20 July – 15 August 2004
Scottish Media Monitor
Three-and-a-half million voting for a transsexual to win this summer’s Big Brother has to be just about the biggest kick up the arse the decidedly conservative UK media has received in years! But back to reality now and the sepia-tinted world of the Scottish media as it stands on moral issues today…
If you harboured any doubts as to The Scottish Daily Mail’s religionist, homophobic agenda, then “KIRK BACKS GAY WEDDING” in over four centimetre high letters on the front page should have spelled it out for you. With hundreds of weddings carried out in Scotland every year, the one between Robert Wicksted, terminally ill with leukaemia, and his partner, Alex Valentine got the magnifying-glass treatment. Jaded re-takes of wedding video footage paled into insignificance after The Herald noted that Edinburgh’s Phoenix pub was the venue, a transvestite was one of the wedding guests and Mr Valentine was close to tears. The Scottish Daily Mail reporter must’ve been at the Bolly, clocking a gaggle of “drag artistes and transsexuals”. Alan Simpson reported “fury from moral campaigners” as a sub-heading bellowed: “Moral campaigners insist: ‘It’s a travesty of Christian beliefs’.” The fact that Mr Wicksted had a 14-year-old son and “was married for four years to a woman to appease his family and the Army before confessing he was gay” should have signalled to the Mail and its half-witted readers that he was also celebrating a divorce from years of inequality, pretence and deception. It didn’t take The Scottish Daily Mail too long to rustle up the mandatory outrage. It took “saddened” Church of Scotland minister the Rev Iain Murdoch of Wishaw, Lanarkshire (not a parish with much to its credit in the tolerance stakes) to whinge: “All this is hacking away at the uniqueness and distinctiveness of marriage, which is God’s ideal for the enjoyment of sexual intimacy… The Bible is quite clear that homosexual sexual relations are not God’s will for humanity and to suggest differently is a distortion of Divine Truth”. And throwing the rug off the shadowy figures lurking behind the story, enter Colin Hart of the militant organisation, the Christian Institute. “This is appalling and a complete travesty of Christian teaching. I am appalled because homosexual practice is clearly very wrong and for a Church of Scotland clergyman to bless something like this is absurd and disappointing”. (‘Ello, Col! Still trolling for cod omi-palones, girl?) Norman Wells, from another militant group, Family and Youth Concern weaved marriage into the Human Genome project, declaring it “one of the basic building blocks of society”. If it were that important, and since religionists usually think all gay men’s lifestyles are just one randy encounter after another, I don’t understand why they don’t want all gays to marry? The Mail declared registrars in Scotland were “threatening a boycott due to religious and moral objections” if legislation was passed allowing gay couples to register civil partnerships which the Mail claimed would award us “the same benefits as married couples with respect to property, inheritance tax, pensions and next-of-kin rights”. Oh, diddums! What could possibly be wrong with a law that gives support to anyone in a relationship, sexual or not, be they gay couples, carers or unmarried ‘straights’? The government say they can’t broaden the Civil Partnerships Bill. Why? Tasmania did! Militants like to harp on about tradition which prevents them accepting marriage being extended to gays. But the Marriage Act of 1949 doesn’t say what sex the two partners have to be, that was added as recently as 1973 in the Matrimonial Causes Act. In seventeenth century Scotland, marriage was just as legal performed by a blacksmith as by clergy when it was just a matter of saying so in front of witnesses, so why can’t we ditch that comparatively modern amendment and return to ‘traditional values’ and history, when numerous examples of same-sex marriages where noted.
The very next day The Scottish Daily Mail ran the whole ceremony again, repeating their report almost word for word, re-titling it: “Kirk split over minister’s blessing for gay wedding”. The same reporter insisted the Kirk “faced deep divisions” over the Rev Iain Whyte’s service. Simpson reported: “Church of Scotland minister the Rev Iain Murdoch of Wishaw, Lanarkshire, last night criticised yesterday’s ceremony”, but that must’ve been the night before, since it was the same quote that appeared in the story they had printed the day before! Evidence of the surge of backers to his mean-spirited message was contained in the paragraph: “He added that his views were shared by many within the Church”. So let’s be having you, then? One at a time! Names…? Addresses…? And again, days later, accompanied by a black and white picture of a classroom of children at prayer, most probably taken in the fifties or sixties and captioned: “Under threat…” religionist, Andrew Collier threw his toys out the pram before writing on the demise of school assemblies, adding: “Only last week, another of (the Kirk’s) ministers became the first churchman in Britain to bless a gay wedding. Will he be disciplined or suspended? No”.
As civilisation as we knew it crumbled before our very eyes, Aberdeen’s The Press and Journal had reporter Iain Ramage screaming about an “unholy row” over Inverness hosting “its first gay ‘wedding’.” This time it was an “unnamed Church of Scotland minister” with an “unidentified city hotel” hosting the reception for Karen Sloan, a Bank of Scotland manager, and Jacqui Clark. With 200 guests it’s difficult to see how it could have been so secretive, especially with all the media interest, but there you are! A misguided Sandy Shaw of Nairn Christian Fellowship, put the ‘secrecy’, (which was much more likely to have been a ploy to avoid the prurient press), down to shame: “No wonder the minister does not want to be identified. Not even the hotel wants to be named. Why such secrecy? When God is at the heart of an occasion, everything is in the open. Jesus Christ does nothing in a corner. What bothers me is when someone says: ‘That’s the church for you’. I have to respond: ‘No, it may be something, but it is certainly not the Church of Jesus Christ’. I assume the presbytery will deal as strictly with him for compromising and undermining the word of God”. Ramage wheeled out Rev Hugh Watt, the Moderator of the Inverness Presbytery of the Church of Scotland who said he thought it had always been clear that “marriage should be between two people of opposite genders and should be for life”. For life? Aye, right! And aren’t ‘straights’ just shit-hot at that!
Weeks after the murder of a gay man in Glasgow, columnist John MacLeod wrote in Glasgow-based broadsheet, The Herald, that gays were simply not equipped to live. Bad enough coming from someone who admits he’s gay. He was later sacked from The Herald. Not for what he said about gays, mark you, but for suggesting murdered Soham schoolkids Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman’s lives would’ve been spared had they been in church! None of this perturbs that vile, peddler of filth, The Scottish Daily Mail who’ll sign up any religionist who can carp and whinge in their columns that the country’s gone to the dogs. I dare say regular readers of the SMM will already know how much John MacLeod pisses me RIGHT OFF! His article: “Why Kirk’s gay wedding was a sorry parody” is the just the sort of claptrap that does it for me. When it comes to gay sex, (and face it, MacLeod, you’re no expert)! he wanted to remind readers “most people are not homosexual – and most of them regard homosexual acts with revulsion…”, he said it is “hard to have a sensible debate on the subject”. I presume by ‘most people’ he means those living on the Isle of Harris! The homophobes could only take succour from MacLeod’s mindfuck on gay sex. On the issue of gays marrying, he wrote: “To any informed and spiritually-minded Christian… homosexual marriage rites are repellent… a ‘gay wedding’ is unnecessary, illogical and faintly ridiculous… There are good reasons for viewing such an exhibition with distaste and, indeed, such a parody of wedlock invites the unease of many gay people”. This seemed an appropriate moment for John MacLeod to draw the curtains on such parodies of wedlock as Britney Spear’s 24-hour, drive-thru wedding with Jason Alexander in the Little White Chapel. MacLeod’s dominant, homophobic father was not likely to remain silent in the face of such sinful manifestations either and had his moment in reporter Alison Chiesa’s collection of religionist’s outbursts in her ‘report’ of the National Trust for Scotland’s commitment to offering it’s historic places for gay and ‘straight’ ceremonies. It wasn’t an issue for the National Trust which has just won my membership, but The Herald needed a story and Professor Donald MacLeod of the Free Church College in Edinburgh needed to sneer: “I expect it may lose the National Trust some support because it has quite a conservative following. However, I welcome the civil partnership legislation as such relationships – which are not marriage – are a reality and the law has to accommodate them. However, I find the aping of ecclesiastical ceremonies slightly irritating and amusing”. Alison Chiesa finished her report, sighing: “No-one was available for comment from the Catholic Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church last night”. Oh, well, you tried, didn’t you, love! Were the BNP busy too? Or what about asking a few neds knocking back a few jars in an Airdrie boozer? The story had them all coming out of the woodwork. After news that Glasgow’s Pollock House might be earmarked, Craig McQueen in The Glaswegian collared NTS member Iain McLeod from Milngavie who thought members would be unhappy “if it was proper marriages” and Jeanette Caulfield from Pollockshaws who started: “I’ve got nothing against homosexuals…” before hiding her homophobia behind some imagined majority support, adding: “I don’t like the idea of gay marriages as a marriage should be between a man and a woman. A lot of people would be offended if they were taking place at Pollock House”. Gay people, like ‘straights’ are entitled to their space to debate the pros and cons of marriage without fear of that debate being hijacked by Scotland’s militant, religious columnists whinging about “the profound offence such a wedding service gives to Christians”. Gedover it! With John MacLeod, here was one queer columnist who was clearly batting for the other side! “On the sinfulness of homosexual behaviour, the Bible is quite blunt. Greatly outweighing such negative precepts, however, is Scripture’s exaltation of heterosexual marriage, both as the ideal for human relationship and as a metaphor for the union ‘betwixt Christ and His Church’. Homosexual relations fall short of this joy”. That’s given you can trust a book that has been twisted and re-written for political advantage and re-translated more times than Snow White. Back on Earth, many gays were proceeding to inject considerably more dignity into their marriages than any Elvis-themed Las Vegas wedding. MacLeod was unmoved. It was because it was ungodly; it was because we can’t have kids; it was because clergymen wouldn’t marry us. Anything MacLeod could find, he threw it. He even used his favourite bete noire, the “lunatic fringe of the gay world”, adding: “Still less appreciated is the unease with which many gay people view marriage”. They included “extreme liberationists” who apparently argue that ‘gay’ means “sleeping with as many men as possible”. ‘Straights’, of course, just don’t do that sort of thing! We should be satisfied with “a properly written will”, MacLeod sniffed. Any gays who tried to contribute new ideas in working partnerships were dismissed out of hand. “Such thinking is now both irresponsible and dated”, he snapped. He found a suitable character to prove his point in a novel, a “know-it-all overwhelmed in the dementia of end-stage Aids - just a docile little boy confined to his bed, eating his chocolate bars, smudging them all over his face and hands”. In the next breath, MacLeod was just another gay man contributing ideas on how we could form partnerships. “Are there no other models for commitment than traditional marriage? Why is heterosexuality the paradigm for gay relationships, rather than friendship? Is the rite of, say, blood brotherhood not as appropriate an expression of fidelity…?” Of our attempt to pursue equality in partnerships, there was a clicking of heels, if not Dorothy’s, the studded heels of Jesus in jackboots. “They say, in the Nazi concentration camps, that little Jewish boys used to tag along after German guards and start mimicking their manners and their gait. And they say that, in any oppressed sub-culture, there will always be those whose defence is to adopt the manners and habits of those in power”. Pity. When The Daily Mail conducted a poll on the issue, the majority of their readers voted in support gay marriage! What a bummer, eh?
David Moulsdale, millionaire owner of Optical Express, Health Clinic, Specialeyes and Co-Op Eyecare in the UK is planning to use the Netherlands as a testing ground for rapid expansion into Europe. I will let them know. Moulsdale, chairman of DCM Holdings, backed religious militant Brian Souter’s massive ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign, sponsoring a private referendum to prevent the repeal of a law introduced into Scotland by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government forcing gays to be treated differently in schools. Clause 28 forced local authorities not to ‘promote’ homosexuality and forbade schools to teach the acceptability of homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationship’. The law was eventually repealed, first in Scotland, and then in the rest of the UK. To promote his company, David Moulsdale uses Jack Irvine’s PR company Media House. Irvine masterminded the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign for Stagecoach millionaire, Brian Souter. As a former tabloid editor and columnist, Irvine wrote in Scottish editions of The Daily Mirror during the campaign to equalise the age of consent in the UK: “A pretty young boy of 16 can’t vote for his local MP, but he can now be buggered by him… So equality is the key, is it? In that case, shouldn’t 16-year-olds get the vote, be eligible to become, say, policemen? No? Why not? Because they’re not mature enough. But they are deemed mature enough to be bum chums for sleazy old pervs”. David Mousdale has now bought two eye laser clinics from Free Vision Euro Eyes, one in Amsterdam and the other in The Hague.
De heer, David Moulsdale, the millionaire eigenaar van de firmas Optical Express, Health Clinic, Special Eyes en Co-op Eyecare van de UK, is van plan om Nederland te gebruiken als een proef terrein voor een versnelde uitbreiding in Europe. Moulsdale is de chairman van DCM Holdings en hij heeft de militante Brian Souter gesteund in zijn beruchtmakende en grote campanje ‘Keep the Clause’, hij sponsered een privé referendum dat de herroeping van een wet verhindert, die in Schotland door de Conservatieve Overheid van Margaret Thatcher's, dwingende homosexuelen wordt geïntroduceerd verschillend in scholen worden behandeld. ‘Clause 28’ ook werd er een verbod opgelegd om homosexuality niet te accepteren ook als er een familie relatie ter sprake is. Met alle gevolgen van dien. De wet was niet aangenomen in Schotland en daama ook verworpen in de UK. Moulsdale gebruikte de PR firma van Jack Irvine met de naam Media House. Jack Irvine was de mastermind achter de campanje ‘Keep the Clause’ een anti-homo wet for de Stagecoach milionair Brian Souter. Irvine in zijn tijd als een tabloid editor en collumist schreef in de Schotse editie van de Daily Mirror gedurende de campaign om de leeftijd te veranderen in de UK. “Een aardige jongen van 16 kan niet stemmen voor zijn locale gemeente, maar kan hij nu wel gepakt worden”. David Moulsdale is nu de eigenaar van Free Vision Euro Eyes in Amsterdam en Den Haag.
In the Netherlands, sex workers face regular health checks, are unionised and demand respect for their profession. In Glasgow the majority are heroin addicts, have faced a dozen or so murders in the recent past along with continuing police and local authority harassment. In Edinburgh sex workers face “antisocial behaviour orders (ASBO)”. After she was served an ASBO, Karen Weaver, 38, told The Sunday Mail she was “quiet as a mouse… I don’t cause fear or alarm to any residents in the area. If a resident walks past, I step off the pavement to let them go by. I’ve never had a fight or argument with any of them and I don’t have sex with clients in this area”. After undercover officers spent taxpayer’s money gathering evidence against her, the local authority claimed she had caused “fear and alarm” to local residents and she was forced to work in an isolated area away from other sex workers thereby increasing the risk to this married mother-of-three. Donald Urguhart, head of Edinburgh Council’s antisocial behaviour division told The Sunday Mail: “This sends out a clear message. The council will continue to take action against individuals who reduce the quality of life for the majority”. Then residents turned on sex workers only support group, Scot Pep that had won well-deserved recognition from the World Health Organisation, calling for its removal. But for Scot Pep, Edinburgh would be looking at the same amount of murders, crime and violence against sex workers as Glasgow.
Chris Daly was only eight-years-old when nuns abused him while in care in Aberdeen. He was locked in a mortuary with dead bodies and forced to stand in the snow in his underwear. He was beaten and emotionally abused on a daily basis. The Scottish Office had a responsibility to children they put in the hands of religionists. The Scottish Executive has turned down his attempt at a public enquiry, granted in other countries. He told The Sunday Herald: “They obviously just want us to shut up and go away. We are an embarrassment to them. Perhaps the Executive doesn’t want to deal with the church because of its political influence?”
garry@scottishmediamonitor.com
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CUT IT OUT…
The Scottish Daily Mail’s Kizzy Taylor on “upset” TV’s Million Pound Property Experiment stars: “Flamboyant Scots duo Justin Ryan, 37, and Colin McAllister, 36, are in need of help themselves – after they were dramatically gazumped for a London flat”. How often do you see ‘flamboyant’ ‘straight’ couples ‘upset’?
Neanderthal homophobic Tory MSP Phil Gallie in The Sunday Mail on visitscotland’s decision to remove a guesthouse that refused a gay couple a double room from their website: “I wouldn’t have two men sharing a bed under my roof. This is another example of minority groups trying to impose their views on the rest of us”.
Crackpot homophobic Catholic columnist, Gerald Warner on Tony Blair in Scotland on Sunday: “Satan preaches against sin… Blair is the child of the 1960s, just as his New Labour Project is the final epitome of that era of liberal cant, immorality, selfishness, vulgarity and social dissolution… Basic civility has been subverted, with the whole process driven by the Blair government. Only with great difficulty has it been deterred from criminalising smacking of toddlers and legalising sodomy in public lavatories”. Steady on, old boy!
Columnist, Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman: “If our prurience and sense of dirtiness around sex is a public embarrassment in terms of the tone of some of our newspapers, it’s a grotesque public expense and private tragedy when it begins to impact on the lives of our young people”.
Selina Scott in The Sunday Mail: “The latest Big Brother series last week apparently celebrated their first TV sex – but there must be a market for this kind of junk, otherwise they would not be screening it”.
The Daily Record TV reviewer on Big Brother’s Nadia: “She used to have a penis but chopped it off. If I did that, it would be really sore but at least I could go on TV and talk about how sore it had been and everyone would vote for me”.
The Sunday Mail on transsexual Big Brother winner Nadia: “The lantern-jawed Portugeezer is still favourite”.
So-called ‘agony aunt’, Old Mother (Joan) Burnie in The Daily Record: “What did Nadia stick in the BB time capsule? The lopped off willy? How come the freak’s the favourite anyway?”
And Old Mother Burnie’s ‘apology’ to outraged readers of her comments: “Apologies all the same because the real freaks are surely those sad men who apparently can’t wait to sleep with Nadia. Sad and sick… What Nadia can do with her fame, I do not know. In the olden days I suppose they could have stuck her in the circus between the bearded lady and the snake oil salesmen. Perhaps Nip ‘n’ Tuck will take her on. She could have a whole episode to herself – Nip ‘n’ Cut”.
Ian Bell in The Sunday Herald on Nadia’s Big Brother win: “Given a vote, people preferred the tranny… It certainly left some of the moral majority (red-top press division) floundering”. The only thing floundering are circulation figures. There’s a message here, but have the press got it?
