12 December 2004 – 22 January 2005
Scottish Media Monitor
Jeffrey John spoke of his schooldays during one of those religious propaganda programmes on BBC Radio 4. It was very touching. He remembered a boy who was bullied because he was ‘weedy’ and ‘effeminate’. The boy had been beaten up, got his lunch thrown away, was called girl’s names and always sat on his own. “I can hardly think of the misery that kid must have gone through”, Dr John said. “I never said or did a thing to help him because, of course, I was terrified that if I did they would suspect me too and I would get the same treatment”. As Karen Walker spat in Living TV’s hit comedy Will and Grace: “Gays and yer discipline. No wonder you all end up in the clergy!” Talking of disciplinarians… Homophobic, Catholic, Conservative columnist, Gerald Warner took a moment to express his support for ‘freedom of speech’ in Scotland on Sunday. Well, sort of. “…Freedom of Speech? Liberty of expression has progressively been outlawed by the government, under the relentless advance of tyrannical political correctness. Observe the demeanour of those around you at work, in pubs, at dinner tables or in any milieu where conversation is wide-ranging. Note the hesitancy of expression of otherwise articulate people, as they grope nervously and self-consciously for a vocabulary of illiterate euphemism whenever they are obliged to make reference to any minority group championed by the liberal establishment”. No, no, no, my old fruit! What you’re mistaking for ‘political correctness’ was simply the genuine intentions of people who didn’t wish to offend. Displays of tolerance, sensitivity and a genuine need to understand; it comes natural to most people. Gerald Warner had been wetting his pants over Ms Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti (Dishonour) that had provoked violent protests from some members of the Sikh community for its scenes of rape and torture in a temple. But whose temple? Is not a theatre a temple for those fighting and defending the right to free speech and artistic expression? Muriel Gray could not have put it more succinctly in The Sunday Herald: (The temple) “is sacred because, like freedom to worship, free speech has been fought for with the sacrifice of lives and the passion of nations. To have it desecrated, by the victory of thugs who threatened theatregoers with death for daring to see one woman’s valid expression about abuse, is a blasphemy on a parallel to anything the fundamentalist zealots in this country can conjure up as ‘offensive’… It was unsurprising… that the almost entirely male shouting threats at innocent people were, when interviewed, revealed as knuckle-dragging misogynists who wouldn’t know Harold Pinter from Harold Steptoe. Their favourite line when asked why they were so angry was: ‘These things don’t happen in a temple’. No indeed. Nor do talking animals overthrow oppressive humans on farms, or guilty murderers get visited at banquets by their victims. People like George Orwell and Shakespeare just made stuff up. It’s called fiction, you pathetic fools. But the philistines won. None of the violent protesters have been arrested or charged with incitement, as they should have been. Meanwhile, the playwright is in hiding, fearing for her life, a great many law-abiding Sikhs are left ashamed and frightened, and a bunch of smug religious fanatics are busy congratulating themselves that ‘common sense has prevailed’.” Gerald Warner’s argument was more steel toe-capped Doc Martens than bare feet shuffling across prayer mats. He was with the militants. “The Sikhs have now served notice that any provocation against their religion will be met with the same ruthlessness that ended the career of Indira Ghandi”. With Kitchener’s finger pointing at the nice couple tiptoeing their way across the York stones to church, Warner stormed: “At the same time as the play in Birmingham was offending Sikh sensibilities, Christianity was being vilified at St Andrews. A production of Corpus Christi, the blasphemous play by Terrence McNally, portrayed Christ and his apostles as a gang of promiscuous homosexuals, with the saviour represented as the son of an alcoholic. Christians protested in an orderly fashion: the play completed its run. Future Christian protesters, contrasting their result with that of the Sikhs, will not need a degree in logic to draw an obvious conclusion… Could so gratuitously offensive a play have been staged if its central character had been, say, the Prophet Mohammed? Of course not, because the fatwa is a much more effective guarantee against blasphemy than the Lord Chamberlain ever was. The cosy explanation is that Christians are more tolerant. In reality, they simply do not care. They have made themselves a soft target because they are largely indifferent to their faith. The injunction to turn the other cheek is often quoted, out of context, to justify craven submission. It was intended to inform the response of Christians to personal affronts; but the appropriate reaction to insults against God was demonstrated when Our Lord whipped the traders out of the temple”. This was The New Scottish Bible: Get ye out there good Christians and let’s kick some arse! Trouble is, who always gets their arse kicked first? Warner snorted: “Part of David Blunkett’s legacy is a proposed law against the inciting of religious hatred: would that not ban any similar production in future? Labour and its media satellites are all over the place. They are eager to impose discriminatory laws that will favour their protégé groups (ethnic minorities, homosexuals, asylum seekers, etc) but to persecute those minorities they dislike (fox-hunters, Christians, smokers, et al). There is no consistency, because their agenda is prejudice masquerading as social responsibility”. We were reminded: “In any other circumstances, the Sikhs could expect to be favoured by the liberal consensus; but what made this case different was the fact that it involved religion. For today the secularist Left has broadened its longstanding vendetta against Christianity to include all religions. With the rise of militant Islam, the Left has lost much of its enthusiasm for foreign creeds, formerly seen as helpful supplanters of Christianity”. And certainly the political Right want to fill that space, only the party Mr Warner loves to hate, NuLabour, boasts some thirty or so members, including Jack Straw, of the Christian Socialist Movement. Is there really no escape?
The very odd, Wee Free teuchter, John MacLeod, j.macleod@dailymail.co.uk, The Scottish Daily Mail’s only queer columnist, thinks George Dubya Bush’s America is just super! He agrees with Churchill that the U.S. is “the last, best hope of mankind…In all truth it is in almost every respect our decided superior, politically and morally… I am a teuchter, a Wee Free, an oddity. In the U.S., I could be wonderfully and simply me”. Oh, jeez-oh! That’s so early eighties! To quote a tongue-in-cheek Alan Taylor in The Sunday Herald: “An oddity? Rev MacLeod? On Harris? Never!” But I’ve got to praise Bible John for his choice of countries. The home of: ‘Don’t ask; don’t tell’? They’ll love you, dear! Soothing his homophobic paymasters he advised: “Of course it is easy to mock the earnest Christians rising in revulsion against state-recognised gay marriage… But what are they to make of a Scottish parliament where… a 73-year old MSP was forced to grovel for voicing his disapproval of homosexuality”. Yes, what exactly? A prudish, debt-ridden country that turns its back on its responsibilities to lead the world on green issues, flaunts international law and elects its President on the pressing issue of whether gays should get married or not? Much of the same sort of drivel could be wiped off the lips of Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday: “…Here is Uncle Sam bestriding the world again. It is America’s vast wealth, its successful capitalist system and its political cohesion that give it staying power. Those last elements may implode during the course of a generation, with massive Hispanic immigration and bitter political polarisation threatening the traditional ethos of American identity. Yet, for the foreseeable future, the US is the only game in town”. They just don’t get it, do they? Pinch me. This is 2005 not 1905, right? We have the Federal Communications Commission in the US neither confirming or denying they were investigating indecency complaints over the broadcast of last summer’s Olympic opening ceremony which included actors depicting two lovers dancing in the sea, a goddess of fertility and a pregnant woman whose belly glowed. Most of the complaints – as always in these circumstances – were part of an organised campaign by religionists, in this case, the Parents Television Council, a similar group to Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA); renamed MediaWatch, after Terry Sanderson’s superb MediaWatch column in Gay Times. Greece hit back, telling the FCC and guardians of US citizens’ morality to butt out of Greek culture! (May I just say I love Mykonos; moussaka is yummy and Vicky Leandros is fab)! Back in storm-lashed Scotland, The Herald was reporting the recommendations of ‘experts’ to monitor lap dance clubs, including private areas such as booths. One condition was to ban physical contact between customers and performers ‘except for a simple handshake at the beginning and/or end of a performance’. This ‘expert group’ includes the police and representatives from the licensed trade. I would’ve liked to have thought there was at least someone in this group who recognised moral policing of sex when they saw it.
Given the numbers of journalists joining Scotsman publications from that doyen of the Conservative rat-pack, The Scottish Daily Mail, I considered the report from Murdo MacLeod and Kate Foster (ex-Mail) on Kirsty Wark inviting First Minister Jack McConnell a respite from the rain at her Majorcan place in the sun in Scotland on Sunday had something of a whiff of hypocrisy about it. “(Tory chairman, Liam Fox} has written to the BBC Board of Governors claiming it was wrong for a supposedly impartial journalist to have such close links with senior Labour figures, demanding an inquiry and ‘appropriate action’.” Haven’t all of those journalists, regularly appearing in these pages, continued milking their contacts in the Scots Parly for their own morally conservative ends? As Alan Taylor put it in The Sunday Herald: “One has lost count over the last few years of the prominent hacks who have sat on the Scottish Arts Council, become trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, judged Creative Scotland awards, given their good names to hospital trusts, written reports for public bodies and private companies, joined political parties and supped with the enemy, all the while apparently unconscious of potential conflicts of interest”.
It’s all so painfully predictable, really. The homophobic B&B owner, Tom Forrest, who was struck off the VisitScotland register after turning away a gay couple, was sorely vexed. Graham Grant, g.grant@dailymail.co.uk, the homophobic home affairs editor of the homophobic Scottish Daily Mail, had been waiting in the wings with arms outstretched to catch the swooning old soldier. A dash of absinthe to revive a couple of homophobic MSPs, (Fergus Ewing and Phil Gallie), and hey presto! We have another queer-baiting story fit for The Scottish Daily Mail! The caption: “Anger as official website carries links to homosexual escort service” was manufactured anger; designed to have readers tapping their pipes on the sides of their brogues. The Scottish Daily Mail first advised going on to VisitScotland’s website, after which, you would have to have been gay and not a hapless Daily Mail reader to take the next step: Clicking on links to gay Scotland. But it’s not over yet! You’ve still to click on ScotsGay! And a Hard search through the mag awaits you before that elusive escort, with a bum like a full moon, is ready to take your rocket and let you land your face in his bird’s nest! Of course, Grant’s report was a joke. What’s not so funny is that many of these dickhead ‘journalists’ leave to work for The Scotsman or Scotland on Sunday! Is this really the standard of journalism in Scotland? It’s indisputably shoddy. The ‘report’ was amateur. “The only gay in the village? Just call the tourist board…” the paper sniped. Backed up by a picture of “Village person” Matt Lucas as Dafydd, from TV’s Little Britain, all the ‘report’ did was humiliate gays and discredit VisitScotland for acknowledging this £95billion UK market with a dedicated section “so they won’t have to be lonely like Dafydd…” They? Who are “they”? Does he mean us? Are we something so foreign to Mr Grant we should be scraped off his shoe? Sentences from the website that were supposed to address a more tolerant and liberal gay audience peppered Grant’s ‘report’ to justify the ‘storm’, ‘outrage’ or, in this case, ‘anger’. VisitScotland’s quirky reference to the “United Queendom” was light-hearted banter that quickly turned to poison in the Mail. Tory MSP Phil Gallie found the quip “utterly offensive”. Fergus Ewing, homophobic religionist MSP for Inverness East, Nairn and Lochaber (he offered vocal support for the retention of Clause 28) moaned: “My Scottish parliament computer was unable to access a link because the Internet filter blocks pornographic material”. (Someone please show the old fella how to disable his Net Nanny)! “We should not in Scotland have a national website… which is basically advertising the country as a place to go and have sex”. If only!
It was a fairly benign report in The Daily Record. A lesbian couple were wed. (Yawn). I know; some readers still get off on this stuff. Gays can’t get married yet in Scotland. This couple were only able to slip through the net because the UK doesn’t allow people who change sex the opportunity to do the same for their birth certificate, so ‘he’ got married to her. Days later, “THEY MAKE A VICE COUPLE”, reporter Paula Murray attempted to tart up her story. “Sex-swap dad and his new lesbian wife are offering sex as an internet vice double act”. It was no big deal. “Karen Sweeney – once married father-of-two Stephen – and Slovakian partner Cristina Sladekova are behind an escort service charging up to £850 a night for their services”, Ms Murray sniffed after “the Record confronted them about the seedy activities”. They readily agreed to close the website down, so whether they were really earning that kind of money is open to doubt. What wasn’t, was The Record’s willingness to cash-in on the sexual aspects of the story with a string of sexy pictures albeit with strategically placed black patches over the best bits to award at least some concession to the moral probity of this story. At the very least, the couple walked away with the dignity of being called lesbian, but it still got me thinking. Was that how they saw themselves? With the Internet revolutionising sex, more men are having gay sex, in groups or otherwise, without adopting the media-trashed title of ‘gay’, so why should Karen and Cristina have to be lesbians, let alone “a vice couple”. Live and let live.
garry@scottishmediamonitor.com
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CUT IT OUT…
Labour Catholic ‘family values’ campaigner, MSP Michael McMahon in The Daily Record: “Our religious institutions will have a much more important role in achieving tolerance in our society than any football clubs or their supporters”.
