The air-brushed portrait of a perfect marriage
The other day, under the headline “Portrait of
a perfect marriage,” London’s Daily Mail gushed
in prose so breathless that anaerobic life forms sprouted spontaneously on the
screen:
“Eleven years ago this month, Sir Elton
John proposed to his partner, David Furnish, thus formalising a relationship
that — as the whole world knows — has blossomed into one of the most blissfully
happy of show business marriages.
“We know
this, of course, because Sir Elton and David have been generous enough to share
almost every detail of their relationship and family life through the pages of
celebrity magazines, in high-profile TV interviews and on social media … Truly,
they come across as a wonderfully loving couple.”
Leaving aside the need to wipe the screen of
one’s laptop and overdose on anti-nausea medication, there cannot now be a
literate person in the British Isles who does not know that Elton John and his
husband David Furnish are the couple at the centre of the long-running
“PJS” injunction*.
The journalist who typed that saccharine-fogged horror knows this, just as
everybody with access to the Internet knows.
The courts have become Canute's courtiers
standing in a digital tide.
Here is the back story. In 2011 Furnish flew
to the US for a tyrst with a gay couple who subsequently (no honour amongst
sluts) tried to sell a kiss-and-tell to The Sun newspaper. The Sun, in
the course of preparing the article, contacted the lawyers of Elton John and
David Furnish. In very short order the Elton Johns were granted a ferocious
anonymised injunction which forbade publication of the article. It was largely
argued on the grounds of protecting “their” children's privacy. The facts were
not in dispute. But nothing at all might be written about the matter in England
or Wales.
Fleet Street has protested vigorously against
the gag, with The Sun calling “on our loyal readers to help end the farce that
means we can’t tell you the full story of the celebrity father’s threesome” by
writing to their MPs “to get them to voice the public outcry in parliament and
bring an end to this injustice.” To no avail.
The Internet is international, not bound by a
London court and sites on servers in California, Canton and Cavan can be read
by English men and women, making the court's action seem futile. But with the
great blunt mace of the injunction the court has fiercely coerced the local
press and the public into silence. The English can read news on foreign
websites but they will be punished if they discuss it on local ones.
This absurdity is late Tudor England with
electric lights. The court has infantilised the English in a desperate attempt
to preserve a propaganda Potemkin village for the Establishment.
The court, wittingly or unwittingly, has made
itself a partner in a vicious hypocrisy. It is defending the illusion of Elton
John's ideal family life against a sordid reality in which his children are
mere bagatelles. Still worse, it pretends to do it for the sake of the children
-- so that the great and good may go on lying.
In his
judgement on January 22, Judge Jackson noted
that the spouse of PJS accepted that theirs was not a mutually exclusive sexual
relationship and that therefore, according to the standards of an open
marrriage, Mr Furnish was not being unfaithful. If the story behind the
injunction casts a cold light on the couple's understanding of marriage, it
also reminds us of the horrid practice of surrogate motherhood: a combination
of eugenics, prostitution, kidnapping, slavery and child abuse. Little
argument can be made for saving the two little boys from the putative damage of
public exposure when they are living with two selfish hedonists who obtained
them by purchase.
If you make your relationship a lodestar of
public policy, the public has every right to hear about that relationship's
reality -- even if that makes you blush, sweat and squirm. Elton John regularly
uses his relationship and his children to bolster arguments for his favourite causes. He has
even publised an op-ed in support of transgender bathroom rights in
which he writes, “As the father of two children, I would hope their world
is free of discriminatory, hateful legislation like North Carolina’s.” This
injunction is an example of a wealthy English elitist having his cake and
eating it too – with the full backing of the Majesty of the Law.
If public policy is to be argued and defended
by reference to one's own family, is it not logical to respond that the reality
of one's family life should be publicly reportable?
The Supreme Court,
by re-instating the injunction thrown out by the Court of
Appeals, has placed the lives of rich and famous
people who have children out of bounds. Because the Elton Johns are wealthy and
have children, the rules that apply to reporting their sexual escapades in the
media are markedly different to the reporting of childless Darren and Mandy
from down-market Dagenham. Publishing a story like “Love rat Darren ate my
hamster” will be tolerated. But exposing the naughtiness of celebrity parents
who can afford expensive legal advice is anathema. This creates a strange new
unlegislated restriction on press freedom.
Kiss-and-tell stories may be distasteful and
boring, reassurance for the miserable that nobody is really virtuous, a way of
keeping everybody in the mud. But they are the price of a free press. That
price is worth paying many times over.
Giving the right to decide what can be
reported or what is news to anybody other than those who buy papers or consume
news is dangerous and undermines the ability of media to expose the misdeeds of
the powerful. It erodes the public’s trust in the media and the law itself.
Tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories thrive in the half-light these injunctions
generate. They have no place in a free country or in a net-linked world.
Not buying The Sun newspaper for a few days in
the Elton John household would be a far better option than coercive national
censorship.
* An earlier version of this article described
the gag as a "super-injunction". However, it is only an anonymised
injunction. In English law, a super-injunction forbids
publication even of reports of their existence.
Paddy Manning is
an Irish gay libertarian conservative who argued against Ireland's Same sex
Marriage Referendum and campaigns against surrogacy, anonymous donor conception
and for free enterprise and free trade.
Reprinted with permission from MercatorNet.
