Pharisees in the Democratic Unionist Party

And Apparently everyone knew.

The man stood at the lectern in the Northern Ireland Assembly, voice steady with the calm certainty of one who has read the relevant verses and found them unambiguous. Homosexual practice, he explained, was sinful according to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity alike. It was a sincerely held view, shared by people of all faiths. This was 2006. In the same year, two senior detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland watched him enter Chariots, a London sauna marketed explicitly as a place for gay men to meet. They were, by their own later account, shocked. The DUP, after all, had built a political identity on opposition to what it called the normalisation of sin. Bigotry toward the gay community was afterall part of the Democratic Unionist Party’s DNA: No Taigs, No Gays.

Jeffrey Donaldson, the former Member of Parliament and knight of the realm no less, is now a convicted child rapist. On Monday, a jury at Newry Crown Court found him guilty on all eighteen counts: one of rape,…