A jilted lover can be a very cruel and destructive human being. With their impotent rage dial turned high, and their emotional intelligence dial turned low, such people tend to go nuclear, harming themselves at least as much as those they wish to destroy, and not really caring about who or what else they demolish in the process.
Compulsive attempts to win sympathisers with manipulative
and selective accounts of what the marital infidel said or did, including the
uncritical reporting of slander and gossip, will eventually undermine trust in such
a person’s accounts and integrity. Those who would rather sacrifice a whole
estate to legal fees than give a penny to a despised ex-partner, may have years
of regret ahead of them, long after their anger would have fizzled out naturally.
The incandescent abandoned may willingly jump into the
abyss, just so they can take the Despised One with them: recall, for instance,
what Vicky Price did to Chris Huhne. Some
are even willing to harm their own children in order to inflict the greatest
suffering possible on an ex-partner. In their state of hatred, deranged
avengers are willing to experience great personal harm in the service of brutal
revenge.
Take the Daily Telegraph journalist Cristina Odone, for
example. Her resentment towards David Cameron and George Osborne for supporting
equal marriage spills over into a barely-concealed vituperative malevolence towards
the fortunes of the whole Conservative Party: a party she claims to support.
This
malevolence, expressed most recently in her 7th May 2013 article in
the Daily Telegraph http://bit.ly/15zC8bG,
can only serve to encourage defections to UKIP, the splitting of the right-wing
vote, and the increased possibility of a Labour government in 2015.
There are plenty of self-styled Conservative Party “supporters”,
particularly those with dogmatic religious inclinations, who would like to see
David Cameron suffer for supporting legal and social equality for LGBT people.
The Conservative Party, to its shame, has had a long history of institutional
homophobia; and with shafts of light now purging the callous darkness of that
cold chamber, some of its less endearing occupants would rather the house burn
down than make peace with their new accommodation.
Mrs Odone’s article bears the title, “The
betrayal of marriage has cost the Tories votes. It could cost them the election
too.” In it, she states:
“Last week's local election disaster, when Tories lost
335 council seats, is down to David Cameron's "redefinition" of
marriage. The Conservative Grassroots group has warned the Government that its
failure to give married couples a tax break, despite the measure being on the
Tory Party manifesto, and its insistence on pushing through gay marriage, which
was never on the manifesto, have put Conservative voters off.”
Mrs
Odone reports the claim by Conservative Grassroots that “again
and again ….. opposition on the doorsteps during the local campaign focused on
marriage.”
When
I was canvassing for the Conservative Party in Buckinghamshire, I didn’t hear
the issue of equal marriage raised once. Of two colleagues who did very
extensive canvassing, one told me that the issue was raised by about a quarter
of those he canvassed, but that only very few of those said they would not be
voting Conservative as a result; the other told me that the issue was mentioned
by only a couple of people he canvassed, who actually supported equal marriage.
A third colleague, with an excellent overview of canvassing across the county,
told me that doorstep objections to same-sex marriage seemed to be concentrated
in the more rural areas of the county, where there was a high number of older,
church-going voters. My conclusion is that there is no widespread and uniform
objection to equal marriage among Conservative voters.
Mrs
Odone laments, “We, like the "grassroots", are distressed to see
so-called conservatives trash marriage,” and writes about the “tragic
repercussions” of broken marriages, as though the marriages of LGBT people were
somehow going to cause those of heterosexual people to self-destruct.
Now,
many of those former Conservative Party members and supporters who don’t
approve of LGBT equality are clearly looking around for somewhere to go. They
realise that, just as discrimination against LGBT people has no future in
British society as a whole, it has no future in the modern Conservative Party
either.
Anti-equal
marriage Conservatives are behaving like hot-heads in a messy divorce. Unsubstantiated
complaints and hyperbolic claims are presented to a sympathetic audience as
irrefutable facts, while barely-concealed revenge fantasies are floated in a
bubble of pretended dispassion. And these revenge fantasies entail the willingness
to embrace serious personal loss, if only there is a chance of destroying the
enemy. If they get their wish, a party will be governing Britain in 2015 that
has a far higher proportion of pro-equal marriage MPs than the Conservatives.
But for a number of David Cameron’s childish anti-equality opponents in the
Conservative Party, that would still be some kind of victory.
© Gary
Powell, 2013
