20 October – 20 November 2004

Scottish Media Monitor

The discovery of the ‘Religionist Gene’, lurking in a particular location of the human genome known as VMAT2, explains a whole host of behaviour afflicting everyone from Christ to Cardinal Winning and all those knocking on their door, from the Pope to Gerald Warner. At last, reasonable explanations for columnists like Mrs Grant! Dean Hamer’s research into how faith is hardwired into our genes had the media breaking out into a frenzy. Few sought the opinion of gays, yet when Hamer had similarly attempted to explain homosexuality; religionists lined up to help the media with their enquiries.

Have we come full circle or are we still just standing in the same place? It was in 1996 when a single man, reviled in his own community near Dunblane, turned on a classroom of kids and gunned them down. Only months ago, Stuart Leggate, 28, sexually assaulted eight-year-old Mark Cummings, then murdered him before packing his naked body into a bin-liner and throwing him down the chute of the block of flats where he lived in Royston, Glasgow. There was a corporate wringing of hands. “Surely there is something we could have done to protect Mark Cummings”, begged The Herald’s editorial. A good question. Leggate was only a teenager when he was convicted of ‘shameless indecency’. He was put on probation and ordered to receive psychiatric treatment. Neighbours had already singled him out as a bit of a loner. ‘Strange’, they called him. He had no friends at school where he was ostracised and bullied. Soon after his first sexual encounter he was convicted again: This time for ‘lewd and libidinous’ practices. (Such convictions had to be taken in their stride by gays growing up in Little Scotland sharing more than a fair share of suicides, sexual guilt and sexual psychosis). In Royston, local residents organised a petition to have the scruffy, cash-strapped Leggate family thrown out. The windows of the family car were smashed and the word ‘beast’ was sprayed across it. In the end, the family packed their bags and quietly slipped away in the night. In The Daily Mail, long before The News of the World’s campaign for ‘Sarah’s Law’; the Paulsgrove riots or even before William Beggs had disposed of his victim’s limbs in the loch, referring to Thomas Hamilton, columnist, Simon Heffer wrote: “Thirty years ago a man like Hamilton would have been run out of every town in which he attempted to practice his bizarre habits…” Ten years on, that’s exactly what they do. But why had not alarm bells rung when Stuart Leggate went on to receive a four-month sentence after having sex with a nine-year-old boy, long before he murdered Mark Cummings? Or when he continued to have sex with children and young teenagers? When local residents learned of his convictions, the attacks were stepped up. Excrement was thrown on their front door. That was never going to save wee Mark Cummings. Neither were the buckets of rotten eggs residents threw over Thomas Hamilton, or the stones youths threw at him in the streets, or the bricks locals hurled through his windows ever going to save the classroom of children he turned on with a gun. Neither would tagging Stuart Leggate have stopped boys following him into his flat. And letting residents know a paedophile was in their midst would only have launched misinformed vigilante action or driven Leggate out to cause havoc in another community. Unfortunately, most bleached-haired mothers and trackie-suited yobs read tabloids, not intelligent discourse based on reason. North Lanarkshire Council was forced to make a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission after a story in The Scottish Daily Mail suggested that the council had made £500,000 a year from housing sex offenders. The story, “COUNCIL SLAMS PERVS FOR CASH ALLEGATIONS” in The Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser brought a story by Robert Mitchell listing the council’s “string of scandals” including a man who blew kisses at two schoolgirls and a 53-year-old who murdered a pensioner (nothing to do with sex) beside a picture of a crowd challenging the council’s obligation to provide housing, including to sex offenders, with placards. The placards voiced the crowd’s fears of paedophiles in their midst: Protect our kids not the scum. Social services are over-stretched and under-resourced and the cost of monitoring Leggate, as the police had done, had turned out to be a waste of time. But Leggate was not a ‘beast’. He started life as a human being. And then he became a disturbed human being. We should have been there for him a very long time ago.

As one of The Daily Mail headers snorted, paraphrasing its President: “Aggressive? You ain’t seen nothing yet…” In celebration of a Republican win in the US election, right-wing militant columnist, Gerald Warner threw off the blanket and wagged his finger at us in Scotland on Sunday: “As forecast in this column last week, America’s Christian and cultural conservatives came out fighting and reclaimed their country”… Liberals’ inexplicable fixation with the militant homosexual cause (representative of less than 3% of the population) proved self-destructive. In the past month, that lobby has destabilised such widely disparate institutions as the Anglican Church, the European Commission and, now, the Democratic Party. With all 11 states where referenda were held on same-sex marriage rejecting the proposition by majorities that had to be weighed rather than counted, the constitutional amendment that will finally resolve this issue is in the bag… Make no mistake, this election was a Christian-led counter-revolution. The national exit poll conducted for Associated Press and the major US television networks found that the highest electoral motivation, at 22%, was ‘moral values’… The whole vile, patronising agenda of the bespectacled drabby wimmin, the Florida conspiracy bores, the wine-bar Europhiles and the Hollywood freak show has been trashed. Infanticide is out of fashion; embryos may not be cannibalised much longer; Butch and Sundance will not be taking a trip down the aisle in their lifetimes. Consider it shoved, lady”. The Catholic Church in Scotland made a call to arms from Scottish pulpits days after the election result. We should have seen it coming. Look at the demonic Keep the Clause campaign that prevented appropriate sex education for gays in schools and when a bunch of militant religionists divided Scotland at the turn of the century. If ever there was a litmus test for a tolerant society that was it. The pink strips turned blue. (John McGurk has recently taken over as editor of The Scotsman. McGurk supported the vile religionist-funded Keep the Clause campaign throughout his reign at Scotland on Sunday). The picture in The Scottish Daily Mail of MSP Fergus Ewing, a staunch supporter of Clause 28, proudly waving this same deeply prejudiced newspaper in the air in the Scottish parliament, captured the extent religionists and moral conservatives have infiltrated the seats of power to press their pernicious agenda. We are entitled to ask exactly whose parliament Holyrood really is? So fearful is the Scottish Executive of religionists that almost any issue of sexual equality for lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgendered is passed in Sewell motions to Westminster for them to deal with. But with the House of Lords knobbled, it is Europe, not Westminster that is the most likely source of our emancipation. The US is similarly divided by a cultural war: half seeking liberalisation and the other half wanting to wrap itself in the certainties of religious and moral conservatism. In Europe, the EU Commission has been almost torn apart after the Italian nominee, Rocco Buttiglione, a close friend of the Pope, expressed the opinion that homosexuality was a sin, HIV and AIDS was divine retribution against gays and single mothers were bad people. The Italian premier tried to insist he should remain on the European Commission. Buttiglione was a man representing, not Italy, but the Vatican. Columnist Duncan Hamilton in The Scotsman tried to make a distinction between Buttiglione and President Bush, suggesting Buttiglione understood the divide between church and state. He believed him capable of holding strong moral and religious beliefs on the one hand and public office on the other. He was wide off the mark. Buttiglione is closely connected to the shadowy right-wing Catholic Opus Dei, he fully endorses papal pronouncements and has called for a ban on artificial insemination; has campaigned for the abolition of abortion and has called for therapy for women and families who consider it; he defends the view that the family exists for women to have children and the husband’s role is to take care of them; he supports camps for asylum seekers and immigration quotas, depending on a nation’s ‘level of criminality’, (of which Catholic and Christian groups he considers ‘low’). He has served on the editorial board of the journal Communio for an organisation (Communione e Liberazione) that believes freedom is only achieved through Christian faith and at the Convention that worked on the European Charter of Fundamental Rights; he submitted an amendment calling for the exclusion of sexual orientation as a ground for discrimination. The EC has to ensure the rights of all its citizens and defend the separation of church and state. What is happening in the Netherlands after the violent murder of Theo Van Gogh, a man known for his challenging work on Islamic thinking, by an Islamic religious fanatic, is deeply worrying.

Jason Allardyce was once again in The Sunday Times Scotland doing the Catholic Church’s work for them. He found a “public furore… re-ignited” when girls “as young as 13” were able to obtain the ‘morning-after pill’ at pharmacies “on demand”. Community pharmacists are highly trained individuals and Glasgow Health Board was only putting the idea out to 30 chemists to see how it worked. In the same paper, only weeks after Allardyce helped stage the Catholic Church’s campaign to undermine sex education in schools, he was scribbling away under the heading “Kirk comes out against openly gay ministers”, about the new Church of Scotland moderator’s views on gays. Not that it should be of any interest to anyone; most of the Kirk’s congregation are hiding under the turf outside. If the Kirk had bothered to speak to corporate companies who have marketed to gays they would know we are trendsetters and a proven success in steering a product in the direction of success. So maybe it’s a good thing that the new moderator Rev David Lacy remains confused; unsure what side he’s batting for. “…Sometimes I believe we should not appoint gay ministers and at other times I really believe we should”. Yes, he knew gays who’d make “fantastic ministers”, and yes, he knew such indecisiveness was cowardly and people would be annoyed with this at the moment, but he was just shrugging his shoulders th’noo. He says that all the gay ministers he knew were all keeping quiet about it because they just loved the church too much and didn’t want to harm it. They “wouldn’t force the issue on the church because they love it despite its failings”. He added: “My heart goes out to them because we just can’t get to grips with the issue and I admire them. They can’t help their sexuality but for the sake of the church they love they don’t practise it”. (Ooh, lovely, now let’s all go hug a fucking tree! I’ve never heard such a load of spineless claptrap in all my life)! Perhaps, Jase, your header would’ve been more accurate had it read: New moderator doesn’t know his arse from his elbow”.

Showing your penis in Kilmarnock “meets stiff church opposition” according to The Herald. It’s a great safety valve that we have theatre challenging British prudery at all, but when it’s Puppetry of the Penis, a couple of Aussie guys, shaping their dicks (or “eponymous parts” as The Herald put it) into the Loch Ness monster onto a large screen, its no surprise the church finds itself voicing its concerns to a dwindling readership in Scotland’s papers while the Palace Theatre is sold out on both nights. The local Kirk labelled it “sleazy, tawdry and repugnant” and of course wants it closed on their say-so. If they really wanted something to snivel about they should have checked out The Crying Body by Belgium director, Jean Fabre at The Tramway. Women lifting up their skirts and pissing, drinking piss, playing with their bits and pissing some more… They had it all, darling! But of course, on another level it was eight actors and dancers exploring the physical and mental boundaries in search of the secret of the body’s tears. I suppose what you saw all depended on what you were looking for.

“A lesbian is demanding the same rights as a husband”. That was the sickeningly homophobic line in The Scottish Daily Mail after Tina Robertson (or “Miss Robinson”) sought compensation when a drunk driver killed her partner. Presumably too ashamed to reveal the author, signing themselves off only as a “Daily Mail Reporter”, the paper was at its most vile. It screamed: “If successful, the case would re-write the law, effectively giving gay couples who live together the same rights as married couples”. Now here comes my ‘demand’. Who wrote this vile report? Come out so that we may know you!

garry@scottishmediamonitor.com

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CUT IT OUT…

Punch-drunk Conservative columnist Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday: “In America, cultural conservatism is alive and fighting fit, infused with a strong Christian faith – unlike in degenerate Europe where we saw Christianity formally put to the ban by the EU parliament last week. Yes, there are millions of American proponents of abortion, of obscene scientific experimentation, of homosexual ‘marriage’ and of a hundred other affronts to Christian civilisation”.

Propagandist, Mrs Katie Grant, peddling the Catholic lie that those who permit abortion use it as a form of contraception, in The Scotsman: “All of the characters in these shows, (she lists Will & Grace, Friends, Sex and the City, and Frasier), with their sentimental values and almost pathologically non-judgmental liberalisation, would, I guess, have voted last Tuesday for that most uncomfortable of creatures, Senator John Kerry, a Catholic who upholds what is always called ‘a woman’s right to choose’.” Sorry, love. Apparently, 23% of gays voted for Bush!

Middle-England Conservative, Mrs Grant, a columnist force-fed to Scots in all of its worst papers, in The Scotsman: “…Local shops, particularly organic ones, employ a rota of tired, pasty-faced students who work long hours in horrible conditions for the minimum wage. Union rights? You must be joking. The proprietors of these ‘knit your own shoes’ shops can be just as ruthless and commercially aggressive as any supermarket chairman. I do not condemn this”.

“There must be an active and imaginative engagement of the media by the Church”. Pope John Paul II. Scottish Catholic Media Office www.scmo.org.uk.

The response of Conservative MP John Bercow to a militant Christian charity’s anti-gay ad in The Times in the Commons: “Given that the approximate £20,000 cost of that full page advertisement on page 31 of The Times by the Christian Institute would have sufficed to feed approximately 5,000 people in Sudan for up to a month, does (Mr Carmichael) share my astonishment that a supposedly charitable institution should choose to deploy its resources in that way”.

Columnist, Jenny Hjul in The Sunday Times Scotland: “How can he speak for Scotland’s morals when his church believes there are Scots who are ‘unnatural’? There may be a moral vacuum in Scotland but what is most immoral is intolerance and O’Brien seems to be advocating intolerance. He would have us pursue the moral agenda of America’s religious right, which is not at all interested in the immorality of economic injustice, racial prejudice or gender inequality but is very outspoken on the subject of immoral sexual behaviour”.