Last night we drew your attention to a viciously homophobic post on the Liberal Conspiracy blog which shamefully tried to stir up homophobia to attack a Tory politician with whom they disagreed.
The Liberal Conspiracy article alleged that the councilor, Simon Renwick, had accessed a site called fitkids.net. As was pointed out in the comments below our post, the site in question was actually fitlads.net. This fact is confirmed on page 29 of the agenda of Fylde Borough Council for 20 October 2010, which also confirms that they have no evidence that Renwick himself accessed this site (not that it should matter), and – more importantly – confirms that nothing illegal had taken place.
Fitlads.net is a sort of Facebook/Gaydar style networking site.
Why did ‘Unity’, the author of the article on the Liberal Conspiracy blog change the name of the website? The alteration of the name of the website implied that Renwick had been accessing child pornography: a very serious allegation to make indeed. We should be prepared to give ‘Unity’ at Liberal Conspiracy the benefit of the doubt, I suppose. Perhaps it was a transcription error.
What upsets me is this. Many people who harbour nasty homophobic attitudes subconsciously conflate ‘gay’ with ‘interested in kids’. Perhaps that’s what was going through Unity’s mind when the slip up was made.
Nevertheless, gay men face violence and hatred, because of careless and deliberate conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia. The “gaykids” slur may not have been deliberate, but that was its effect.
For that, Liberal Conspiracy should apologise.
