IDAHO, International Day Against Homophobia took place this week. The annual event was noted by Neil Cobb on the Inherently Human blog with an overview of goings on from a UK perspective. Check it out here.It may just be my cynical bent but I wonder if anyone really noticed? Public groups such as the police put up flags, local officials pose with a rainbow flag outside city hall, public buildings flag the rainbow flag and all this sounds good. All laudable things that nobody can really criticise. Yet, who notices? It feels, at least to me, increasingly some sort of abstract 'do-gooder', equality tick-box exercise, removed from any real political debate. Lady Gaga editing The Independent, really? Does anyone care? Had it been The Sun, OK, maybe but in a low circulation liberal-leaning paper like the Indy, so what?
None of this is to say that IDAHO shouldn't matter, it does and it should. But, it needs to be a more visible, more emotional, more angry event. It needs to reach-out and challenge - and it does in many parts of the world but I suspect in the UK, apart from channeling public funds to educate the educated, to preach to the converted it is currently a low-impact day. What do you think? Did you notice it?
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