Another tabloid, The Scottish Daily Express, edited by Kerry Gill and in direct competition with The Scottish Daily Mail, appeared only lukewarm in its response to repeal. “Name-calling and intemperate language… has damaged the country, setting group against group and individual against individual…” The Express editorial at the start of the Section 28 furore focused on the issuing of guidelines. “Some will criticise ministers for isolating teaching about homosexuality, a far cry from the ‘inclusiveness’ the Executive tells us it desires in the new Scotland. But desperate times require desperate measures and ministers may at least succeed in drawing the poison from the affair. Section 28 should, by all means, go, but most sensible and neutral people want to know what is going to replace it. While 99.99 per cent of teachers can be trusted to be responsible, there may always be an exception who will have to be tackled”.

The popular Scottish Sunday tabloid, The Sunday Mail, like The Record, another Trinity House title at the time, took a quick volte-face over issues of sexuality a few weeks before Souter announced he was bankrolling the Scottish School Boards’ Association’s efforts to prevent repeal of Section 28 when Peter Cox from The Scottish Mirror took over as editor. Under former editor, Jim Cassidy, The Sunday Mail had been excruciatingly Victorian about sexuality. Cassidy was the brother of Tom Cassidy who worked with Jack Irvine on the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign and was close to senior members of the Catholic hierarchy, including Cardinal Winning. The Sunday Mail’s editorial now spelt out its support for the repeal of Section 28: “Dewar learns how to lead from the front… His vision for Scotland’s future, outlined in today’s paper, is for fairness and justice for all – and that includes gays”. The paper’s columnist Melanie Reid pinpointed the latching on to the issue of ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. “Moral traditionalists like that description. They portray Clause 28 as a last bastion holding back a wall of filth from the ears of our innocents. As if its lifting would mean our kids would get 10 hours tuition a week in how to look like Julian Clary”. Their editorial begged: “What on earth is happening to our normal tolerant Scottish society? You would think the Anti-Christ had just been appointed new teacher for Primary Two… We are talking about the scrapping of… Section 28… It was introduced by the Tories, let us remember, to soothe Middle England’s fears about everything you can’t buy in Sainsbury’s… Axing it will not allow beasts incarnate to wander through our schools corrupting our children and turning us into a nation of cottaging gays… The right-wing English-based Daily Mail tells us gleefully that of the 2300 groups asked for their views on Section 28, a full 40 were gay. Indeed. And the other 2,260 were heterosexual!”

Owned by the Barclay brothers, The Scotsman was an Edinburgh-based broadsheet in support of repeal. “This newspaper does not accept that Scots are prejudiced”, its editorial insisted confidently. It was another about-turn for a paper once edited by the ferocious editor of The Daily Record, Martin Clarke in 1997, albeit for little more than a year. Alan Ruddock took the helm and was in the editor’s seat until February 2000. Under its editor-in-chief, the Paisley-born, former editor of The Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, editors changed frequently and pro-repeal Tim Luckhurst – a former advisor to Donald Dewar - would end up out on his ear after only a few months, finishing up, toning down his act, writing a column for The Scottish Daily Mail. Rob Ballantyne, Stagecoach’s head of PR also served time as assistant business editor of The Scotsman. Ritchie MacLaren proudly related in his Diary in The Scotsman how he was “travelling by bus – not Stagecoach, since some of my best friends are gay…” Over the paper’s support for repeal, Rev Dr Alistair P Donald from New Deer, Aberdeen wrote to The Scotsman, declaring: “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Robert Neil kept up some light-hearted observations watching the Scottish Executive at work for his column in The Scotsman. “Somehow, listening to MSPs talking about – you know – ‘it,’ is like hearing your favourite aunt at the Christmas table suddenly change the conversation from Brussels sprouts to orgasms… Wee Phil (Gallie), the Tory justice spokesman, ambled forth from the backwoods, claiming he didn’t have an axe to grind. But nobody believed him. In an ill-advised allusion, he said his postbags had been bulging…. Andrew Wilson (SNP) got fed up with his ramblings, and said: ‘Are you, Phil Gallie, in favour of the equalisation of consent or not?’ He was not. But the message from the overwhelming majority was: ‘Not tonight, Philistine…’ Another Conservative, John Young, who thinks the Karma Sutra comes with a chapati, said that in all his years on Glasgow council, sex had only been mentioned once. And, even then, it was just somebody asking what it was like. John is a genuinely nice man, and hardly anybody’s idea of a bigot. He said of Mr (Jim, Scottish Lib Dem leader) Wallace: ‘I just wonder if he isn’t advocating sexual licence’. No, John, you won’t need a licence. That’s the television”.

The Scotsman balanced its liberal view with a feature by Tim Williams: “…This crisis offers an opportunity for the new parliament to be seen as responsive and relevant to the Scots as they are, and not as they were imagined to be by the self-deluded intellectuals who saw self-government as the high road to a more liberal Scotland”. An editorial in The Scottish Daily Express agreed. “The Scottish Executive has largely brought the brouhaha on itself by assuming too much and knowing too little about what kind of country Scotland is”. Tim Hopkins of the Equality Network had his response printed in The Scotsman to William’s feature. “Unlike the UK, Ireland’s law now treats gay and straight people entirely equally. There is no Section 28, there is an equal age of consent, and gay people are protected by law from discrimination. Ireland’s repeal in the last ten years of all laws which discriminated against gay people shows it is entirely possible for a country to accommodate both those with strong religious views, and gay and other minorities. Just as the Act of Settlement stigmatises Catholics and must be repealed, Cardinal Thomas Winning should acknowledge that a law which condemns the ‘acceptability of homosexuality’ stigmatises gay people and must be repealed”. But Cardinal Winning responded to requests for sound-bites from the media; not gays.

The Scotsman’s Conal Urquhart attempted to field the opinion of the very people the repeal of Section 28 would affect: Schoolchildren. But the City of Edinburgh Council education department advised head teachers not to let senior pupils talk to the paper. However, Balerno High School showed no such timidity and revealed a high degree of intelligence amongst the ten pupils the broadsheet questioned on the issue. None of them believed a rounded education would have any bearing on their sexuality. Hannah Stevenson, 17 insisted: “You shouldn’t make laws to deal with emotions”. There was little sympathy for Cardinal Winning’s “stupid and ignorant” belief that homosexuality was a perversion. Ewan Connolly, 17 revealed: “It’s not seriously discussed, it’s joked about because people are embarrassed about it. Today is the first time that we have talked about it”. This was echoed in The Herald with a letter from Daniel Donaldson in Glasgow: “When I was taught in school, I was shown a video of babies in buckets to highlight the ‘evils’ of abortion, under sanction from the Catholic Church. Upon reflection this was an event that should never have been allowed to happen. I find the Cardinal’s hypocrisy on the issue of education unbearable. If a Catholic school can show a traumatic and powerful video about abortion, featuring pictures of babies in buckets, then what is the big problem about teaching about homosexuality?” This was wickedly summed-up by Muriel Gray in The Sunday Herald. Due to the constraints of his faith, she criticised Cardinal Winning for his lack of experience. “He has never had sexual relations, never had to live alongside and compromise with a partner, never had children and felt the responsibility, joy and pain that accompanies that gift. Not even has he had the mundane experience of ordinary working life and the associated problems the rest of us struggle with every day. He has, therefore, through no fault of his own, the intellectual maturity of an average 16 or 17-year-old”.

The Herald, Scotland’s most popular broadsheet had always adopted a fairly conservative approach to sexuality, but now backed the Government. “Changing the law would be as likely to lead to ‘gay sex lessons’ as to naked abseiling with red squirrels”. Compare that with a Herald leader in 1997 which advised that the Church’s “…apparently controversial interventions in politics are actually of the greatest value to us all”. Such an opinion was carried by a plethora of morally conservative and religionist commentators, all of whom now wrote regularly for the paper: Stewart Lamont, John Macleod, Patrick Reilly and Michael Fry to name a few. In the middle of the debate over the repeal of Section 28 they printed a commissioned piece by Graeme Woolaston, a gay arts consultant who occasionally reviewed books in the paper. Not known for particularly liberal views on sexuality, either, Woolaston was a safe and respectable homosexual that was occasionally permitted to grace the broadsheet with his commissioned opinion. Amongst his submissions he even attacked human rights activist, Peter Tatchell in a letter, adding: “In the area of personal relationships, the gay community has much to learn from straights”. Woolaston detested the views or attitudes sometimes attributed to ‘the gay community’ which he insisted where held “only by a vocal minority” and added: “There’s no doubt that many gay activists have done immense damage to their chosen cause by antics which suggest that, out of sight of heterosexuals, gay life is a freak show… Let a gay march consist of 5000 sober, cheerful men and women, and one bearded nun, and you can bet your life that the next day the bearded nun will be in all the newspapers…” And the illustration used to accompany Woolaston’s sober commentary in the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world? You got it in one… A bearded nun!

There sometimes seemed an element of restraint in The Herald’s handling of the affair under its religious editor Harry Reid. Reflecting on Section 28’s roots, its editorial advised: “True, the silly, right-on actions of a ‘loony left’ council or two played into Tory hands but (Section 28) was going to have its day sooner or later”. Bill’s political cartoon showed two gay men at a bus stop with the caption; “I don’t care where it’s going. I’m still not taking a No. 28”.

Tom Shields and Ken Smith noted in their Diary in The Herald that young Nathan, from the hit drama Queer as Folk, was spotted climbing on board a Stagecoach bus “Presumably Brian did not object to taking a fee for his bus being used in the series…” The Channel Four programme Queer as Folk went out at 10pm every Tuesday night throughout the debate. The bright orange billboard posters of ‘promiscuous’ Stuart, boyfriend Vince and ‘under-age’ Nathan advertised the programme in Scotland. The new series, Queer As Folk Two featured Nathan bullied at school, unchallenged by his teacher. The planting of erotica in the car of a devout Catholic to help Vince secure promotion over his religious rival in one scene angered some Catholics. G Hunter from Clydebank demanded in a letter to The Daily Record: “Anyone believing Section 28 should be repealed… should watch Queer as Folk, now receiving its second screening on Channel Four… (it shows) gay pornography… (and) a scene depicting child abuse”.

During the Section 28 debacle, many of the leading protagonists were profiled - Brian Souter, his wife Betty, Jack Irvine, the Scottish Schools’ Board Association’s Ann Hill and, of course, Cardinal Winning. In a Channel Four programme profiling Winning shortly before the repeal of Section 28, they made of the fact that the voice of Catholics was not being heard. This was an extraordinary assertion compared to the silence imposed on Scotland’s so-called ‘proselytising, militant gay activists’. The profile of Peter Tatchell, by Michael Tierney in The Herald’s Saturday magazine might have been an exception, although the charismatic member of the gay rights group, Outrage! was actually based in London. With all the talk of well-funded militant gay organisations, Tierney revealed Tatchell lived “on about £5,000 per year”.  For a campaigner who had been vilified for so long by the media, it turned out to be a disappointing profile. Tierney labelled the lifelong pacifist a “militant gay rights activist…” from the outset. Fortunately, a more measured side to Tatchell’s quest for repeal was also revealed: “His proposed guidelines for incorporation into the Section 28 repeal bill (which he has sent to First Minister Donald Dewar) to specify that: schools should not promote or encourage any form of sexuality; all sexual orientations must be discussed in an honest, factual manner; pupils should be offered practical advice on how to refuse and report unwanted sexual advances, practise safe sex to stop the spread of HIV, and how to sustain happy, fulfilling relationships…” Perhaps, such a calm and measured response  from Tatchell was not what Tierney had expected. With a hint of disappointment, he wrote: “For all his erudition he possesses a kind of self-centred, I-know-best account of, well, just about everything. He’s gripping and illuminating but he’s also a bit sour, a bit dour. Stumbling around in a perpetual dungeon of righteousness, it can’t be much fun being Peter Tatchell”. Over his opportunity to interview Peter Tatchell, Tierney mused: “Finally, I’m in with the out crowd…”

The letters’ pages of The Herald were always a lively platform of debate over Section 28 and special ‘Letters about Section 28’ pages appeared more than once to handle the huge postbags. This was one of the few papers that made a serious attempt at affording a wide-ranging and balanced view of opinions right across Scotland and beyond. Andrew M Fraser, Convener of the Committee on Public Questions, Religion and Morals of the Free Church of Scotland wrote from The Mound in Edinburgh on 22 March 2000. His Church had recently been split down the middle and threatened to disappear altogether. He referred to the repeal of Section 28 as “not one of human rights but of morality”. Without proof he declared that Section 28 was “an effective deterrent” brought in by a Conservative Government to curb local authorities that “were spending large sums of money promoting homosexuality in schools and in other areas…” Where? How? He didn’t say, but went on to reveal there were “statistics to show that on many occasions local authorities have drawn back from this because of a fear of prosecution under Section 28”. His real agenda was only too apparent. “Where do we want Scotland to go? Once we were known as the land of the Book (Bible). Our values, our laws, were based on God’s blueprint for human society. It made for an upright, honest, diligent, compassionate society. Much of this is being eroded as both God and His blueprint have been largely dismissed”.

Aidan McLaughlin from Glasgow had his letter to The Herald printed on another day when lack of space meant letters on Section 28 had to be rolled over onto another page in the broadsheet: “Before Section 28, how many people campaigned to have a law along those lines introduced in the first place? Before Section 28, how many times did we hear Brian Souter, the Cardinal, Jack Irvine, Michael Fry, et al, on this issue? Before Section 28, how many complaints did the Scottish education authorities receive from parents about their children being indoctrinated with homosexual literature, forced to act in homosexual plays, etc…? The answer bears a passing resemblance to the first letter of ‘opportunist’ only it’s bigger and fatter”.

garry@garryotton.com

Next issue: The Sunday Herald and Muriel Gray