enormous predator, swallowing the life of the owner's family and then almost eating up the flesh of his daughter, run by men who are corrupt at best and murderous paedophiles at worst.

In the final episode the company seems to be abandoned, like a sinking ship, by its owner who had already squandered lots of its resources in a vain pursuit of his daughter's kidnapper, signifying the unimportance of money and wealth.

His wife is a heroine of the drama, who is against the big multinational from start to finish.

Occupy Wall Street couldn't have got the message across better.

The moral of the story is, among other things, that the corporation ruined the family, and its dereliction restored it.

How many families, in real life, are actually helped, kept together and survive thanks to businesses like Zeeland is naturally conveniently omitted from the yarn, which could have made the hardest-core Marxist proud.

UK Comic Frankie Boyle Donates £50,000 to Help Guantanamo Inmate

The only good news in this article is that buffoon, oops, comedian Frankie Boyle is retiring.

It doesn't surprise me that he is involved in this:

But Frankie Boyle is now using his fame, and wealth, for more serious ends, by donating tens of thousands of pounds of his money to help Britain’s last inmate at Guantanamo Bay to sue the MI6.

Yesterday the Glaswegian comic announced the £50,000 compensation he won from a recent libel victory against the Daily Mirror newspaper, would go towards a landmark legal attempt to sue Britain’s security services over accusations they have defamed Shaker Aamer, the only British resident still languishing without charge in Guantanamo.

There are just about billions over trillions over zillions of better ways to spend one's money than to help a man whom the US military Joint Task Force Guantanamo believes led a unit of fighters in Afghanistan, including the Battle of Tora Bora.

Repeatedly, ex-Guantanamo prisoners have led militant groups and have been suspected of terror acts after their release, including Sufyan bin Qumu, who may be involved in the attack on the Benghazi U.S. Consulate that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on the last anniversary of September 11th.

Even Boyle seems to realize there is something "random" about this whole affair:

Even Boyle, who is best known for his performances on BBC panel show Mock the Week, admits his involvement in the case sounds a little far-fetched. “I remember reading [the US pop star] Usher crashed a hot air balloon into something, and I thought ‘this is just a random word generator’”, he told The Independent yesterday. “It feels a bit like that.”

Clive Stafford-Smith, the director of Reprieve, admitted the libel action untested legal formula but said there was important legal ground that needed to be explored.

Peter Hitchens, Will Self and Gay Marriage on Question Time

On the BBC's political debate program Question Time last night, panellist Will Self lived up to his auto-referring surname (the only thing that it's not his fault) by doing his best to shut up everyone who dissented with his views by calling them "homophobic" or "racist", according to the subject under discussion, whether it was same-sex marriage or mass immigration. When the argument was about drug policy, his tactic was slightly different: since the words "addictophobic" or "substancist" (discriminating against those who take illegal substances) have not (yet) been invented, he accused those with different ideas of simple, old-fashioned ignorance of the data.

Will Self is a writer and a Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, which is a very sad illustration of the standard of what these days passes for college brainwashing, sorry, education.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens was the only one of the five panellists with something intelligent and sensible to say, beyond the ideological irrationality (Will Self), political interests (MPs Justine Greening and Stella Creasy) or simplistic platitudes (Lord Bilimoria).

Hitchens' first intervention, about PM David Cameron's ill-conceived backing of "gay" marriage in church, was not very forceful, though. He just dismissed the subject as unimportant and preferred to concentrate on attacking Cameron more generally. But after two people from the audience spoke out clearly against it, he must have found the courage he lacked at first in the culturally Marxist environment of Question Time, very hostile and aggressive to his positions, and regained the dignity of expressing deeply politically incorrect views.

But the real highlight of the program was the two members of the audience, a white man and a black woman, who had the courage to declare their opposition to homosexual marriage and even more, in the woman's case, to openly state that love of God is the basis of her opposition, facing derision, laughter among the crowd, and isolation.

I haven't seen this kind of thing for some time, and only recently I've noticed people who stand up for Christianity in a public way, like for example X-Factor star Jahmene Douglas, who professed his Christianity on the show, and said he wants to raise the moral standards in pop music.

What is interesting are also two observations.

One is that many of these Christians without fear, like Jahmene and the woman in the Question Time audience, are black or have a black parent. In our politically correct times, this gives them an advantage over whites (although it's obviously unfair, and whites should be treated with the same consideration too): it's much more difficult for "ethnic Europeans" to argue aggressively with blacks. In the case of the lady opposed to same-sex marriage, for example, to call her "homophobic", the usual reply PC people resort to, would make them feel uncomfortable because that could clash with their feeling that they are probably racist in calling a black, particularly a woman, names.

The second thing to note is that the two members of the Question Time audience who stood up for Christian values were not treated with the same intolerant derision. The black woman got a better reception than the white man, and for that I have already given a reason in the paragraph above: PC.

There is, however, another reason. The guy was apologetical. When asked about his views, he started by saying: "With the greatest respect to homosexual couples", then he rested his position on the argument that same-sex marriage is "ontologically impossible", a philosophical argument which does not hold much water but - this is my hypothesis - he thought would give him a defence against charges of homophobia, based, as it seemed to be, on higher grounds than prejudice.

The woman, instead, did not refrain from using the name of God and the Bible to support her views, and did not try to diminish or compromise her positions.

I believe that, as the recent disaster of Romney's defeat in the American presidential election shows, we should stop apologizing for our opinions and stop feeling that we have to defend ourselves.

People who have politically incorrect views that run counter to the current dominant orthodoxy, which generally speaking is cultural Marxism, should not make any attempt to dilute them: that is a losing strategy.

If you think something, say it loud (metaphorically) and clear. Others are more likely to take what you say seriously if you do not sit on the fence and, who knows, there may be some-one among them who was just waiting to take the plunge him/herself or somebody who wants a real alternative to the current climate of thought oppression and free speech censorship.

X-Factor Star, Committed Christian Jahmene, Wants to Raise Standards in Music

The very talented and exceptionally moving singer Jahmene Douglas, who was the runner-up in The X Factor pop music contest last night and whom producer Simon Cowell said he is planning to give a recording contract, is a really good role model and some-one to watch for.

In an interview with The Daily Mail 3 days ago, Jahmene said that he used to pray to give himself strength through the torment of living with his abusive dad Eustace.

The 22-year-old from Swindon recalled about his father: "He didn’t want us to go to church. He stopped us from going to Sunday school".

‘But when you do go to the bottom of the bottom, you realise everything that is important. I’m not here for money and fame and all that stuff. I have my own priorities and try to keep myself grounded in what my mission is.’

Which is? ‘A lot of singers have forgotten they have a responsibility through influencing people - mainly the younger generation. So all these foul songs - they don’t realise how badly they’re poisoning children’s minds. I’m trying to bring back the class of the olden days and hopefully set some standards.’

In Ella’s last week, Jahmene, who doesn’t drink, refused to join the other contestants in performing Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night. He says: ‘The lyrics weren’t just about alcohol, they mentioned threesomes.

‘The first line was: “There’s a stranger in my bed.” I was thinking about Ella, who’s only 16, and how it would be for her to sing lyrics that open this whole world of ménage à trois, getting naked and drinking.

‘The contestants were 100 per cent behind me. So the production team changed the song. A song has to be something I feel deeply about. I’ve turned down a lot of songs because of the message.’

Jahmene is truly made of steel, despite appearing painfully nervous most of the time.

...‘Winning can mean a lot of things. There’s winning the competition, then there’s making an album and being successful - that’s the winning for me. If I’d left two weeks ago but made an album that was successful and made a difference, I would have won.

...‘When all hope was gone, I used to get on my knees and pray for the strength to change things. I think the fact I’m here now proves my prayers have been answered. The X Factor is a massive platform to help change things for someone else.’

Jahmene is a committed Christian and had no problem, in these days when being Christian is seen as politically incorrect and not "cool", in professing his views on The X Factor program. For example, when he was asked what album he would like to make he replied a Gospel music album. When he was asked what kind of music he would have liked as one of the one-week themes for the show, he answered "‘Team Jesus’ Gospel".

He then introduced The X Factor to his local church's Gospel choir, with which he regularly sings, and to his pastor.

This is the first time in a very long time that I see Christianity and the most popular music associated in such a public, high-profile way.

"For every action there is a reaction" is not just Newton's third law of motion in classical physics, but on many occasions in history it has seemed to govern human behaviour too.

The 18th-century Enlightenment with its focus on reason was followed by 19-century Romanticism with its attention to emotions; the rise of communism in early 20th-century Italy was followed by the fascist regime trying to put a stop to socialists and communists taking power, and the defeat of fascism was followed by a resurrection in communist influence.

Early, pre-Socratic Greek philosophy saw a series of philosophers radically contradicting the principal ideas of the philosophers preceding them.

Maybe in the coming years, after many decades of erosion of Christianity and attacks on Christian values from numerous fronts in the West, we will be witnessing a reaction in the form of young people like brave, strong Jahmene, who will show rejection of this trend and will express that they do not want Christianity to be put aside in a corner to die in our societies and say that they want to bring Christian principles back into the public sphere.

Only Totalitarian States Have Thought and Hate Crimes

The UK footballer Rio Ferdinand has been hit in the eye and left bleeding by an object - a coin - thrown into the pitch from the crowd during the derby match Manchester United versus Manchester City.

This is the kind of fans' behaviour on which the Football Association should concentrate, not the various campaigns to stamp out "racism" in fooball.

As the saying goes, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Let's be clear. "Racism", if defined only as an attitude or a way of thinking, cannot and should not be a crime. Only actions derived from it can.

Criminalizing "racism" defined purely as a way of thinking means establishing a thought crime.

And thought crimes exist only in states which are totalitarian or going in that direction, as George Orwell described so accurately in his highly-predictive, political futuristic novel 1984, in which Big Brother, the leader of the totalitarian "Ingsoc" (English Socialism) party in power, controls every individual's single movement through telescreens.

Similarly, "hate crime" is a thought crime.

As a consequence, there should be no aggravation for a crime if it's considered motivated by racism. Murder is murder, full stop. Whether you are killed for racism or for your money, you end up dead. The alleged aggravation is, again, nothing other than the presumed crime of "racism", which is a thought crime.

That goes for verbal insults too. If the circumstances of the insults are such to warrant a prosecution, then they should be prosecuted, but whether the insults are regarded as "racist" or the product of "hatred" should be totally irrelevant.

We have been brainwashed - or attempted to be - that the fight against racism is so noble that every means, even the loss of civil liberties, is acceptable for its sake. But we should be vigilant.

Believing that one stands on the moral high ground and that unpleasant measures (in this case instituting thought crime and thought police) are justified for a noble goal - otherwise known as Machiavelli's The Prince's motto "the end justifies the means" - is the first step towards the establishment of illiberal and despotic societies, as past events following revolutions, from the French Reign of Terror to Leninism and Stalism, amply illustrate.

Church Gay Marriage Is a Travesty of Christian Marriage

Today, during a conversation I was just about to use the word "family", when I realized that I don't know what "family" means anymore.

This is a semantic, and therefore logic, problem.

In logic, the 19th-20th century German philosopher Gottlob Frege distinguished between the two characteristics, the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning or significance and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by it. You could see it as its extension.

The sense or connotation are the concept's descriptive qualities, the information it conveys.

If you say "cat", the meaning of the concept is all cats; its sense is a domestic, feline, carnivorous creature who hunts, purrs, has whiskers and ears of a certain shape etc. The concept expresses both.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has a vast meaning of an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it.

If you say "everything", the meaning is infinite and therefore the sense is tiny. If you ask someone what he did today, and he answers "everything", he conveys little or no information.

So, about "family".

In this case, the reason why we don't know what it means any more is obvious. A couple of homosexuals, married or not, with or without children, is now considered a family. Even 3 people of either or any sex who had a ménage à trois and lived together would be considered a family. An unmarried (heterosexual, because we have to specify these days) couple each of whose members was married to someone else with whom they had children (living with either parent) is considered a family. The list is endless.

And again, by extending the meaning of "marriage" to the point of making it burst, we have enormously shrunk its sense, which has become very vague now. Hence, I could not use the word today when I needed it.

Many things have caused this unwelcome development. I want to focus here on the homosexuals' ever extending demands for their "rights".

It's OK for them to do what they want, as for everybody else, as long as it does not harm others.

Here we have got to the point when the gays' demands are harming others.

First, the direct victims are the children, either adopted or born through some artificial or concocted means (IVF or sex of one of the couple with a third person), that a homosexual couple can now legally call their own.

Freud was probably the first to say that a mother and a father have, among other things, the crucial task of being a model through example, showing their children what the different sexual roles are. Many things that Freud thought were wrong, but this is still considered true, this is what most psychologists think today.

Nobody denies - yet - that there are two sexes, and that they have important differences.

The children of these homosexual couples, having two mothers and no father or two fathers and no mother, will very likely grow up confused about sexual roles and differences, and this is not going to bring happiness and psychological balance but the opposite. They will probably become homosexuals in a disproportionate number of cases, compared to the others.

When in the next few years or decades the consequences on these children will become apparent (and in particular when it will be clear that they are not happy people), that may signal the start of a backlash against all this giving homosexuals whatever they ask for.

The other victim is indirect, and is society. It's all of us. The family is a vital part and foundation of society, and diluting its sense and value - obviously not just through "gay marriage" and all that, but also through many other unsavoury developments among heterosexuals - has already produced terrible outcomes (the underclass, with rise in: crime, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and others) and is going to continue doing so.

Homosexuals are not discriminated against any more. Like blacks, they are not victims anymore.

Wake up. The people discriminated against have changed, the oppressors have become oppressed.

Now, when there is a civil dispute between gay activists and people who have different views, the former will always trump the latter, as Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife owners of a B&B in Cornwall who were successfully sued by a male homosexual couple for offering them two rooms rather than one, experienced first hand.

The excuse most commonly given for this perversion of the law is to say: the B&B is a public business. There's a lot to answer to that. First of all, the couple did not send the homosexuals away, they just offered them two separate rooms. No law can oblige a hotel or B&B to offer one particular room instead of another; even reserved rooms can sometimes be replaced by others.

Second, pub landlords are entitled to throw out or refuse entry to whomever they like, they don't even need to justify that with motives. It's often said that the reason for this is because they have to maintain order in the pub, but in reality they have the power to use that right at their discretion, they may simply throw out whomever they dislike. So, why should people who run a hospitality business not have the same right? Night clubs refuse admission to people for simply wearing the wrong clothes and nobody talks about human rights violations, which would be ridiculous.

Third, I think that the law of contract should enable everybody to freely enter the contract or not. A business, public or not, should have the right to refuse to serve whomever they like. In fact, they do. Banks, for instance, may refuse to open an account without any valid reason.

I believe that the "public business" motivation is just an excuse, and the real reason is just that the gay agenda must take precedence over everything else.

If anybody has any doubt, just look at the new law about to be introduced in the UK that allows gay marriages to be celebrated in church, which Prime Minister David Cameron has yesterday backed.

Gays say that they just want to be like everybody else, but the fact is that they are not like everybody else. If you, either by choice or not (I don't think that anybody knows really) live a homosexual life, go the full length, accept your diversity and live according to it.

What's the sense of living as a gay but at the same time imitating heterosexuals and doing things which are definitely not gay, are the essence of not being gay, like having children?

In the case of the church gay marriage law, the Church of England rightly protested that clergy should not be forced to perform ceremonies that go against their beliefs and doctrines. The government's reply that they will not be forced was ridiculous, because, as the Church answered, they will be forced not by the law itself, not by democratically elected representatives of the people, but by unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic judges of European or international courts in the hands of whom the certain legal actions initiated by homosexuals will eventually end.

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception?

Actually no, there is an exception, at least until now: the demand to lower or even abolish the minimum age of consent to sexual intercourse for homosexuals. This demand comes from associations like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) founded in 1978 before the pederasty issue became vastly exposed, and is an activist homosexual and paedophilia coalition group whose primary stated aim is to overturn US statutory rape laws.

In short, it asks for pederasty to be made legal. Among NAMBLA advocates are well-known homosexual activist figures, like David Thorstad and the leader of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) rights movement Harry Hay, and was part of the American gay rights movement for a long time, participating in marches and gay pride parades. It is not just an American phenomenon, though. Our own Peter Thatchell, Britain's leading gay activist, also supports underage sex.