20 December – 12 December 2004

Scottish Media Monitor

They have privileged access to Parliament. They skew the highest court in the land to pursue their agenda; they recruit cronies in our media and trumpet their demands over they way we must conduct ourselves on almost every facet of our lives. So how come media whore, Mrs Katie Grant was whinging that “Christian belief has become something to hide in ‘free’ Britain”. She was having a laugh, surely? She moaned in The Scotsman: “…Religion is now thought of as being rather like leprosy, a horrible disease from which those afflicted should be rescued and cured”. Is it? Good. Then my work here is done! Mrs Grant cast her ever scornful eyes over “Godless liberalism, the new opium of the masses”, blaming it for “family breakdown, sexual disease among the young, teenage pregnancy, the collapse of self-respect and dignity, yob culture and, above all, a new kind of sanctimonious intolerance among politicians for anybody expressing views, particularly religious views, that actually draw clear lines”. Now what ‘clear lines’ are we talking about here? The ones drawn in the sky as militant Islamists flew toward the World Trade Centre; the men who marched to their deaths in Christian crusades; modern-day, sanctimonious religious dignitaries, marching to the tune of prejudice or Mrs Grant’s, thumping her right-wing messages in Times New Roman across the pages of another paper? “Nowadays, social liberalism means cheerless totalitarianism. Ban, ban, ban, the liberals cry, as they noisily air personal dislikes and turn them into law, making pariahs out of smokers, hunters, those who shake the salt cellar too hard, and soon those who shoot and anybody else who doesn’t conform to the rigid liberal agenda as well”. ‘Reckless liberalism’ is a new one on me! Mrs Grant added: “…Religion has only itself to blame. Too many people have declared God to be on their side only to wreak havoc in His name. But most people of faith have developed more enlightened frames of mind and want to worship and let worship, live and let live”. Yes, they do. And most shun their militant leaders who claim to speak on behalf of them. But, back in her strident, militant fashion she declared: “Catholics who rejected the flip-flop liberalism of John Kerry stood up and were counted”. This was being neither fair nor compassionate to liberalism. With greater opportunities come greater responsibilities. Of course liberals would defend your right to smoke, but not if you cannot respect the rights of those around you to breath clean air and walk the streets free from your litter. It is the rights of corporate companies who load our foods with salt and sugars that are being contested here, not the citizens who rattle the salt cellar. And of course liberals defend and respect your right to worship as long as your don’t hijack worship for political gain and deny others their right to be treated equally. And of course liberals deny toffs the right to tear animals to pieces (of course she had to try and slip that one in)!

Mrs Grant is a Catholic propagandist who spends most of her time leaning on language; twisting it to her own advantage. Look at ‘political correctness’. How did that ever come about? It’s opposite is ‘political incorrectness’ or sleaze, but somehow, the right wing have succeeded in getting us all to mouth its poison without blinking. ‘Political correctness’, with its eighties epitaph of ‘hatchet-faced black lesbians enjoying self-defence classes at council tax payers expense’ is now a phrase as common and ugly as quilted nighties. What’s next? Mrs Grant turned to abstinence. “When did abstinence become a derogatory, judgmental word”, she begged in The Scotsman. (Well, when religionist-backed right-wing governments ploughed millions into its promotion, I suppose)! The first step is to suggest that us naughty liberals want to step on the toes of those who choose abstinence. No one has said that ‘abstaining’ from sex is ever bad. It is a choice like any other. And like any other, it deserves to be an informed one, not a result of fear or ignorance. Nor is it a contraceptive to protect against what Mrs Grant described as, “a quick ‘shag’, a horrible word but one that just about describes what most teenage sexual encounters have become”. Are they? Or are they complex manoeuvres, a potent cocktail of passion, romantic love, fanciful ambition, fumbling inroads in a search for security, surety and commitment with a partner in an uncertain world. Thankfully, Mrs Grant’s jaundiced views bear little relation to most people’s sexual experiences. The ‘quick shags’, when they occur, are by no means confined to teenagers and are in any case a part of our own forbidding sexual culture that banishes sexual romance, experimentation and longevity along with the poetry of the troubadours. Mrs Grant insisted: “A positive mention of abstinence also reassures a teenage girl – or boy – buffeted about by the remorseless 24/7 onslaught of sexual information and advertisements…” I was wondering where she came up with that one, but then I remembered that the Catholic propaganda, promoted by Vatican cronies like Mrs Grant, dictate that the reason why Scotland has one of the highest teenage pregnancy levels in the western world is because our liberal sex education has failed. Snag is - no thanks to religion - we’ve never had a liberal education! I left school knowing more about the mating habits of frogs than the art of human sexuality. And gay sex? Oh, you can stick that right up your back-burner! The flawed logic of ‘abstinence’ has been turning up in the most unlikely places. Taking a sharp downturn in quality of late, The Sunday Herald had Liam McDougall fielding quotes from, amongst others, devote Christian, Dr Trevor Stammers, a trustee of the Family Education Trust, “an independent think-tank” to promote abstinence. (The week before readers endured Cardinal Keith O’Brien gnawing at our brains with his warped reasoning why we should celebrate the patron saint of St Andrew with a day off on 30 November in Scotland! Oh, please! Isn’t it bad enough we have to endure two weeks off during the darkest, coldest time of the year at the behest of religion? If Scotland deserves a holiday, it should be in the short summer)! But I digress… Abstinence is not a cure-all for a surge in sexually transmitted infections. It is a result of ignorance, drunkenness and more efficient notification and treatment of STIs. The results of a better sex education have been staring us in the face for years from our neighbours in Sweden, Denmark and Holland… Well, if abstinence can’t win, Mrs Grant, why not try threats? “And by the way, maybe I could also remind our law-makers, who seem to have forgotten, that teenage sex, at least if you are under 16, is wrong”. That’s just what we want to encourage, isn’t it? The fostering of guilt and the criminalisation of young people as they approach that magical age when the doors fling open and the drawbridge is raised. But keep rolling out the propaganda. The woman with the wagging finger insisted, in the USA, “we should surely welcome the study by Peter Bearman of Columbia University and Hannah Bruckner of Yale, who found that teenagers making virginity pledges delayed the onset of sexual activity by an average of a year and a half and had fewer sexual partners. How on earth can that be a bad thing?” Well, it can be a bad thing when teenagers break those abstinence pledges and become statistically more likely to go on to have unsafe sex for starters! Oh, didn’t she mention that? So how about a good scare story then? Like Linda Blair ejaculating green puke, Mrs Grant spat:  “The other day, a taxi driver told me that when on night shift he no longer stops to check if girls sprawled on the roadside, their legs spread wide, are all right. He’s fed up of being sprayed with vomit and abuse by both them and their lover-of-the-second”. She insisted: “We do not have to live in the world of cheap sex followed by pills or abortions. That world may have taken a powerful will and imagination, a difference could be made… Come on, you witless MSPs, at least give it a go”. Yes, indeed. Come on, let’s have an imaginative and passionate sex education that starts treating sex like the art it truly is. There’s more to sex than suck and fuck images of seventies gay porn videos or the airbrushed pink of an exposed glans on a limp dick in a school textbook.

But when is it right to have sex? Sometimes, research doesn’t always come up with what we want to hear. In which case, we either take it on the chin; let it broaden our knowledge of a given subject, or, we behave like The Scottish Daily Mail. We shut down our sense of reasoning, condemn the research outright, rustle up various off-the-peg quotes in support of our agenda and call Dr Richard Yuill a charlatan. The next thing we do is strip the researcher of every shred of integrity and don’t stop until the tabloid-reading vigilantes are hammering on his door. Mail Reporter Maureen Culley declared “outcry as man who befriended paedophiles picks up academic award”. Apparently, “fury erupted” after Glasgow University awarded Yuill - after years of research - a Phd in Sociology. Since the University will be restricting access to the research for five years, it should come as no surprise who was fuelling the ‘outrage’! Make no mistake; these restrictions that had to be imposed on important academic work are a direct result of our media. Culley reminded us Yuill was “dogged by controversy”, alluding to previous attempts by controversial tabloid journalist Marcello Mega to discredit his research in another tabloid. It was not difficult to manufacture the ‘fury’ after a few phone calls to those working with survivors of abuse. In truth, what Dr Yuill had offered was hardly new. Dutch research by Sandford had already produced research that declared not all cases of cross-generational sex have produced evidence of harm. Yuill’s research did not find all intergenerational experiences healthy, but it did challenge the current age of consent set at 16 and supported those who believe that the age a young person is mature enough to consent to sex can be variable. Have we not been here before? Was it not fascists who burnt academic research outside the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute in Berlin because it was deemed too controversial? Anne Houston, director of Childline Scotland stepped into the report to add: “Anything in the public domain which could be used as an ‘excuse’ by abusers to persuade children that sex between an adult and child is ‘normal’ is dangerous”. The University, who had rigorously examined Dr Yuill’s research both internally and externally, stood by him while newspapers like The Herald only sought academic critics (one churned out the mantra that the research could fall in the wrong hands and the other wanted more restrictions on this type of research). There is no more excuse for abusing children, as there is for censoring valid research that increases our understanding of what is, in this country, a highly charged subject claimed by the media as its own. Anne Houston added: “Children tell ChildLine that various materials which appear to show that sex between an adult and a child is acceptable are used in grooming a child to be abused”. (Like Yuill’s academic tome will be hiding on the coffee table under Celtic View and well-thumbed copies of Big Boobies). Mail reporter, Ms Culley was not choosing her words very carefully. She warned that Yuill “was previously struck off the teaching register after ‘inappropriate horseplay’ with teenage boys” which rather concealed the fact that he was, in fact, struck off after some lads were caught smoking pot at a party back at Yuill’s place.

‘Outrage’ takes many guises in the media. It is almost totally manufactured by the journalists, desperate to make a wage in a paper that hires and fires on circulation figures. “DRUNK JESUS STORM” in The Sunday Mail is fairly typical. The “students shock play” at “Prince William’s university” (he wasn’t in it) portrayed Jesus as gay and the Virgin Mary “as an alcoholic”. Their rendition of the play ‘Corpus Christi’ would have gone unnoticed had The Sunday Mail not contacted local religionists – not too shy to admit to being Christians - to pour out their ‘outrage’. Stephen Green of Christian Voice called the play “blasphemous hate-filled mockery” and told The Daily Record “portraying Jesus as a homosexual is an insult to our saviour. We demand respect for the Christian faith”. The Rev Canon Dr Robert Gillies of St Andrews Church, Queen’s Gardens told The Sunday Mail’s Himaya Quasem: “There is no evidence to suggest that Jesus Christ was homosexual…” Which just goes to show you can’t trust a man of the cloth. I’d like to know what evidence religionists have that Jesus was ‘straight’? As I understand it, Jeez – who pointed out that marriage between a man and a woman wasn’t for everyone - could barely keep his hands from sliding down his ‘favourite’, disciple, John’s pants! He must’ve mentioned him – the one he loved – eight times in his gospel.

Stagecoach boss, Brian Souter who funded Scotland’s Keep the Clause militant campaign against the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality has seen a 15% hike in his company’s profits. Bruce Waddell, former editor of The Scottish Sun, a paper that supported the campaign, is now editor of The Daily Record, which also did. The Record reported how, “tycoon drives bus firm on the road to glory”, adding: “…His success was down to his strategy of getting back to basics” to turn his ailing firm round. He was reported saying: “…We had less meetings and less reports and listened to what people wanted us to do”. The shares of Stagecoach climbed 13% after the firm reported pre-tax profits for the half-year of £69.2million, almost £10million more then a year ago. His business interests in the USA have also seen something of an upturn.

garry@scottishmediamonitor.com

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CUT IT OUT…

The way The Scottish Daily Mail marked World AIDS Day, (a day late) using the perfect person to be living with AIDS: “Cathy Crawford, 53, of Edinburgh, is not the face of HIV that many people would expect. She is neither a drug addict nor gay and has not been promiscuous”. 

Homophobic, Catholic columnist Gerald Warner swiping at the United Nations in Scotland on Sunday: “Not long ago, two UN agencies called for the criminalisation of those who criticise the homosexual lifestyle (‘Pope John Paul II? You’re nicked, sunshine!’) Since such a law would criminalise a billion Catholics and almost as many Muslims, the prison-building programme that it would necessitate would dwarf all the UN’s previous construction follies… Can we find no better beneficiary for our money?” Fortunately, only a small number of those ‘billion Catholics’ think like the Pope and Mr Warner.

Enough to make Glasgow City Council chuck in the towel? “Birmingham-based PoleCats, wants to take pole dancing into mainstream gyms in Scotland… A spokeswoman for Fitness First said demand had been so high for the classes, which also includes erotic dancing, that more were now being made available”. (The Herald).