In an interview in September with SIC, a faith-based High Definition program, and assuming his sexual orientation, the defeated candidate for the leadership of the SDP paradoxically stated that he did not believe that the sexual orientation of a politician had any relation to society, stating: “In Portugal, I really do not doing. And to be honest, I don’t think this is something now that everything is easier. I don’t think it will be in the 80s or 90s. “

At the time, I wrote about Rangel’s interviews and these surprising statements, recalling, among other things, that I not only voted in 2008 against same-sex couples’ access to civil marriage, but also entered the SDP in 2005 as a candidate. to the deputy (and from there – to the leader of the bench) in the campaign for the legislature, in which his party used a letter of homophobia against then-PS leader José Socrates – in other words, at a time when he could only have lingered (painful?). Of course, in the SDP, at least, the sexual orientation of a politician was and should be in a bad sense “relevant to society.”

It is of course important to keep these facts in mind because Rangel, contrary to what he and others would like us to believe, did not just remain silent about his sexual orientation until 2021 – a right he apparently has – and did not exercise. a campaign for gay rights; he was an agent and accomplice of homophobia. By the way, continues to demonstrate this complicity in the aforementioned interview, never even using the word homophobia, thereby erasing the suffering that this cause (caused) and will cause, and excluding both his own history and the history of his party in promoting the same homophobia and therefore not cause this suffering.

This complicity – and dishonesty – of Rangela was joined by all those who resented the likes of me, who remembered this register of gay rights politicians, in other words, human rights. Therefore, it is especially ironic to see people like Publisher do Observer, Jose Manuel Fernandez, who during the “exposure” claimed that this topic did not interest him at all – “Paulo Rangel is a homosexual. What have I got to do with it?“– and that a Social Democrat, being a homosexual, was not obliged to combat prejudice against homosexuals by speaking of an “elephant in the room” to explain the defeat of PSD right-wing forces.

Saddened, Jose Manuel Fernandez now admit this bias: “I know the country in which I live.” And he goes so far as to accuse: “The Left, which was so bitter against Rangel, did not realize that they were a little reactionary.”

So the JMF, who says that a politician who is (and comes out) homosexual does not matter, that “his ideas are important,” suddenly began to think that if this politician assumes that he is homosexual, then the “left” will not be. make. do not know how to criticize your ideas?