Update 12.30pm: The Daily Telegraph is carrying a bizarre advert today criticising The Times's columnist Libby Purves. It is in the form of an open letter signed by Demetri Marchessini, a Greek-born businessman and author.
It attacks Purves for her pro-gay sympathies and is an apparent reference to a column by Purves on 20 January, Surprise, surprise, dictators are also bigots, in which she wrote about the stance of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, towards homosexuality.
It begins: "One of the fascinating questions about journalistic life in London is why the well-known columnist Libby Purves, who has clearly stated that she does not believe in religion, repeatedly tells those who do believe in religion, what they should think."
He accuses her of downplaying "the connection of homosexuality to religion" and claims that homosexuality has been a major sin in the Christian religion for 2,000 years." He continues:
"What Miss Purves and many others cannot grasp is the fact that when our government made homosexuality legal, it did not make it moral. Governments can decide on laws, but only God decides on morality. How can anybody, let alone Miss Purvis (sic), tell people what they should think about homosexuality?"
Marchessini also claims there "several serious inaccuracies in Miss Purves' column. Firstly, it has already been repeatedly explained to her, that there is no such word as 'homophobic'. It cannot be found in any dictionary, nor does it have any meaning." [NB: It can be found in several dictionaries]
He goes on to take issue with her interpretation of a recent statement by the Pope and concludes: "How can we persuade Miss Purves to comment on something that she knows more about?"
Purves responded by taking to Twitter, calling Marchessini "a joke" but pointing out that the "persecution, beating, jailing and hanging of young gay men around the world (inc Commonwealth) is not a joke."
Evidently, the most irritating factor for The Times was the fact that the Telegraph got the advertising income.
In a phone call, Purves told me Marchessini was a regular writer of green ink-style letters of complaint to female columnists. Last May, he placed an ad in The Times critical of the paper's political columnist, Rachel Sylvester.
Comment: I can understand the commercial reasons for the Telegraph accepting the ad. But it does seem extraordinary to give the man a platform to attack a columnist in a rival paper just because he is wealthy enough to pay.
Secondly, there is the important matter of a failure to fact-check his piece. Quite apart from the misspelling of Libby's surname at one point, he misquotes her and thereby changes the import of what she wrote.
He quotes her as writing: "the deep and obvious root of homophobia is religion". In fact, she wrote "one deep and obvious root of homophobia is religion." [my italics]
I think the Telegraph should, at the least, have ensured the content of the advert - which took up a quarter of a page - was factually accurate.
Furthermore, the writer places far too much emphasis on Purves's remark about it being some "50 years since falling in love with another man was an imprisonable crime in England." Marchessini makes a great deal of this by taking it literally and contending that "what was a crime was sodomy."
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