20 February – 20 March 2004

Scottish Media Monitor

Just as cruising got a bit passé under the weight of the five-fingered friend round the mouse’s neck, a tabloid discovers the gentle art of ‘dogging’. Recalcitrant football player, Stan Collymore admitted his pastime was nipping off to cruising areas to watch willing couples have it away in their cars. So far, so good, until The Daily Record pulled over into the lay-by to join in! Party pooper Janice Burns was in it only for the money. Shining her torch onto everything that was going on, she gasped: “Scotland has been exposed as a hotbed for public sex orgies known as ‘dogging’.” She imagined, “our abundance of beauty spots are attracting hoards of perverted visitors from all over Britain”, along with “thousands of Scots (who) are obsessed with having it away in front of strangers in public places”. I can’t help picturing her, shivering in a lay-by up on Cathkin Braes at 2am in the morning, pulling away on her abacus: “10,000 Scots go dogging”, she counted. Well, firstly, the so-called ‘public’ places she referred to have been established precisely because they are not very… well, public! And secondly, what’s so unusual about wanting to be seen having sex? Do you blindfold your sexual partner? And as for sharing the experience… According to a recent digital TV poll, 52% of Scots men fantasise about another woman while they are having sex with their wives, so there you go! It’s not just prudery at play here, I also detected snobbery: “It is not just happening around the central belt and in big cities. Villages such as posh Kilmalcolm in Renfrewshire are being targeted too”. Given how unaffected men who have sex with men are about class, why should ‘straights’ be any different? Imagine a couple of swingers from Bearsden wrinkling their nose up at the offer of sex in a lay-by in Castlemilk! Sex is sex, sweetheart! And then she added: “The practice is popular with people of all ages and social backgrounds – even people in their 70s”. Good heavens! People in their 70s enjoying sex? Given that the average life expectancy for a man, say, fae Shettleston is 63, (about the same as in war-torn Iraq, I’m told), I would expect the Health Education Board for Scotland to be promoting ‘dogging’ not let The Daily Record drag it in the gutter! Writing about these “seedy liaisons”, advertised on websites, Ms Burns couldn’t bring herself to mention thecruisingground.com, cruisingforsex.com or squirt.org, so, for the benefit of all those married and bisexual readers looking for a bit more than moral rectitude from agony aunt Old Mother (Joan) Burnie, she detailed: “Popular sites include Cathkin Braes, near East Kilbride; a car park on the Kilsyth to Carron Bridge road; a lay-by in Palacerigg Country Park in Cumbernauld; Edinburgh’s Gyle Centre car park; Mugdock Country Park on the road between Glasgow’s posh suburbs of Bearsden and Milngavie; and lay-bys at Kincardine Bridge. Some of the country’s most scenic and secluded beauty spots including Culloden Visitor Centre, near Inverness, and Tentsmuir Forest, near St Andrews, are also listed”. Well it would’ve been nice to include the showers at Hampden after a match, but hey-ho! Ms Burns was clearly fascinated by the websites. “Venues for night and daytime sexual rendezvous are listed openly. On any night of the week thousands of doggers post messages on websites looking for anonymous sex. The Daily Record found hundreds of appeals for ‘meets’ within a few minutes of visiting one of the sites. Most hide behind made-up names as they prowl the internet looking for sleazy encounters”. The Record took solace in the strong arm of the law. “A Strathclyde Police spokesman said: ‘Legislation is in place to deal with this type of behaviour’… Police have warned that the outdoor sex sessions could result in prosecution for breach of the peace or outraging public decency”. Oh? And whose decency would that be? I thought we’d done away with wasting precious police time on victimless crimes and only someone who was genuinely outraged could make a complaint? The Daily Record called a doctor who warned: “This can destroy couples” before going on to explain the etiquette in more detail, including: “When the show is over, doggers must let the audience know”. What, with a round of applause? Colette Douglas Home spluttered in The Scottish Daily Mail: “…In the space of two days this week, I read about ‘roasting’, dogging’, pits for abusing children and an army of immigrant sex slaves to service the paying British male (whatever happened to the British tradition of sex once a week in the missionary position?)” The whole thing was wound up in The Record with a report on the former Liverpool and Aston Villa player who’d sparked the tabloid interest in this otherwise discreet pastime when, before promptly checking into The Priory Clinic, he declared: “What I have done is disgusting and I’m so ashamed… but I can only beg for forgiveness”. (What was wrong with, ‘I had a fabulous time, thank you’)?

Spiritualism has been a subject dogged by censorship and restrictions for many years. Today, the subject is generally portrayed in somewhat undignified or sensational terms like Living TV’s Most Haunted with Yvette Fielding, parapsychologist, Jason Karl and medium, Derek Acorah. No newspaper is complete without it’s resident psychic, from The Sun’s Mystic Meg to The East Kilbride News’s Derek Ogilvie whose presence prompted them to stir their “religion correspondent”, Nicky King to write an article “in response” to Derek’s column. Why? It turned out to be a disgraceful piece of free advertising for an extreme, militant and homophobic religious group. Advising people what best to do if they were left with unanswered questions after losing a loved one, he wrote: “Well, one possibility might be to join one of the ‘Alpha’ courses running in many of the local churches just now”. I couldn’t see the article headed with the word: ‘advertisement’ anywhere, instead, readers were invited to write to The East Kilbride News with “any questions about faith that you were always afraid to ask”. With some relief I hear East Kilbride is getting a new local paper.

The Scottish Daily Mail’s so-called ‘Education Reporter’, Graham Grant emphasised “one of Scotland’s most senior Catholic bishops”, Archbishop Mario Conti’s, opinion of the Scottish Executive’s proposals to tackle Scotland’s record of teenage pregnancy and STIs, by making condoms and morning-after pills more readily available to young people engaging in sexual activity. The proposal was, if you want to use Grant’s vernacular, “savagely attacked”. How important was this opinion, apart from promoting a religionist’s agenda above and beyond the realities of their grip on society? Well, if you consider that Hamish MacDonnel’s homophobic reports in The Scottish Daily Mail never stopped him landing the job of Scottish Political Editor for The Scotsman, and The Mail’s equally vile Eddie Barnes as a Political Editor for Scotland on Sunday, perhaps Grant sees a big future for himself. There was no shortage of the Good Lord’s work to be done in Scotland’s press. Eddie Barnes brought the “radical” - I would’ve called it ‘sensible’, wouldn’t you? - plans to replace outdated prayers with spiritual reflection and person-centred discussions to non-denominational schools to the fore. (Catholic schools will still be able to proselytise to children). It also gave Mr Barnes an opportunity to give a leg up to militant groups. “Evangelical Christian groups also claim that the group are guilty of ‘watering down’ Christian traditions, and pandering to political-correctness”. (Yawn!) And Yakub Qureshi, also in Scotland on Sunday, insisted: “Demands for state-funded Muslim schools to be established have spread across Scotland”. The author of a report to be sent to councils, Dr Akhtar Saeed Bhutta, told Scotland on Sunday: “Girls and boys would be treated equally but did not rule out separate classes”, (sic). I rather think Scotland’s papers are talking to an empty church. With Gaydar the fifth most popular website, often listing more popular than the BBC, perhaps that should indicate a need to court more liberal or secular views on sexual issues. Or does the media really think that when the Catholic Church talks, everyone listens? In The Mail, Conti “accused Health Minister Malcolm Chisholm of ignoring the need for educating children about morality – and focusing solely on telling them about the mechanics of sex”. If ever any institution was guilty of ‘mechanising’ sex, promoting the missionary position across feather eiderdowns across the western world, it has been the Catholic Church! Perhaps, if anything, that has been the fault with all sex education. ‘Mechanising’ sex encourages the portrayal of sex as shallow as the The Sun’s page three pin-up; animalistic as a lad’s perception of a twirl round the pole at a lap-dancing club; tribal as the pages devoted to the arrest of footballers in the Costa Calida, amongst them, Paul Dickov who faced allegations of sexual aggression with penetration. Perhaps the Church too could put aside the cruel mechanics of its power-hungry political structure and rediscover its spirituality through erotica. We are losing the art of sex: Never mind ethics and finger-wagging. Give us back the passion; poetry; romance and erotic expression. Fortunately, there is a revolution in progress. The invasion of gay spaces by ‘straights’ doesn’t stop at London’s Old Compton Street, Manchester’s Canal Street, or Glasgow’s Polo Lounge. Oh, no! A scan through our sexiest sites will unleash battalions of anonymous horny bisexuals, married men on heat, curious ‘hetties’ that want anything from a new emotional high, a boy-cunt in lingerie, a good suck on their knob or a dirty session with their partner and another gay couple. And the numbers are growing. The idea that sexual liberation will grind to a halt if only we could win everyone over to sexual chastity is as short-sighted as King Canute! While the Scottish Executive tried to mop up the mess, Conti ran across the new parliament floor in his muddy boots. He saw the proposals as “geared to undermine family unity”. He deplored the “medicalisation” of the “problem”. (Why is sex always a ‘problem’ with religious militants)? I don’t remember the Catholic Church ever being so vocal over the ‘medicalisation’ of gays when while they doggedly persisted in the outdated idea that we could be ‘cured’. In The Herald he insisted: “It is not the role of government to deconstruct human nature…” But OK for Catholic militants, I suppose! “Marriage is mentioned only once in the 92-page document”, he whined in The Scottish Daily Mail before releasing another vile attack on gays and gay marriages. “Is every expression of sexuality, even those which are illegal, abusive or unnatural, to be welcomed, indeed celebrated?” Of course, there were plenty of others making submissions to the Executive consultation on sexual health, so why all the column inches set aside for a homophobic church leader? (Oh, but of course he’s not homophobic, is he? He was just following the Rules)! Gathering the opinion of a Church whose own record on sexual well-adjustment is questionable, to say the least, The Mail added that Conti thought the Executive proposals were a grave threat to the rights of parents and to ‘society’s morality’. As Joan McAlpine wrote in The Herald: “We do not need to imagine the sort of ‘moral society’ the Catholic Church prefers. It existed for more than 50 years… It was backward, hypocritical and superstitious. It burned the books of its greatest writers, such as James Joyce and Edna O’Brien”. Graham Grant insisted in The Mail, “the row intensified as an influential medical think-tank warned that the Executive’s proposals were flawed and unworkable”. The Scottish Daily Mail wheeled in the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics to declare: “The evidence for the effectiveness of abstinence-based programmes is growing…” Eh? The chastity programmes, backed by huge cash injections in the US, have been an utter failure! The archbishop had quoted from a 60-year-old report from the Scottish Medical Advisory Committee that recommended “a chaste life being the one real protection against venereal disease”. Before you had a chance to turn the page, juxtaposed with this report, was another on the disastrous consequences of youths without morality. “Eight children are named on register of Scots sex offenders”. One sexually-active 13-year-old was put on Michael Howard’s Sex Offenders’ Register after he told a High Court in Paisley that he had had sex with an 11-year-old. Another couple of boys aged 12 and 13 had sex with an 11-year-old after inviting her to play football with them. They were first charged with rape, before being charged with sexual assault. Once upon a time, this sort of thing might have resulted in some parental jousting before being brushed under the carpet and forgotten. The Mail prepared the gallows: “…Experts blamed the breakdown of the traditional family unit for such child crimes”. I was left sniggering behind my hymn book over the latest ramblings from the right-wing Catholic columnist, Mrs Katie Grant, who’s piece in The Scotsman bemoaned the lack of priestly vocations: “At the end of last year, I met an energetic, newly-ordained young priest, still in the first vigour of his vocation. He was a truly splendid man: clever, articulate and friendly, with a genuine, traditional spirituality that shone through everything that he said. In a group, he was funny and perceptive, and in the evenings he joined in the dancing before slipping quietly away to his room. Men like him are few and very far between in the Catholic Church in western Europe and the United States… The whole point of priests is that they are set apart. Diminish that and you will get even fewer of them. If being a priest is not special, why be a priest at all…? Instead of giving up on the priesthood, why don’t our Cardinals encourage more developing world seminarians to come and train here…? What is more, I’ll bet that the inspirational priest I met last year would find many more kindred spirits among his African and South American colleagues than he finds among the colleagues that he works with at the moment”. Well, I think that should more than swell the numbers, if you know what I mean!

The Scottish Daily Mail’s agenda is shamelessly transparent. “SCANDAL OF SEX PILL FOR SCHOOLGIRLS” was more religionist propaganda posing as a ‘report’ by their cronies, Kate Foster and Graham Grant. “Danger of drug given to under-16s without parents’ permission”, screamed from the front page. Giving the so-called ‘morning-after’ pill was supposed to have “plunged into crisis” Scotland’s “radical” sexual health policies. To help justify claims of a “massive row”, they dragged in the Scottish Tory health spokesman, David Davidson to declare: “The Scottish Executive wants to scatter these pills around the country like they’re sweets”. To give more weight to claims of “a furious moral backlash”, The Mail warned “responses to a public consultation on the experts’ proposals obtained by the Scottish Daily Mail spell out massive public opposition to their plans”, amongst them, The Mail’s chums, the militant Christian evangelical group, CARE for Scotland. The Mail juxtaposed the story: “Magazine that tells girls of 13 why they should use condoms” with the caveat: “Don’t let your children buy this”. Over Sugar magazine’s 12 page special on sexual health sponsored by Durex, The Mail warned: “It is the fist time Durex has managed to promote its products in the editorial section of a teenage magazine”. The editorial even accused the Scottish Health Minister, Malcolm Chisholm of “remorseless peddling”. The Mail has been promoting its vile message in editorials for years. Isn’t this the pot calling the kettle black? The editorial sat beside some particularly tasteless English right-wing clap-trap from Melanie Phillips over the “moral vacuum” we are apparently descending into by giving transsexuals human rights. “And where, pray, in all this ungodly madness is religion?” she begged. Where? Why spouting from your own dear organ, my love, that’s where! In Aberdeen’s The Press & Journal, published by Associated Press, the same group who publish The Mail, was also a gush of moral concern and “Furore over plan to open teenage sex clinic in city”. Nichola Workman hit out at Caledonia Youth for offering help to girls “without speaking to their parents” before dragging in hard pressed Tory David Davidson and the homophobic, Rev Jim Cowie of the Kirk’s Board of Social Responsibility, a shower who will be best remembered for their campaign for the retention of Section 28 and the closure of old people’s homes, (whilst the elderly were still in them). There was, of course, the Catholic Church chipping in with their usual froth and a group calling itself Not With My Child, formed by Catholic mother Eileen McCloy, who, while not busy looking after her 10 weans, was planning a protest outside clinics in Falkirk and Aberdeen. Of course, these services meet very few youngsters under 14 who are sexually active, so are delighted to hear up-front parents talking about sex openly and intelligently with them. Scotland’s own Mrs Mary Whitehouse, the militant Mrs Katie Grant who, along with the Catholic Church, has produced stacks of finger-wagging material over sexual matters over the years, confessed in The Scotsman: “You would need a wheelbarrow to carry to the compost heap all the plans, reports and new approaches even tiny Scotland has churned out about sex in the last few years”. After moaning how the Executive was keeping “thousands of committees, councils, printworks, paper factories and lawmakers busy”, she dropped the “80-page tome” from the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics in our lap. Rubbing her hands together in satisfaction, she declared: “I’m with the SCHB on this”, praising the document because it “prioritises the parents’ role in children’s sex and relationship education rather than relying on bureaucrats and doctors”. This was Church-speak. As was her demands for the privatisation of sex education in order that ‘parents’ could, in their collective ignorance, hinder effective sex education. Joan McAlpine again on 1950s Ireland, had another opinion on Catholic morality: “…Young couples were forced into face-saving and, ultimately, miserable marriages. A single, pregnant girl thrown on to the streets had few places to turn. There were no benefits, because the state system was designed to discourage unmarried mothers. Many were packed off to barbaric institutions – as portrayed to devastating effect in Peter Mullan’s film, The Magdalene Sisters. This is what happens when parents’ rights are sacrosanct. A daughter guilty of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in 1950s Ireland could be certified as simple minded or degenerate, and locked away forever”.

While militant religionists were destroying lives in Madrid, in America they were preparing to push the Constitution Restoration Act 2004 through Congress. Drafted by televangelist, Pat ‘Scotland is a dark place run by homosexuals’ Buchanan, it prepared the ground for establishing the USA as a theocracy. The law ‘would acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law, liberty and government’. As it’s own Attorney General John Ashcroft – the nation’s chief law enforcement officer – has been quoted saying: ‘America has no king but Jesus!’ Marked by human right’s abuses, imprisonment without trial, the declaration of war on a nation ahead of international law, the abandonment of talks to save our planet, the only thing tearing America apart right now was gay marriage! Alan MacDermid wrote in The Herald about the Wee County’s invitation to Elton John to marry his partner David Furnish there. It is the only county to offer same-sex services in Scotland. “If he and his Canadian consort drop by in Clackmannanshire, the council promises a fairy-tale wedding in fourteenth-century Alloa Tower”. Consort? Is ‘partner’ or ‘lover’ really such a difficult word to use? The usual shower was recruited for their homophobic ‘opinions’. Father James Wallace from St Bernadette’s Catholic Church in Tullibody told The Herald: “I certainly would not welcome Elton John marrying his boyfriend in Alloa. Same-sex relationships are completely against the teachings of the Bible and the Catholic Church would not tolerate it”. (Like we give a flying fuck if they do or don’t)! And the Rev Graham Brown of the United Free Church added: “It would be unbiblical and wrong. I cannot understand why the council is encouraging this”. We are not worthy of the dignity afforded heterosexual couplings, vis-à-vis: Vegas drive-ins, Britney Spears’ quickie and the prospect of Lisa Minnelli and David Gest’s divorce trial on reality TV. In The Metro, Mrs A. Goodlet from Kilmarnock wrote: “A letter to Joan Burnie’s problem page highlights a major problem in our society. It seems same-sex couples can book into a bed and breakfast without prior warning. In my view, double rooms should be for married couples only – on production of ID”. And so say Basil Fawlty and Joe Orton’s Edna Welthorpe (Mrs)!

Dr Martha Burk is not the sort of woman you would call a ‘militant’. For the National Council of Women’s Organisations, she challenged the US Masters championship at the Augusta National golf club last year for their men-only policy. In the UK, another men-only club, Royal Troon, has been chosen to host this summer’s Open Championship. The Scottish Sunday Mirror headlined the story “PLAYING ROUGH”, declaring: “Militant women golfers are planning to cause chaos at this summer’s Open Championship…” Hopefully, the Royal and Ancient, golf’s governing body, will kick itself into this century, but I doubt it. The paper added in language befitting a war game (yes, it was written by a man, Frank Hurley): “One counter-guerrilla tactic being considered is to ask broadcasters to refuse to show any demonstrations…” Don’t worry, it won’t be the first time we’ve been denied a chance to capture our history on film. We’ve retold those stories of brave women abseiling into the House of Lords, being sat on during the Six o’clock News, or painting Stagecoach buses pink until they’ve taken on a life all of their own!

Looking at erotic websites? Big deal! But in that most public of arenas, the workplace, it takes on a new mantle. Never mind the mantra: ‘Haven’t you got something better to do?’ This is a chance to publicly enforce moral parameters. “Forty-one police officers are facing disciplinary action after an internet pornography probe”, reported The Scotsman following a “crackdown” by Lothian and Borders Police at their headquarters in Fettes. According to the broadsheet, they were “using the internet inappropriately”. And “one civilian worker was found to have ordered kinky clothing to be posted to his home from a transvestite website”. A force spokeswoman said that some of the officers were even offered counselling “over the kind of material they were seeking out”.

garry@scottishmediamonitor.com

SMM supports the work of The Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund, P.O Box 35253, London E1 4YF. Donations welcome, write cheque to P.T.H.R.F.

CUT IT OUT…

Gerald Warner re-writing history in Scotland on Sunday on the activities of the late First Minister, Donald Dewar: “He indulged his former special adviser Wendy Alexander in her personal crusade against Section 28 – a folly that provoked more than a million Scots to vote against Executive policy in an independent referendum, and which began the alienation of people from parliament that culminated in last year’s 49% turnout at the Scottish elections. Alongside Holyrood, that was Dewar’s true memorial”. Two out of three Scots rejected, binned or simply ignored the glorified opinion poll, which, despite a £2m injection from religionist Brian Souter, attracted less than half the votes achieved by a private referendum on the privatisation of water in the Strathclyde region!

Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday, belittling the rights awarded to trans people in his opposition to reforming the House of Lords: “Prominent among the crude efforts to rekindle the class war was the obligatory mantra about ‘men in tights’ – a startling inconsistency from a government that so conspicuously favours such persons, to the point that the Gender Recognition Bill will award the endorsement of the state to a scientific untruth as primitive as flat-earthism”.

Quoted in The Sunday Herald, Allan Rennie, editor of The Sunday Mail on the idea of a Scottish version of the Press Complaints Commission: “I think there is a hidden agenda here, being driven by the far-left liberal intelligentsia in Scotland, including academics and the zealots on the NUJ”.