Protest the pope in London

This is the protest against the pope I went on yesterday – I turned up thinking I might be the only one, or maybe 80-100 people would be there.

When I arrived there was maybe 1,000-1,500 there, by the time the march went forward, delayed by over an hour it was more like 10-12,000.

Heartening that the secularists, atheists and a lot of gay rights people united for this cause – inc a lot of bears including the Bears Against Bigotry (a group founded because of a nasty comment by Mark Ames from XXL on his Facebook page against Muslims) – I don’t go to XXL because of their dodgy stance on body fascism, promotion of muscle bears as the only bear type (funnily enough Colin though wanted to go last night and bought tickets, but I thankfully ended up not going…certainly after reading Mark’s comments I won’t go ever again). Interesting alliances…

And even got to meet in passing Ian McKellen – Colin the friend I was with had met him before so said hello.

Best banners: Well I loved ‘Fuck off back to the 14th Century’ and ‘Yes the Devil Does Wear Prada’ which you can see here, I also saw ‘Down With This Sort of Thing’ and a picture of Father Jack from Father Ted which apparently tickled Graham Linehan – I took a pic of it but it didn’t come out very well. Others were the great zombie pope with swastika which got cheers and is pictured here – and also a rather bizarre one saying ‘I went to the Vatican and had to wait in long queues!’ and the brilliant ‘If you don’t want me to take the piss out your belief then don’t have funny beliefs’…and the George Carlin’s ‘nothing says ‘i trust you god’ like 3 inches of bullet-proof glass’.

The speakers were good, Dawkins got a slightly strange ‘superstar’ type response (although one wag shouted ‘Dawkins you are our god!’ but he made good points especially about the fact that Hitler was actually a Roman Catholic – Nazism was not a purely atheist movement, and Peter Tatchell was good too (a bit panto though – ‘It’s behind you!’ type crowd interaction) and Geoffrey Robertson QC who went on too long and mentioned ‘British values’ which kind of irked me, but the values of tolerance, secularism, seperation of church and state, freedom of sexual orientation and also freedom from and prosecution of child abusers in the church I agreed were good values…I just have an instant response to when anyone mentions ‘British values’ or ‘Family values’ or ‘Traditional values’ I always expect the kicker of ‘those darned immigrants’ or something…and my dislike for nationalism – but thankfully he was actually referring to the good values.

So a complete success – although you’d not know that if you read the likes of this awful obviously Catholic writter Torygraph piece which tonsils are so tickling the Pope’s prostate it’s not true – and raspberries to those who said it was pointless. Not bad for a bunch of ‘secularist nazis and atheist terrorists’ – and it seems with the majority of British people not wanting a state visit, leave alone pay for one for a State that really doesn’t exist, leave alone the child abuse, the HIV policies, stance against contraception and the gay priests – I think we carried many more than 12,000.

Also interesting the Independent on Sunday has a YouGov poll of British Roman Catholics – looks like they feel Rome is out of step re: abortion and contraception…maybe it’s not the aggressive atheists Joe should worry about…

Actually reading the really bad and inaccurate press about the Protest, especially in the Torygraph – I’m surprised how arse-kissy a lot of the press were about the Pope. According to the press, the Protest the Pope people were a bunch of out-of-touch liberals and feminists and gay rights protesters.

First: don’t call me a liberal! Grr! I’m an old school socialist. Secondly: I didn’t ask everyone if they were all liberals; but neither did the press. I doubt Geoffrey Robertson is, nor Tatchell. McKellen is definitely Labour…so to say it was all media liberals is bullshit. My experience it seemed a wide range of people, dykes & gay men to communists (there was at least one communist banner) and atheists and secularists and even the weird Prostestant bloke in green doing Irish dancing saying that the Pope will go to war on all Christians (riiiiight…). There was all sorts – but to do the classic propaganda smear job of ‘oh it’s just those noisy jumped up dykes and wishy-washy liberals’ is depressing and in fact WRONG.

EDIT cos I don’t want to create ANOTHER post about said Pope I think people have Pope Fatigue:

Excellent Skinnyman freestyle about the Pope: