By Hilary White

LONDON, July 22, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A British journalist and activist has come under fire from a homosexualist activist for revealing the names of key figures involved in a deliberate long-term plan that resulted in the success of Britain’s “gay rights” movement. Nicholas De Jongh, a theatre critic, playwright and homosexualist activist, accused journalist Matthew Parris of “blowing” the confidentiality enjoyed for four decades by a small cadre activists who brought the movement to its maturity in late 1980s Britain.

In a June 27th article in the Times of London, Parris described the “strangely clandestine atmosphere” surrounding meetings of a group of activists who organized in 1988 to oppose Section 28 of the Local Government Bill. That bill for a short time outlawed the “promotion of homosexuality” as “a kind of pretended family relationship.” In addition to De Jongh, Parris named the actor Ian McKellen and financial baron and politician Peter Mandelson as key figures in this group.

Later, the group that was to become Stonewall, one of Britain’s most influential political lobbies, “put gay equality and homosexual law reform on to the mainstream national agenda” Parris wrote.

“Two decades on we British have overtaken the Americans. After successive reductions in the age of homosexual consent until an equal age was reached, after the Civil Partnerships Act, and after a long and remarkably steady shift in not only the rules but social and media attitudes too, nobody would dispute the success of this slow-burning, 40-year-old crusade.”

Parris wrote that contrary to the usual homosexualist doctrine, the movement did not start with the infamous “Stonewall riots” in New York in 1969, staged after police raided a popular homosexual nightclub in Greenwich Village. Instead it was started and nurtured by “valiant, patient, ‘respectable’ pioneering organisations” and individuals who had “been plugging away for decades.”

In a letter to the editor on June 30th, De Jongh, who organized the meetings in the late 1980s, complained in the Times that Parris’s characterization of the group as a conspiracy was “inaccurate and lurid.” Despite, this, however, De Jongh, wrote “Our meetings were off-the-record, since some of those present were closeted. Confidentiality was maintained for years until Parris, without consulting anyone, blew it.”

The success of the movement can be judged by Peter Mandelson’s appointment by the Labour government as First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Lord President of the Council. Mandelson (one of those “conspirators” named by Parris) – along with former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – is regarded as one of the key figures in the “New Labour” government that has brought in unprecedented legal changes favoring homosexuals.