Julia Gasper
Julia Gasper is a member of the English Democrats, and a former member of the UKIP until they ousted her, after she claimed that some gay men prefer sex with animals[1]. She is a perennial candidate for European Parliament and local council elections. She dedicates her time to extreme and unapologetic homophobia defending the rights of straight people and writing essays on really old French writers.
A homophobe is born
The origins of Gasper's anti-gay crusade can be traced back to November of 2010 when she posted an entry to her blog entitled “Why I think that Gay Rights have Gone Too Far”[2]. In the post, she dismisses homophobia as “a pretentious, confused pseudo-word”, and compares homosexuality to behaviour like sending obscene e-mails or stalking. Predictably, she believes there is a "strong connection between male homosexuality and paedophilia" (this connection isn't one that you can actually find in the peer reviewed scientific literature, obviously[3]). In the same blog post, Gasper rallies against Oscar Wilde and accuses him of gang-raping an under-age boy (because if ONE gay person did it, they must ALL do it, right?), and laments whines about the media's silence on “the appalling persecution of heterosexuals in countless countries of the world”.
Recent escapades
More recently, in May of 2014 Gasper used her blog to publish a very special conspiracy theory about the filthy hobbitses gay rights movement and their successful attempt to oust Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla who stepped down after it was revealed he donated money to California's Prop 8 measure[4]. She blames Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame), Pope Francis and countless others of “new McCarthyism” and of course, compares gay rights to Nazism.
When she's not raging on her almost entirely pink and purple blog, Julia Gasper turns to academia.edu to express her doubt about “the Homocaust”. In one of her essays, she picks apart the death toll of the Nazi's concentration camps to prove that the gays only constituted a tiny amount of those imprisoned (because that's somehow okay) and explains how gay people in the camps were there because they were Jewish[5].
Gasper has actually gone further than most right-wing homophobes, and has publicly hoped that gay people die of “guilt”[6].
Pink News and Grindr
Gasper is especially furious with the online LGBT news website Pink News, after they exposed some of the views listed above. She suggested readers of the site were insane and ought to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act[7].
Gasper has also taken issue with the gay social networking app Grindr, in which everything from friends to casual hook-ups can be attained. She called the hundreds of Members of Parliament who used the app a “threat to democracy”, despite the fact that there isn't a single verified account of an MP using Grindr.
Other positions
Gasper seems to be a single-issue candidate and has no other discernible policies on her blog, aside from occasional outrage towards the likes of David Cameron, broadcaster Jon Snow, Barack Obama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the National Zakat Foundation[8]. Why she's outraged varies from moment to moment and is really anybody's guess at this point. However, she does subscribe to other political positions that you'd expect from a right-wing British crank: Euroscepticism, Islamophobia, and fewer rights for criminals.
References
- Top UKIP official quits after gay hate rant exposed by the Sunday Mirror, Mirror
- Why I think that Gay Rights have Gone Too Far, Blogspot
- Michael R. Stevenson, Public Policy, Homosexuality, and the Sexual Coercion of Children, Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality (2001)
- The Shameful Injustice to Brendan Eich, Blogspot
- The Myth of the Homocaust, academia.edu
- MEP Candidate: I hope the guilt of same-sex marriages kills the queer gangsters, Pink News
- UKIP candidate Dr Gasper: PinkNews readers ‘should be sectioned under Mental Health Act’, Pink News
- What is The National Zakat Foundation, Blogspot