Police in England arrested a student for nagging a horse:
Police officers who arrested a student for calling a police horse “gay” have been accused of “absurd heavy-handedness and over-reaction” by a leading campaigner for homosexual rights.
Peter Tatchell of the pressure group Outrage! said that the arrest of Sam Brown, a student at Oxford University, “brought the police service into disrepute”.
Mr Brown, 21, a student at Balliol College, was arrested for causing harassment, alarm or distress and fined £80 after asking a mounted police officer if he knew that his horse was homosexual.
The student made the remark during a night out in Oxford where he was celebrating completing his English Literature degree.
Mr Tatchell, who has handcuffed himself to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, in his campaign for homosexual rights, accused the police of grossly wasting their time and resources. “The police are not doing nearly enough to halt genuine violence against gay people and yet they waste their time on this absurd arrest,” he said.
“Gay people do not need this kind of bizarre protection from the police and it risks creating a homophobic backlash.”
Actually, we understand the horse was very upset about being the target of namecalling and had to hospitalized.
The horse is in stable condition.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.