Free speech about homosexuality upheld in Britain (for once)

We read:

"A complaint about Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir’s articles on the death of the Boyzone singer Stephen Gately has not been upheld by the Press Complaints Commission.

Mr Gately’s civil partner Andrew Cowles complained about an article headlined ‘A strange, lonely and troubling death’, and a second column headlined ‘The truth about my views on the tragic death of Stephen Gately’. Mr Cowles said the articles, which also attracted 25,000 third party complaints through social networks Facebook and Twitter to the PCC, were inaccurate, intrusive at a time of grief and had made a number of pejorative references to Mr Gately’s sexuality.

But, in a judgment released yesterday, the PCC said that, while it was legitimate for there to be criticism of the articles, Mr Cowles’s complaint was not upheld on any of the issues he had raised. The Commission said it should ‘be slow to prevent columnists from expressing their views, however controversial they might be’.

The PCC also said that, as a result of the huge public response to the article on social networking sites, and on the Mailonline website, both the newspaper and Ms Moir had been ‘confronted with the impact of what had been published’. The Commission said this showed a ‘healthy system’ for challenging a columnist’s opinions.

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Previous coverage of the matter here