The Outlaw Jimmy Wells

By AM Monday, April 27, 2015

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Jim Wells, a Protestant fundamentalist, has under the euphemism of resignation been forced out of his post as the North’s micro minister for health. It is right that he went given his fundamentally unhealthy attitude to the gay community. A minister who publicly proclaims that some citizens are unfit for normal family functions on no grounds other than his own biblical bigotry renders himself unfit for office. In that oft quoted phrase for passing your sell by date, his position had become untenable.

Booting him out is fine but it does absolutely nothing to address the issue of how he was ever shoed into the top spot in a science saturated field and he 'a man who despite having no background in science felt qualified to dismiss an entire body of it.'

David Ford, who himself is the incumbent of a sensitive post despite his disdain for the judgement of the courts in the Christy Walsh case being on a par with those of Wells towards gays, at least got it right in his comment:

Peter Robinson was entirely aware of Jim's views at the point when he made him minister of health. The real question is what does that say about the leadership of the DUP that they're prepared to put somebody with those kind of views into such a sensitive post with all the responsibility it has?

Which leads to the challenge firmly nailed by Eamonn Mallie that confronts Peter Robinsons as he looks into the pit rather than the pool of talent from where he might draw a replacement for Wells.

The problem now for DUP leader Peter Robinson is finding a Health Minister from within his own party ranks who would disagree with Jim Wells’s views on same sex marriage and children being reared by same sex parents and so on. With the exception of Pam Cameron I am not aware of any other DUP MP or Assembly member disassociating him or herself from Mr Wells’s Downpatrick remarks.

While all that is going on we now we learn of a new PSNI investigation into Wells's comments. That makes his opinion the subject of two police investigations, the second in respect of comments he made to a lesbian couple while canvassing.  This dangerous trend of demanding that the police be used as an instrument of thought control is reaching a new pitch in the North. It is hard to determine who is the worst offender, the people who made the complaint to the police or the police for having listened to it in the first place. What seems reasonable to say is that both are wasting police time.

The BBC reported in unconcerned fashion that ‘the Police Service of Northern Ireland is trying to establish if an offence has been committed.’  It is doing no such thing. It is not trying to find an offence but to fashion one out of the Wells comments.  Short sighted policing tackling blind bigotry is hardly emblematic of a visionary society.