22 January – 19 February 2005
Scottish Media Monitor
Flashback. After Scotland’s devolution, under First Minister, Donald Dewar, the then health minister, Susan Deacon, inspired by the success of sex education in countries like the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark set up four Brook Centres in Scotland’s cities and established Healthy Respect, championing the supply of better information on sexual issues for young people. But there was trouble at t’ Mill. Liberal protesters had forced the Bank of Scotland to back down from a multi-million pound deal with homophobic televangelist Pat Robertson and soon after, minister Wendy Alexander announced the repeal of Clause 28, banning the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. Social conservatives went on the attack. Religionists led by the late Cardinal Winning; newspapers championed by Martin Clarke, then editor of The Daily Record; entrepreneurs led by Stagecoach boss, Brian Souter and the man behind the Bank of Scotland’s PR and a former editor of Scottish editions of The Sun, Jack Irvine joined peroxide pram-pushers chanting ‘Keep the Clause’. The fledgling Scottish Parliament looked set to topple. Homophobic billboards went up across Scotland, gay venues were attacked, there were illustrations in newspapers showing how to spot homosexuals, Labour lost the by-election in Ayr and with ‘Keep the Clause’ a playground catchphrase, there were beatings, a suicide and murders of gay men. The Executive buckled. Clause 28 went and so too did Healthy Respect. Religionists were promised ‘guidelines’ in sex education. The Catholic Church’s media cronies continued to press for an end to the Executive’s liberal ambitions until eventually, they got their way!
Now, asking ex-Scottish Daily Mail ‘reporter’, Eddie Barnes to report on the efforts of the Scottish Executive to stem the tide of Scotland’s appalling record of sexual infection and pregnancies is like asking Old Mother Burnie to hold the condom tray at a swingers’ party! He was in Scotland on Sunday flagging up “sex clinics in rural schools plan”, supporting the Church’s long-standing campaign to spike the Executive’s programme. The well overdue Sexual Health Strategy - to give it its proper title - was designed to offer guidelines on sexual health and ensure all pupils had access to advice and support, condoms and the so-called ‘morning-after pill’. At least, that was the intention. But then, of course, no one had bargained for The Scottish Daily Mail and the Catholic Church. They insisted the strategy was “sure to trigger a renewed battle between ministers and moral campaigners over sex education”. (Yes, with a bit of help from you and your paymasters, Barnesy)! When the strategy was out, The Scottish Daily Mail hardly had a word to say about it. Where were the ‘storms’, the ‘fury’ and the ‘outrage’? There was a smell coming from the woodshed. The story dominating the papers was the conviction of Luke Mitchell for the murder of Jodi Jones. Mitchell, a disturbed goth, attended Catholic St David’s school, certainly no shining model of all that was good in education! There had been a suicide of a 13-year-old girl who had hung herself in her bedroom in Dalkeith. Her friends claimed she’d been a victim of bullying. School inspectors saw nothing wrong with the school and left praising its ‘good standard of education within a very caring and supportive atmosphere’. Anyone thought to ask gay kids how caring and supportive Catholic schools were? (Perhaps, the Executive should wrap it up in a Sewell motion and ask Westminster to deal with it). Without paying too much attention to the well-oiled cogs of the Catholic media machine, their chief of propaganda, Peter Kearney told The Herald: “From the date Cardinal O’Brien’s article was published, (the one that labelled the strategy ‘state sponsored child abuse’) we had more public debate in the 10 days following than in the 10 months previous. To say he raised awareness of it would be an understatement”. Mario Conti soon returned to The Sunday Herald. This time, where he belonged, in ‘Guest Vocals’, a spot that strongly suggested this was a one-off. How we prayed. Conti was pumping the idea that we should all treat sex holistically in schools “and not exclusively as a medical issue”. Fine, if he meant we could be more open and honest about all aspects of sexuality, but he didn’t. It was the same boiled sweet in a different wrapper: No sex please, we’re Catholics. It is difficult to take seriously a spokesman for an organisation that got sex so wrong it had to stash money in overseas accounts in preparation for compensation payouts to its sex victims. The message that casualties, chalked up in their thousands in the lost years of sexual prohibition and censorship promoted by the Church, could only be rectified by more stringent measures, was astounding. Conti was happy that the strategy had taken on board his insistence that it contained “clear educational guidelines…” Problem was, the “appropriate information” provided by Catholic schools with its “emphasis on the moral and ethical framework within which we view this great gift” exclude the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and the transgendered. Conti was happy the strategy had taken so long to “get the right answer”. In right-wing gobbledegook, it was a blow to “political correctness”. He added in his address: “I would define the victory, if victory there must be, as being one for good sense. For that the Executive deserves our thanks”. But perhaps the “thanks” – if that’s what you want to call the misery that will be heaped on our nation by this unnecessary pandering to the Church - was owed to the apparently “abstinence plus” supporting Scottish health minister, Andy Kerr who told The Scottish Daily Mail: “We respect the right of faith groups and others to hold onto and promote their religious, moral and spiritual values”. Dancing with the devil, it seems the minister had had a wee private meeting, undated and unminuted, three days before Christmas, with Cardinal Keith O’Brien; not long after O’Brien had warned in parliament that gays were ‘captives’ of ‘sexual aberrations’. The delayed health strategy now winged its way out of the Executive doors on a white fluffy cloud, transformed into what Conti now described as an “impressive document… Gone are the ambiguous language of political correctness and provocative neologisms; the talk of ‘celebrating sexual diversity’ and tackling ‘heterosexism’… Gone is the ‘safe-sex’ mantra; replaced with the altogether wiser rhetoric of ‘abstinence plus’.” Yes indeed. Gone was the safer sex message that had saved so many of our lives; gone was the recognition that gays too were part of Scotland and deserving of the protection of its parliament; gone was sexual diversity to be replaced by the straitjacket of sexual conformity and gone were those nasty neologisms. (Aah! Remember when gay meant happy before it was hijacked)? The Catholic Church was H-A-P-P-Y! These were the ‘guidelines’ they had always wanked over. Even family planning workers could be barred from entering their schools at the insistence of head teachers, effectively giving Catholics a veto. Iain Macwhirter got it exactly right in The Sunday Herald: “Abstinence plus what? Abstinence plus rampant promiscuity? Abstinence plus judicious sexual exploration? Abstinence plus a bit on the side now and again? The Executive sexual health policy is an oxymoron: just say no – except when you say yes”. This had been five years in the making, cumulating in a cash injection of just £15m of public money, only some of which would go to centres helping pregnant teenagers. What a total piss-up! Even that was still too much for the Catholic hierarchy. Cash for abortions had the Catholic Church’s mean-spirited spokesman Peter Kearney waving his todger in The Scottish Daily Mail: “This is a staggering investment in approaches which have demonstrably failed. To plough good money after bad on such a scale is very worrying”. Well let’s hear it for ‘Abstinence-plus’ then! It’s like getting gang-banged by a couple of suited evangelicals round the back of the bike sheds; just the sort of message that will open the school doors to the Silver Ring Thing and all sorts of other dotty US-style Let-Jesus-Say-When shenanigans. As Kearney wasted no time explaining in The Scottish Daily Mail: “The Scottish Executive must translate its rhetoric on abstinence into reality by giving equally serious financial support to groups offering abstinence-based advice”. There! What did I tell you? What hope have we of becoming a modern nation with the Church round our necks? Scotland is top of the league in unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. In five years, Herpes and Chlamydia went up by 50% amongst teens, over 38,000 became pregnant in just four years and 16,000 had abortions. Will the ‘strategy’, led by the same group who stripped it of its purpose really do the trick? Oh, please, do me a favour! Now I see why Jack Straw argued that Westminster, not Holyrood, should have responsibility for abortion. We have been exposed as a nation of superstitious, morally conservative red-necks and the disease is spreading.
Swooning in adoration at Catholic successes, The Edinburgh Evening News gave Forward Together, a bunch of Church of Scotland militants, the oxygen of publicity over their desire to see the Kirk lurch to the right alongside them. Rev Ian Watson, Professor Andy McGowan and Rev Bill Wallace were ringleaders. (Regular readers will no doubt remember Wallace and Connelly, the homophobic double-act: Bill Wallace of the Kirk’s Victorian Board of Social Responsibility and the late Catholic Chief of Propaganda, the ‘Sexfinder General’, Monsignor Tom Connelly). Mr Wallace - still hanging on in there, bless him - once told The Scotsman all “genital sexual acts should be within the marriage bond and nowhere else”. (At his age, he’d be lucky to get it on the sheets)!
The religionist’s limp organ, The Scottish Daily Mail were soon picking again at their sexual scab. Their ‘political editor’ Ian Smith declared “anger over cash for youth group offering children secret abortions”. Ideally, we would like girls as young as 13 to be sufficiently sexually educated that they knew how to avoid unplanned pregnancies; but shit happens! When it does, Caledonia Youth is there for them. £701,000 was not a lot in real terms, but it pissed off The Mail enough to spill its tired mantra. “Critics said the figures undermined Mr Kerr’s claim that the strategy was focused on encouraging school children to avoid underage sex”. It was the Abstinence Plus message. It didn’t take a genius to guess who the ‘critics’ were. The “funding row” was part of The Scottish Daily Mail’s spiteful campaign to prevent financial help to young people who found themselves completely alone, fearful of their parents and desperate for help. “The funding row has derailed the Executive’s attempts to appease critics, particularly the Catholic Church…” And who were these ‘critics’? Try not to laugh. At the end of the report The Mail showed its hand to reveal Catholic militant Peter Kearney and Eileen McCloy, a mother of ten from Glasgow! (Oh stop! I’ll wet myself in a minute)!
Graham Grant. He’s a bit scary. Behind the personal ramblings of a bitter, crotchety, homophobic old soldier is a somewhat younger man. Grant’s (g.grant@dailymail.co.uk) predictable rant was this time directed at “anger over public cash to promote gay history… “Thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ cash will indeed be spent – promoting the history of Scottish homosexuality”, he gasped. The £10,000 grant to OurStory Scotland charity would do what we’ve been so careless doing: Recording, or even recognising our history. Its aim was to tackle disadvantage and prejudice by investigating the history of gay issues. It “sparked fury from experts…” Professor Tom Devine had recently criticised pupils’ sketchy knowledge of our nation’s past. He told The Mail: “This is an educational scandal…” but he was referring to the lack of history taught in schools, surely? Grant frothed at the Executive’s effort to “recognise and celebrate the contribution that LGBT people have made to Scottish society”. Adding that “the news sparked fury from experts who said the funds should be invested in Scottish history teaching instead, amid concerns that the subject is dying out in schools due to lack of funding”. So, we’re responsible for the demise of history as a subject taught in schools now! Grant’s homophobic contribution continued on the lines of: “The decision to celebrate gay issues and invest in researching their history comes as some Scottish head teachers scrap the study of history”. The only ‘expert’ Grant found was Tory MSP Bill Aitken who thought the Executive had “got its priorities wrong”. Indeed it had. It should be speaking out against The Scottish Daily Mail’s homophobia; silencing them once and for all! That’s why I’m not interested in the mud-slinging that has taken place between London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone and a Jewish Daily Mail journalist. All I know is that Mr Livingstone has helped highlight what I have spent ten long years demonstrating: Associated Newspapers own a newspaper that is responsible for appalling levels of sexual fascism. Their journalists might well scream: ‘It wisnae me’, but like the cries of the officers policing the concentration camps, it’s no excuse. May I finish by repeating the words of London’s mayor: “You cannot work for The Daily Mail and expect to have the rest of society treat you with respect”.
Religion is not a poison. It offers a good deal of comfort and support to people, but it also offers a platform for those furnishing their own personal agendas. Most Catholics are embarrassed by the pronouncements of its leaders; others deplore its homophobia. Some have made a stand. Those who do some of the worst damage occupy privilege positions in Scotland’s press. Mrs Katie Grant, one of Scotland’s most vile columnists, regularly spouts propaganda designed to hurt queers. In The Scotsman, she gasped: “…Organised religion is nothing more than a wicked social construct, a form of institutionalised bullying using superstition to lock people into a certain mindset so that others can take advantage. How else can you explain the clerical child abuser or the suicide bomber?” I had to pinch myself. But alas! Mrs Grant was squaring up to defend religion, not finally staring truth in the face. She reminded us – yes, us, mark you! – “That the religious message of loving God and your neighbour is constantly ignored; that we continually and deliberately misinterpret it; that it has taken us years to learn tolerance, does not undermine the basic, simple, universal religious revelation, which is, essentially, that salvation comes through peace and justice”. Given her homophobic record; that’ll be her badly singed in Hell then! She added: “I’ll carry on sticking up for organised religion. I accept completely its pitfalls. I accept that human beings thoroughly misuse it…” But she’s going to stick with it anyway. As no doubt the same tired out newspapers will stick with her.
I like to think that readers of this column are sufficiently clued up to know that all professed ‘anger’; ‘outrage’ and ‘fury’ are the clucking of only a few ‘critics’; a handful of trapgobs whose numbers are listed in mobile phones for guaranteed soundbites on so-called moral issues. “Naked anger at Page Three pose in student newspaper” was no exception. The “row” was over a half naked girl on page three of Edinburgh University’s Student magazine “she is pictured in one of the university’s historic libraries”. History and sex? Oh, Lord, no! (They also featured a guy “in skimpy briefs” but he got only a passing mention in The Herald). Student magazine was “flooded with complaints” according to the report by Billy Briggs and the unfortunately named Jonathan Lessware. Lale Tuncer, a religionist from the university’s Islamic Society said, “many students… were disgusted” at the sight of “nudity of a man and a woman”. The other complainant was our old friend, Catherine Harper, commanding officer of Scottish Women Against Pornography. “It is an incredible retrograde step by the editors which will lead students to only view women as a pair of breasts”, she babbled, claiming to speak “for many parents”, most of whom would know a tit when they saw one.
Cops come from all walks of life, and cum in all ways too! If there are gay cops – and of course there are – I expect they will do all the things that gays do. But what do you do when your lifestyle comes up against a bunch of reactionary, sexual prudes? Apart from line the cat’s litter tray, there’s not a great deal more anyone can do with The Sunday Mail. It’s as sexually liberating as the ball and clawed feet under the cover of a walnut dressing table. Following on the heels of Hamilton Sheriff Hugh Neilson’s resignation after he was caught wrapped in a towel during a police raid in a Glasgow sauna, The Sunday Mail discovered a cop giving out towels and making sandwiches in a gay sauna in Edinburgh. They stopped only at printing the recipe for the sandwich filling! What hope is there of turning a comic into a newspaper or the ‘Force’ into a ‘Service’ if this is all it takes to put you off your dinner. “PC Delwyn Williams, 32, resigned from the force on Friday after his astonishing double life was exposed”, cried The Sunday Mail. He faced a criminal inquiry. ‘Reporters’ Jane Hamilton and Brian Lironi were behind this ridiculous story. “An undercover reporter”, too ashamed to expose himself, in more ways than one, popped along to the No 18 sauna to be shown around by Williams. By all accounts, Oor Del was courteous and helpful. The naive ‘reporters’ were stunned by what was, after all, a gay sauna! “Williams showed our reporter three small rooms, which he said were available for anyone who wanted to have sex. There is also a dark room and a ‘sling’ room with leather straps suspended from the wall about half way up… Eight middle-aged men were sitting naked. (The stairway was) decorated with posters of nearly-naked men”. What did they expect, pictures of Esther Williams and Deanne Durbin and magazines on how to get the best out of your Skoda Estelle? Del went on to advise: ‘There are two other gay saunas in Edinburgh. You might want to try them too”. (Townhouse Sauna and Gym in East Claremont Street and Steamworks at Broughton Market). It was, of course, all too much for Sunday Mail ‘reporters’ who probably were more used to pulling their rosaries through their fingers. However, they still went back for more! “Another investigator who visited the sauna was propositioned for sex three times in an hour. …Two men, both in their 50s, were sitting in the Jacuzzi chatting… (Steady)! Williams joked that our reporter would have to ‘dis-robe’ before he could be shown the rest of the sauna. Several other men were lying around wearing only towels… Later, a second reporter sitting in the sauna was asked three times by different people within an hour if he wanted sex. He refused all offers and left”. (Well done, old boy! Another tabloid martyr to the cause). Lifting the smelling salts to their noses, the moral investigators were surprised to find the premises “still open for business yesterday”. And the day after and the day after that, we hope! They tried to dig around for anyone else too ashamed to put their name to The Sunday Mail’s tripe and found “a police source” who told them: “There have been stories in the past which have embarrassed the force but this is on another level”. It is. Including the release of pictures that were being used by police in an investigation. The licence holder, Kathleen Dykes, took on the sleazy Mail head on over the constable’s moonlighting: “It was a great job for a gay man. Any straight man would be more than happy to work on a desk if they were going to meet a potential 50 women in a towel every day”. If they ever go back, I do hope our boys give them the clap they so richly deserve.
Having always had to make do with heterosexual romances in the school library, it came as something of a breath of fresh air to read how successful American author David Levithan had been with his new book Boy Meets Boy. Published by HarperCollins it might be available in Scottish schools which “will include a number of Catholic secondaries”, trembled The Sunday Herald. One Church propagandist, the Catholic Church’s ‘parliamentary officer for the Catholic Church in Scotland’ told them: “I hope headteachers have the good sense not to allow this propaganda into their schools. It is very detrimental to children of high school age to be exposed to books that depict homosexuality as normality”. Even more ridiculous was Stephen Green of Christian Voice who added: “…On the one hand it could increase bullying against boys who might be slightly effeminate, and on the other it promotes homosexuality”. It is blatant hypocrisy for the Catholic hierarchy to hijack the First Minister’s summit on sectarianism by demanding equality and the repeal of the 1701 Act of Settlement, which bans Catholics from the throne at the same time as they are shrewdly abusing the human rights of children growing up gay, bisexual or transgendered in their schools.
The media are obsessed with transgender. Barely a week goes by without another tranny thrown in the media circus. “Sex-swap hubby conned me with lies about his naughty knicks”. Reporter Paula Murray was milking the story of “sex-swap lesbian” Karen Sweeney dry. Karen met Slovakian dancer Cristina in an Internet chatroom, they got married – something they were able to do because Karen’s birth certificate had to show she was a man – and then The Daily Record revealed they offered sex to those interested in threesomes. Now, Karen’s (nee Alan’s) ex-wife claimed Alan had told her it was normal for men to wear panties. (Well, few men haven’t, so there’s probably some truth in that)! He also told her he had shaved his legs to help his swimming and shaved his chest to help him get a tan. (Hold the front page)! Resorting to garden-fence gossip, the report added: “…A pal of the couple, who is also a former colleague of Alan’s, said: ‘Sandra believed all his lies’.” The ‘pal’ worked at IBM in Greenock with Alan. “One Monday, he came in wearing a skirt and said we were no longer allowed to call him anything but Karen… He was quite a sight. It was ghastly… If you accidentally called him Alan he’d go and moan to the bosses that he was getting stick from us. And he did get some, to be fair”. Then he had every reason to ‘moan’ to bosses, surely? Wow, some pal! Despite the efforts of IBM to educate the workforce, Karen became depressed, was off sick for a year and finally took redundancy. I’m curious of the one-sided approach the media give to the subject of transsex. What about men who share this interest in a different way? What about their interest in the transformation or the fantasy of taking home a woman who ‘turns out’ to be a man? What of their interest in a TV or TS’s identity or their love of a truly feminine man? These are men who circumvent labels like ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’, who fit perfectly into Freud’s theory of sexuality and conduct their relationships, however privately, escaping the attention of the media and public discrimination.
Why are the right-wing press so eager to sideline sex as something so trivial and unimportant? It was, according to The Scottish Sun: A “NEPALLING WASTE” after “MSPs blast £8,500 sex study on trekkers”. Researchers at Aberdeen University were studying the sexual habits of Nepalese guides after reports “they are getting frisky with tourists”. They weren’t just getting “frisky”, of course; they were having sex. Probably unsafe sex since condoms were considered taboo. You can count on the Tories for a soundbite, so The Sun turned to Mary Scanlon who “blasted”… “You would almost think it’s April Fools’ Day”.
garry@scottishmediamonitor.com
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CUT IT OUT…
Fiona MacGregor’s report in Scotland on Sunday: “(Catholic) Church leaders recognised that the ordination of a married man may perturb some more traditional members of the church but said that they believe the years he spent working as an Anglican priest means he can bring important experience to his new role”.
