Wednesday, July 05, 2023

Things Change Fast

I think this would've been unthinkable 5 years ago, but likely to happen again now.
On the 28th December the BBC’s flagship News at Six bulletin (broadcast at 6:20pm due to the bank holiday) watched by almost seven million people ended with a report on the birth of Sir Elton and Mr Furnish’s first child. The report contained just one interview, with Stephen Green, of right-wing group Christian Voice, without any warning that he is someone who has in the past supported the death penalty for gay men. The report was repeated on a number of occasions throughout the evening on the BBC News Channel.

BBC entertainment correspondent Lizo Mzimba introduced Mr Green by saying: “not everyone is pleased to see such a high profile same sex couple start to raise a surrogate child.” The report then contained an interview that was visibly edited together in which Mr Green told the BBC: “This isn’t just a designer baby for Sir Elton John, this is a designer accessory… [cut] Now it seems like money can buy him anything, and so he has entered into this peculiar arrangement…[cut] The baby is a product of it. A baby needs a mother and it seems an act of pure selfishness to deprive a baby of a mother.”
That's from 2010.

The UK is not on precisely the same timeline as the US for these cultural shifts, but not so different.