IF I choose to share the ups and downs of life with my beloved gnu, that - in the privacy of my own home - is my business.

If I then applied for legal aid to take The Ilkley Gazette management to Court because, as my employers, they refuse to accept my darling gnu as a pension beneficiary in the event of my early death, such an act might be construed by less progressive members of society as a waste of tax payers' money.

Last week the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled against a railworker who complained that her employer, South West Trains, refused to give travel perks worth around £1,000 a year to her partner because she was the same sex.

Lesbian and gay rights campaigners were in shock about the decision apparently, claiming the ruling reinforced discrimination. I disagree.

Not so long ago, the concept of rights campaigns evoked images of downtrodden people fighting against massive, systematic injustice and prejudice.

The Civil Rights movement among black Americans, the campaign by Argentinian mothers demanding the right to know what had happened to their 'disappeared' children, the Catholic Civil Rights marches in Belfast, and the campaign for the right to run their own country by black South Africans immediately spring to mind as heroic struggles for what were preceived as peoples' legitimate rights.

I may be on my own here but the 'right' of a woman train guard's girlfriend to get a free travel pass seems a rather less heroic crusade by comparison, leaving me with the feeling that I somehow should have the 'right' not to pay taxes every week to fund such trivial struggles against petty injustice.

Offer any lawyer a wad of notes and they would start a month-long argument in an empty house, so as a society we can only expect more of the same in the next few years each time hysterical gay or anything else 'rights' campaigners come across an aspect of society they can make a fuss about.

As a somewhat vertically challenged person, I could bring an action in the European Court of Justice against the governing body of the sport of basketball because the rules preclude anyone but deformed giants with eight-foot long arms being any good at it.

Rather than choose a more appropriate sport for someone of my size to play, I want the law changed so I could play on stilts thereby giving me as much chance as anyone else of catching the ball when it is eleven feet in the air.

Can railway workers who choose to remain single and living on their own claim free travel vouchers for the budgie? If not I think they should consult a barrister immediately.

Large corporate bodies making sweeping policy concerning employee benefits cannot be expected to incorporate every possible lifestyle permutation in their deliberations - expecially when accountants are expected to cost the policy down to the last decimal point.

Simply because someone is left out does not, in each case, mean a conspiricy to discriminate against a particular minority.

And, as people working against DSS fraud are well aware of, the more loopholes in the rules designed to allow flexibility, the more opportunity it will give the unscrupulous to take unfair advantage.

Of course the end result of the latest court case will be expensive legislation in Parliament, a lot of bleating about the fight against discrimination and a victory dance by TUC general secretary John Monks.

The train companies will study the law and take a decision to quietly phase out free travel perks for all its employees to prevent the possibility of being taken to court for discrimination by people who should have more important things to worry about.

This heroic struggle for rights will mean that all rail company employees, homosexual as well as heterosexual, will lose out.

But such harmful practical effects of their crusade will not in the least bother the paranoid campaigners who will simply move on to the next perceived example of blatant discrimination against their favoured minority.

In this case it appears as if it is not the road, but the railway line to hell which is paved with good intentions.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.