Blasphemy in Scotland

Sticky7 February 2015 Garry Otton 2 Comments

Blasphemy in Scotland (From John Fraser and Tom Aikenhead to Raif Badawi)

Garry Otton

John Fraser was a merchant’s apprentice, a bookkeeper who fell foul of the blasphemy statutes of 1661 and 1695 that punished profanity and wickedness at a time when Scotland was in the theocratic grip of magistrates whose religious zealotry was rewarded with incentives by the Scottish Privy Council. They were allowed to keep a share of the fines in return for their co-operation. If they refused, they were fined and replaced by those who could.

King_William_III_by_Cornelius_Johnson1 — King William III by Cornelius Johnson

In late seventeenth century England, King William III (‘King Billy’ or William II in Scotland) was busy defending the country from a French invasion and ridding the world of ‘popery’. Scotland was a dark place where Presbyterian ministers burnt witches and hounded young girls to death simply for playing on Sundays. Ministers, elders and deacons ruled over their parishioners with an iron fist ready to banish those unwilling to toe the line with excommunication and all the social and legal ostracism it carried with it. Parishioners guilty of sins like fornication, adultery, slander, assault or breaches of the Sabbath would be made to demonstrate their shame, sitting on a stool of repentance in church amongst the congregation, often in special clothing or wearing a hat emblazoned with words describing their sin.

John Fraser was charged with denying, impugning, arguing and reasoning against the being of God, saying, “there was no God to whom men owed that reverence worship and obedience so much talked off” and claimed established religion was made to “frighten folks and to keep them in order”. When asked what religion he was, Fraser was supposed to have replied that he didn’t have one and was an Atheist. More than enough to have him dragged before the Privy Council.

Fraser argued that he’d been misunderstood. That this was a product of a conversation he had with Robert Henry and his wife, a couple from whom he rented lodgings. Fraser had been reading, as one contemporary put it: “ill books which corrupt and ensnare curious fancies”. A book by Charles Blount was mentioned, but facing a long jail term, he wisely chose to label him a “notorious blasphemer” whilst boosting his Christian credentials with a casual mention of his more normal bedtime reading: Truth of the Christian Religion by Dutch author Hugo Grotius. Fraser, like the author Charles Blount, wasn’t an atheist; simply a critic of religion who saw a different end for the human spirit and argued that the world was older than 6,000 years. Robert Henry and his wife had stormed off after Fraser’s blasphemous utterances leaving him little chance to put things right until breakfast. By that time, Mrs Henry had already reported him to the moral police.

Fraser was locked-up in Edinburgh’s tollbooth in sackcloth. He was still there after they had arrested a young Edinburgh student by the name of Tom Aikenhead and hung him for blasphemy.

While England’s pamphlets, periodicals and booksellers enjoyed more intellectual freedom with the lapsing of their Licensing Act, Scottish Christians clamped down on any influx of forbidden books like Charles Blount’s, Oracles of Reason, Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament or John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious. Toland had lived in Glasgow and been a student in Edinburgh, but his book, lumping Catholic priests with Protestant clergy, earned such notoriety that he had to flee back to his homeland of Ireland. Authors like Thomas Hobbes who argued that only matter existed and Benedict de Spinoza, an atheist who died of inhaling the glass dust he made grinding lenses, were censored in Scotland.

In 1696 the Privy Council found a book reflecting on the Church and State and a couple of pro-Catholic pamphlets in Edinburgh. An edict was issued ordering the search of houses and shops of booksellers for profane literature. Booksellers were ordered to compile lists of every book they sold and hand them over to the Privy Council where zealous evangelical Presbyterians on the committee could run their gimlet eyes down the lists.

It was in this Edinburgh, in 1676, that wee Thomas Aikenhead was born to quarrelsome parents. His father, James, was an apothecary who squandered money and died with large debts. Although Tom’s mother, clergyman’s daughter, Helen Ramsey tried to continue her husband’s business alone, the property was eventually sequestered to pay for her husband’s debts. At a late hour, Helen was beaten and thrown out with her children, including seven-year-old Tom. His mother was sent to the west wing of Edinburgh’s tollbooth for a month as a debtor. Within four days of her release she died. At nine, Tom and his younger sister Anna and 15-year-old sister Katherine were orphans. Sir Patrick Aikenhead, a clerk of Edinburgh’s Commissary Court helped out and, when he was 16, bought a property for Tom on the fourth storey of a tenement house near Netherbow. At this time, Tom became a ‘bajan’ (first year student) at the town college. With classes starting at 6am, he would have been taught to translate Scottish works into Latin before going on to learn Greek and philosophy, theology and medicine. Tom’s regent would have probably been Alexander Cunningham who enjoyed Edinburgh’s taverns “being a young man and having no familie” and was said to be “taken in ane Ba[w]diehouse with any oyr mans wife” for which he was imprisoned in the Canongate.

Young Tom would soon gain access to the college library, and under the watchful eye of a portrait of Calvin, was free to read the books there.

Rakes-progress — The Arrest for Debt (William Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (1735). This is St. James Street on St. David’s day when crowds in carriages and sedan chairs are hurrying to St. James Palace for the celebrations. The man on the left of the engraving is a Welshman with a leek in his hat. Tom is being carried in his sedan chair but is rudely intercepted by bailiffs who arrest him for debt. Tom’s old sweetheart, Sarah Young, happens to be passing and saves the situation by paying what is necessary. Meanwhile an urchin robs him of his gold-headed cane and a man replenishing a street oil-lamp distractedly allows the oil to overflow onto Tom’s head.)

Tom was said to have dismissed scripture as “Ezra’s fables” and “a rapsodie of feigned and ill invented nonsense, patched up partly of poeticall fictions and extravagant chimeras”. He regarded Jesus and Moses as political “impostors” and said he preferred Mohammed. He called Biblical miracles “pranks” and said Jesus and Moses exploited a common training in Egyptian magic to manipulate the vivid imaginations of “ignorant blockish fisher fellows”. The Apostles were dismissed as a company of silly, witless fishermen and he wondered why the world was so long deluded with their contradictions and nonsense.

Such blasphemies saw Aikenhead hauled before the Privy Council on 10^th November 1696 where they ordered he be put on trial for his life at the High Court of Justiciary, locking him up in the draughty eastern wing of Edinburgh’s tollbooth, a five-story building already three centuries old where his mother had been imprisoned.

Many of Tom’s classmates testified against him. The gang leader was 21-year-old Mungo Craig who hoped to be a minister and “heard him revile the books of the New Testament and call them the books of the impostor Jesus Christ”; Patrick Midletoune reported “that about the middle of August last, about eight o’clock at night, going by the Tron kirk, he hard him (being cold) say that he wished to be in the place Ezra called hell, to warm himself there” and John Neilson said Aikenhead thought of the contradictory nature of the Trinity as the same as a “squaire triangle”.

Aikenhead’s trial would be before Stewart of Goodtrees, the king’s advocate, Sir Patrick Hume, the king’s solicitor, Hume of Polwarth, the Chancellor and other senior judges. News of Aikenhead’s trial spread. Tom was not so well connected as John Fraser. Unlike many of those who condemned him, he had not invested in the infamous Darien scheme, an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading nation by establishing a colony called ‘Caledonia’ on the Isthmus of Panama. Nor could he boast family links to covenanting Christians or any merchant or professional connection of note.

Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart prosecuted 20-year-old Tom and demanded the death penalty to set an example to others who might otherwise express such opinions in the future. On December 24^th 1696, the jury found Aikenhead guilty and he was sentenced to be hanged. Tom petitioned the Privy Council to consider his “deplorable circumstances and tender years”, but to no avail. The Privy Council ruled that they would not grant a reprieve unless the Kirk interceded for him. The Church of Scotland’s General Assembly, sitting in Edinburgh at the time, urged “vigorous execution” to curb “the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land”.

On the 8^th January 1697 Tom Aikenhead took the hour-long march to the gallows in Leith after reading a letter saying: “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth and to seek for it as for hid treasure… So I proceeded until the more I thought thereon, the further I was from finding the verity I desired…”

Clutching a Bible, Tom tried to pray with a speech of “great disorder” before a hood was placed over his head and the ‘hempen necktie’ hung round his neck. Michael F Graham delivers the grisly details in his book The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment: “Those hanged rarely died instantly, so onlookers probably would have watched him shudder for several minutes as he twisted in the chilly January breeze and gathering darkness, fist clenched, nose and mouth oozing a bloody mucus, gradually suffocating. The moment of death was often marked by the appearance of stains as the victim’s bladder and bowels released their contents”.

On the 8^th January 2015, five days before his 30^th birthday, Raif Badawi was awarded the Scottish Secular Society’s inaugural Aikenhead award while he was languishing in prison, convicted under Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cybercrime Law, “founding a liberal website…, adopting liberal thought” and for “insulting Islam”. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1million Saudi riyals in Jeddah’s Criminal Court. Badawi’s lawyer, Waleed Abu Al-Khair, a human rights activist, was also arrested and sentenced to 15 years in jail for charges including “undermining the regime and officials”.

Raif received the first 50 lashes on the 9^th of January after Friday prayers to the merciful Allah in a square outside a mosque in Jeddah watched by a crowd of several hundred who shouted Allahu Akbar (God is great) and clapped and whistled until after the flogging ended. The hospital advised Raif was too ill to receive the next 50 lashes scheduled for the following week. But in prison he remains.

Garry Otton 2015 (author of ‘Religious Fascism’)

tomaiken — ‘The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment’ by Michael F Graham

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The Repeal of Section 28

Sticky30 April 2014 Garry Otton

Pageflex Persona [document: PRS0000035_00047] — Religious Fascism – The Repeal of Section 28

The repeal of Section 28 was a forerunner to later terrorist acts attributed to religious extremism. The religious-backed campaign terrorised a community and threatened Scotland’s fledgling parliament.

Some will see the imposition of Section 28 – the law that forbade the “promotion” of homosexuality as a “pretended family relationship” – against a backdrop of Margaret Thatcher addressing a sea of waving Union Jacks at the Conservative Party Conference of 1987 following hot on the heels of exaggerated tabloid stories of black lesbian self-defence groups or books like ‘Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin’ in school libraries. (It was actually in a teachers’ resources library). When this Tory, anti-gay, religiously-inspired law was challenged in 2000: Scotland would be the main battleground.

In England and Wales, efforts to keep Section 28 on the statute books was, to a large extent, pointless since Section 28 applied not to schools but local authorities whose control many had opted out of under measures introduced by – of all people – former Tory leader Margaret Thatcher.

The Scots remember repeal as a time when the gay community was under attack from billboards mounted across every available space in Scotland vilifying homosexual practices. Intellectuals who wrote to newspapers to lend support were denounced. Newspapers spread warning of ‘cliques’ and rumours of an ‘international conspiracy’. Attempts were made to close LGBT organisations and doors and windows of such premises were smashed. Pictures could even be found in newspapers illustrating a homosexual’s distinguishing features. Parliament wavered and buckled while a community in crisis was left to defend itself against a rise in verbal abuse, beatings, suicides and murders. This wasn’t Germany in 1935: It was Scotland in 2000. It was sparked by MSP Wendy Alexander announcing the repeal of Section 28 and Christian fundamentalist Brian Souter pouring £2m into a ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign backed by Cardinal Winning of the Catholic Church and a string of influential social conservatives.

It began in 1999 when controversial American TV evangelist Pat Robertson, owner of a mammoth media, educational and legal empire in the USA with an estimated value of a billion dollars, was introduced to ultra-conservative Catholic Bill Hendry, the Bank of Scotland’s executive vice-president. The bank announced it was setting up a telebanking operation with Pat Robertson who once claimed that the “feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women: It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” As Bank of Scotland share prices fell and clients started withdrawing their savings, the bank was forced to pull out. Robertson labelled Scotland a “dark place” over-run by homosexuals. The bank called on media boss and ex-Sun editor Jack Irvine to step in. During the equally contentious debate about an equal age of consent, Irvine was famous for referring to “pretty young boys of 16” who couldn’t vote being “mature enough to be bum chums for sleazy old pervs”. Scotland’s richest man, Stagecoach boss, Brian Souter, a Bank of Scotland customer and member of the hellfire and brimstone Church of Nazarene, was sufficiently inspired by Irvine to court him for an idea of his own. They shared a good lawyer. Jack Irvine’s business partner Peter Watson sometimes accompanied him on business trips to the Cayman Islands. He was the man behind legal firm Levy & McRae which legalled articles for the press. As Scotland’s top lawyer, Watson counted the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Elish Angionlini, an appointed member of the Scottish Government as one of his most prestigious clients.

Powerful figures backed the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign. Not just Martin Clarke, the editor of Scotland’s top-selling tabloid the Daily Record, but also the editor of the Sun, Scotland on Sunday, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and numerous other publications. Given the surfeit of Christian journalists and columnists in the media and both the Westminster and Scottish Executive, there was no shortage of allies to respond to this emerging Christian campaign.

Under the auspices of preventing the repeal of Clause 28, gays were made scapegoats for a war against “the siren voices of liberalism”, secularism and permissiveness. Education packs that either sought to counter bullying by creating a better understanding of gay people or sex education leaflets aimed specifically at gay people to encourage safer sex were put under scrutiny. All the while the media perniciously portrayed homosexuals as a sinister menace with inferences of a “homosexual lobby” seeking to prey on impressionable youth and further a selfish agenda. Homosexuals were maligned in a media campaign furnished by well-funded Christian charities and organisations – some collecting around £2 million in annual income – like the Christian Institute and Christian Action Research and Education (CARE). Scotland’s fledgling Parliament would twist and turn as one compromise after another was offered to placate the pious.

Pleas for equal treatment were contorted into demands for additional rights. A victim of the Soho gay pub bombing was denied compensation under the Criminal Injuries Compensation after sustaining injuries and losing his partner whilst the partner of a heterosexual couple won theirs. And then, when Martin Fitzpatrick who fought successfully against eviction from a house he shared with his partner after he died, former religious correspondent and Daily Record columnist Tom Brown wrote: “What worries me is that this will be taken as capitulation to the homosexual cause. …The signal to demand more”.

SNP MP Jim Sillars, writing in the Scottish Sun sneered at “test tube births on a scale of millions, with the sperm of homosexuals conveyed artificially to women’s ovaries, in order to give homosexuals full rights to have children. That test tube world is the only logical conclusion of the Tatchellite campaign of full and equal rights”.

Scotland on Sunday Catholic columnist Gerald Warner wrote that “homofascism” was “aggressively and shamelessly, the ideology of the parliament”, that “homosexual missionaries” were coming for the children and incited people to take to the streets in protest. He mocked the lisp of Labour MSP Wendy Alexander, the “Minithter for Communitieth” who fronted the campaign for repeal before suggesting she was “living testimony to the unwisdom of abolishing the ducking-stool”.

Any equal treatment of gays was fair game. Gerald Warner’s homophobia knew no bounds. On gay partnerships he scoffed: “There is a vote-winner for you. Possibly with the co-operation of sympathetic local authorities, provision could be made for the romantically-minded to hold their wedding at the public convenience where the happy couple first met”. Special pages of letters in newspapers against repeal frothed with homophobia like this one from John McBride of Shettleston who wrote in the Scottish Sun: “I don’t have any kids myself but if I did and anyone tried to teach them about homosexuality I’d probably end up assaulting the teacher”.

In the Metro, owned by the same publisher as the Daily Mail, nine out of 10 letter-writers in the London edition were found to share the same names or initials as those in the Scottish edition even though what they wrote was completely unrelated.

Cardinal Winning was soon declaring gay sex a ‘perversion’ and, on a trip to Malta, compared the gay lobby’s imagined distribution of material in schools to Nazi bombs during the second world war. Upon his return he was met with press reports of a serious attack on a young doctor outside an Edinburgh gay bar. Threats of suicide to the gay switchboard doubled.

When a string of professors and academics wrote to the press sharing their concerns, they were mocked by the ‘Keep the Clause’ camp. Journalists regularly attacked Labour politicians who supported repeal. People like Donald Dewar’s adviser Philip Chalmers was caught with “a lady who was not his wife – although she may have been somebody else’s” in the back seat of his car in a red-light area after the Record were tipped off by police. Donald Dewar’s chief of staff John Rafferty was also targeted when he exaggerated death threats to health minister Susan Deacon over her support for abortion. But the chief target was always Wendy Alexander, described in the Record as “bossy”, a “spinster”, and “five-foot-nothing” and showered by a host of other uncharitable and misogynistic remarks. They suggested she was “riding high in the Department of Frump” and gave her a makeover, superimposing her head onto the body of a woman curled up on a couch wearing a white trouser-suit with lilac-strapped shoes. Alan Cochrane in Scottish editions of the Daily Telegraph called her the “accident-prone and politically myopic Miss Alexander”. Channel Four awarded Wendy Alexander a trophy and the title Parliamentarian of the Year in Scotland. The press were delighted to report how she smashed it to pieces as she got out of a car at Heathrow Airport. The following year, Channel Four awarded it to Christian homophobe Baroness Young!

Most of the press accepted paid advertising of ‘Keep the Clause’ petitions to complete and send to the Government. Many were backed by articles or even marked to indicate exactly where to sign to keep Section 28. Churches soon followed urging their congregations to sign. A free mailing address was set up to collect the thousands of signed petitions. The Scottish Sun found “condoms – sent by gay rights activists fighting to scrap Clause 28” whilst the Record reported the delivery of old beds and refrigerators.

Gay lessons for Scots schools — The Daily Record’s editor Martin Clarke ran a long homophobic campaign to support Keep the Clause.

Brian Souter threatened to launch a private referendum. He castigated the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) for refusing to back it, so, using an old electoral register, he launched his own after accusing a ‘gay clique’ in the Labour administration of wrecking his plans. MP Jimmy Wray referred to a ‘gay mafia’ in the Scottish Sun and in the Scotsman he advised: “People didn’t vote Labour into power to allow the country to be run by a gay mafia. The public don’t want to know what homosexuals are doing. This is the trendy minority trying to dictate to the majority, and it won’t work”. Echoing the Nazi treatment of Jews in the thirties when there were references to powerful Jewish cliques influencing government and of Jewish trickery, the Scottish Sun referred to “gay dirty tricks”. The Record warned: “The Section 28 turmoil has gone from unsatisfactory to downright sinister. It is now clear that powerful factions are determined that the people of Scotland will not have their say”. This was also aimed at ERS member and gay Labour MP Stephen Twigg, The ERS were in fact concerned about the rise in violence toward gays being reported by the police. ‘Keep the Clause’ had already become a playground catchphrase and police set up a special surgery in Edinburgh.

The Daily Mail printed a double-page spread with an anatomical diagram of the human phalanges explaining: “Homosexual men have slightly shorter second fingers than straight men”. The Record also carried the information along with their homophobic content.

In a film review for American Beauty, the Daily Mail detailed how Hollywood was “demonising heterosexual life as part of a disturbing new pro-gay agenda… This held that heterosexuality was a curse to be denigrated and mocked wherever possible and that gays could never win the power they craved in society without undermining heterosexuals whenever possible”.

Three quarters of those surveyed by the Gay Police Association cited ‘belief of perpetrator’ as a prime motivator behind homophobic incidents. Their advertisement showing a Bible and a pool of blood with the words: “In the name of the Father” was censored by Advertising Standards Authority. Despite coming eighth in a list of campaigns receiving the most complaints, ‘Keep the Clause’ posters were never removed despite widespread defacements from protesters.

Outcast, a gay political website, was closed, according to the Internet Service Provider (ISP), “following a complaint”. A university lecturer was paid almost a quarter of a million pounds in damages and legal costs by the ISP Demon, owned by Scottish Telecom, in an out-of-court settlement over material carried on the site. Outcast was a respected and nationally distributed gay political magazine run by volunteers with a circulation of around 10,000. It boasted contributions from many people who were sympathetic to gay equality, The ISP NetBenefit wanted an assurance from a solicitor acting for Outcast that they would not print anything libellous. “Obviously, no solicitor can give a guarantee like that”, said editor Chris Morris who had previously taken Britain to the European court over its unequal age of consent law.

A Christian couple, backed by Christian legal representatives, sought to take Glasgow City Council to court for “promoting” homosexuality. They eventually withdrew but succeeded in persuading the Council to write to all council-funded LGBT groups warning them not to “promote” homosexuality. The media spun it as a victory.

As the campaign to repeal went nationwide there was a surge of violence and murders, particularly gay men, across the whole country like 50-year-old Alex Noble who met his fate after picking up an 18-year-old in Glasgow. Ethan, a sensitive 16-year-old who was being bullied in a Catholic comprehensive in the Highlands hung himself.

The fledgling Parliament shook and wobbled at every turn towards repeal. At first, Ministers said that the guidelines on sex education were adequate and would not be reviewed: then they were. Despite insisting there would be no replacement clause for Section 28: the Scottish Executive was soon tabling one. Ministers insisted the guidelines on sex education would not be made legally binding: then came a U-turn. The public were assured by Donald Dewar that there would be no inclusion of marriage in any guidelines, but with an amendment by Catholic MSP Michael McMahon, religious campaigners were soon trying their luck with that too.

That was nothing compared to the semantic contortions Scotland went through over sex education. Without a national curriculum as in England and Wales, Scotland had no need for statutory guidelines. There were no calls from teachers for statutory guidance on drugs or alcohol where teachers were trusted. Now there were calls for statutory guidelines on sex education. Minister for Children and Education Sam Galbraith emphasised that these were not ‘guidelines’, which would govern the contents of statutory legislation – always rebuffed as contrary to Scottish practice – but ‘guidance’ which govern the conduct of sex education in Scotland. The ‘guidance’ was to state that parents had to be consulted if sex education – appropriate to pupils’ ages – were given to their children and that they could even remove them from classes, (although such a right already existed).

Section 28 was eventually repealed and stories of schools invaded by ‘homosexual propaganda’ proved entirely false. The same couldn’t be said for religion which, if it didn’t already own the school, had their unelected representatives on all of Scotland’s education committees. If schoolchildren couldn’t be rounded up to visit churches, clerics were invited into the classroom to work with children in so-called non-denominational schools without parent’s knowledge, which happened at Kirktonholme Primary School in East Kilbride where extreme sect Church of Christ had been pushing creationist anti-science literature on children for eight years before they were rumbled and exposed in the Daily Record, albeit it under a new editor.

Garry Otton’s Religious Fascism (The Repeal of Section 28) is published by Ganymedia.

Garry Otton, 2014

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Catholic New Militancy: Michael Voris

Sticky14 May 2013 Garry Otton

Less than a week after inviting a controversial abstinence-only preacher from the US to speak to schoolchildren in Paisley, the Catholic Church once again demonstrated a shameful lurch to the extremist right. Church Militant TV presenter, Michael Voris was invited to talk to a packed hall of Catholics aged mostly sixty-plus with twenty-or-so hard-core young Catholic evangelists from Stirling, Dundee University, Glasgow, Hamilton and various other Catholic churches along with the Catholic Parliamentary Media Officer, John Deighan for a meeting in Motherwell, across the road from the Carfin Grotto.

In typical Bible-belt fashion, Voris is a suit and tie, tanned, toupee-wearing, Catholic apologist from Texas who dismisses global warming as “pseudoscience and hyper-sensationalism”. He correlates Hitler’s eugenics programs to global warming, theories of overpopulation, and support of contraception and legalized abortion, saying “What you have to understand is that the elite have now moved on to a sort of new updated version of this, a new technique. It’s not eugenics anymore. Now it’s called global warming.” He worries that many Catholic clerical hierarchy are “namby-pamby” and says he feels that what is needed now is “muscular Catholicism that isn’t afraid to encourage battle and sacrifice.”

Now he is delivering his militant message to an audience of around 150, asking them to put their hands up if they know two souls who had left the Catholic Church? There was a sea of waving arms as at least two-thirds signalled the loss. He claimed his “only conclusion” was that “Catholic leaders had lost faith.” That, and the spate of disgraced priests, bishops (and a cardinal, although he did not once refer to Keith O’Brien, except to point to the “social ill” of homosexuality) who were carrying away with them lost souls. The Catholic Church was “falling apart,” he admitted.

voriscm — Catholic blogger, Michael Voris

Voris has had much to say about “militant gays” who “violently promote the gay agenda of free disordered sexual behaviour, redefining marriage into extinction and aggressively wearing down those who don’t approve of the gay lifestyle”. Yet, in 2016 he admitted to engaging in “sins of a sexual nature” with other men and claimed the New York archdiocese was planning to exploit his “past life” and use it against him. He said: “For most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality, I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men.

“From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. In a large portion of my twenties, I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women.”

He added: “These are the sins of my past life in this area which are all now publicly admitted and owned by me. That was before my reversion to the Faith.

“Since my reversion, I abhor all these sins, especially in the world of the many, many other sins I have committed having nothing to do with sexuality.

“I gave in to deep pains from my youth by seeking solace in lust, and in the process, surrendered my masculinity.

“Many of you know the story of my mother’s prayers and sacrifices and pleading to God on my behalf that I give up my sinful life and return home to the Church.

“As a last resort, she prayed to be given whatever suffering needed so that I would be granted sufficient grace to revert. It was shortly after that prayer that her very early stage stomach cancer was detected, which she died from a few years later.

“When my mom died, I pledged at her coffin that I would change… I returned fully and completely to the Faith.”

In Motherwell, Michael Voris advised “the Devil never takes a vacation, some don’t have bodies and they don’t need to rest.” The state of the Catholic Church, he surmised, was a result of “an attack by the diabolical”. There were nods and shuffles, but little sign of dissent. The audience had been well trained in obedience. He dipped into the Old Testament for evidence and to recount how “the snake just goes up to Eve and proposes a question – all is easy, isn’t it – she engages with him…” A moment’s pause before shouting. “BUT WE SHOULDN’T ENGAGE WITH THE DEVIL AT ALL!”

After prayers, first from a local cleric and then Voris, he confirms: “We have such an intense relationship for Him we would die for Him.” And that pretty much confirms his somewhat militant response to the collapse of the Catholic Church. “The job of the Church is not to make soup kitchens,” he scoffs, “but to make Saints.” He reminds the faithful of something they probably already know: “The Catholic Church isn’t about feelings.”

The Church’s position was quickly escalated. “The Catholic Church is the only thing that has been invested with the light of God”, he declared. The Church of Scotland and England, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses were dismissed as “man-made institutions.” And if you ever wondered how lonely a place Heaven might be, he ranted: “There is no-one in Heaven; except for Catholics,” adding, that if a few from other religions “found their way there it was despite of another faith; not because of it.”

He charged his audience not to seek popularity and to speak the Truth, (and only the Catholic Truth), so when they spoke to friends at work, their colleagues were really hearing Jesus. “And it will be offensive,” he warned. But this wasn’t an option,” the unmarried Michael Voris added: “It was a command…

“We need to explain why contraception and same-sex marriage is evil.”

Garry Otton 2013

Articles

Cardinal Keith O’Brien: Warning from Heaven

Sticky10 March 2013 Garry Otton

If pride comes before a fall, it was a very big one for Cardinal Keith O’Brien and the Catholic Church when the Cardinal got caught with his pants down…

Well, well, well! What a year 2013 was! If there’d been a gay god in Heaven, she’d have thrown a party and we would all have been invited! First Herr Ratzinger suddenly resigned after some wag found a ‘gay mafia’ within the walls of the Vatican, then Mr O’Brien gets caught with his hands down his priests’ cassocks. Never mind Stonewall’s Bigot of the Year award, perhaps we could have just had the names of these seminarians to hand out some big silver goblet at an Oscar ceremony for services to the gay community.

I know. I should have had more sympathy for Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien, born into a socially conservative Catholic family in Ireland in 1938 and indoctrinated in a sectarian or so-called ‘faith’ school with all its twisted logic on sex and homosexuality. The Scotsman reported him reassuring everyone: “I accept and promise to defend the ecclesiastical teaching about the immorality of the homosexual act…” You could almost picture him licking his pinkie and flicking over a gilt-edged page of Leviticus. But it all went pear-shaped from there really… Young men boarding in a 19th century baronial mansion at Drygrange, drunken parties, crushes on young ‘pups’, japes in the ‘jakes’ (communal bathrooms) and then lights out in the dorms after a ‘rager’ (wild party). Firstly, the Cardinal, irritable at not knowing what priests had blabbed, scorned them, (so many men…?), accusing them of vagueness before delivering his own mealy-mouthed apology vaguer than an apparition of Mary Magdalene. It was brief. He was forced to suffer the terrible ignominy of admitting: “I’ve fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal”. Indeed. All these lads were over 18! But the world wasn’t interested in his man-on-lad fun. The world’s press were honing in on his Ted Haggard moment so we could gasp at his naked hypocrisy! Oh, look…! The Cardinal has no clothes! He added: “In recent days certain allegations which have been made against me have become public. Initially, their anonymous and non-specific nature led me to contest them,” he protested too much, before adding: “To those I have offended, I apologise and ask forgiveness. To the Catholic Church and people of Scotland, I also apologise.” The gay community he’d made his mission to kick shit out of were presumably bundled in with the ‘people of Scotland’ before he shot out the door with his bags and fled the country to enjoy his retirement. (Or to live his life as a hermit if you were to believe the Catholic Church).

So there I was, practically dancing naked on the tables in celebration. It was only when I was joined by other religious Catholics did I start to become decidedly uneasy. Daily Telegraph Catholic apologist, Damian Thompson was agreeing with those calling the Church “complacent”, “sclerotic”, “arrogant” and “philistine”. I had to check the newspaper’s header. Eddie Barnes, a former Catholic newspaper editor and one of many Catholic contributors to The Scotsman called the Church “fallen”. Archbishop Tartaglia grimly warned from the pulpit the church had had its “credibility undermined” and was “damaged by hypocrisy”. There came a point when even the BBC confessed the Catholic Church didn’t have anyone in Scotland that could comment on stories.

Those left standing looked decidedly ridiculous. A Catholic woman on Call Kaye’s BBC Scotland phone-in was frothing at the mouth over a “gay agenda”. Reporters attending a Mass found members of the congregation dismissing allegations as “lies”. The bad-tempered Peter Kearney of the Scottish Catholic Media Office – normally always up for a fight – was nowhere to be seen. First Minister, Alex Salmond, who had publicly backed Cardinal O’Brien, opened the doors to Bute House after his election and spoiled him with private meetings over equal marriage (the Equality Network had none), was determined not to be distracted by the cleric’s downfall after all the good things he’d done. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill who must’ve been listening to Steps in the car called it a “tragedy”.

The Scottish Catholic Media Office looked sadly desperate as they attempted to pick up the pieces. A front page ‘exclusive’ by Joe McGuire in The Glaswegian was defiant: “CITY KEEPS THE FAITH” and “Church scandal ‘will pass’”. Archbishop Tart’s spokesman begged the congregation “not to throw in the towel” and, in a perkier note, added: “All the reports we have suggest that people are continuing to attend church as normal – we certainly haven’t registered a drop on attendance”. That was not confirmed by other reports; one finding Mass numbers down by a half. One almost felt sorry for Peter Kearney, who, only weeks ago, was pictured happily languishing across a sofa in beige.

There was nothing left to do but for the press to give a brief but passing mention to what fun it was having Keith in the house before looking back on his best bits.

One section of the community had borne the brunt of Cardinal Keith’s best moments. Every nasty attack backed by the Vatican, amplified by the Scottish Catholic Media Office and their media cronies were engraved on his headstone. Like when he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that same-sex marriage was “grotesque”, a form of “madness” and “like bringing back slavery”. The Vatican wing of the BBC had treated it as ‘breaking news’, headlining the story with feigned surprise that he should be the “latest” of several senior clergy they’d been lining up to bad-mouth same-sex marriage.

O’Brien was reported saying gays were ‘captives’ of ‘sexual aberrations’. He bragged about his deep pockets too. In the Sunday Times Scotland, he warned the Scottish Government that it could expect an “unprecedented backlash” from his Church if it let gays marry, claiming “marriage is under threat and politicians need to know the Catholic Church will bear any burden and meet any cost in its defence.” He promised the Catholic Church would spend an additional £100,000 on an advertising campaign against the plans, on top of the £50,000 it had already spent.

Prior to Ratzinger’s ‘state’ visit to Scotland – which was at considerable cost to taxpayers, involving the raiding of funds set aside for overseas aid and coinciding with news of 13 suicides of former victims of priestly abuse in Belgium – The Scotsman printed issue after issue of coverage with fawning deference to the Catholic Church, including a double-page spread with several photos of Cardinal Keith O’Brien laughing; smiling and saying that he would be “happy” if the Pope didn’t apologise for child abuse, adding that there wasn’t very much in Scotland anyway. Oh no? With demonstrable indifference to the head of the BBC Trust, Tory Lord Patten, who took personal charge of the Papal visit, a renegade journo at the BBC discovered bishops in the Catholic Church in Scotland weren’t always passing cases of child abuse to the police and reported at least 20 allegations of child sex abuse by priests between 1985 and 1995.

Was Cardinal Keith O’Brien reminiscing with any fondness to a time when the Catholic Church supported Catholic sexual repression and hypocrisy? A time when, in 1994, Father Tom Connelly, skirting almost every story on morality in the Scottish press on behalf of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, and Cardinal Winning both advised that child sex-abuse cases shouldn’t be reported to the police – that it was the victim’s job! When in 2003, another Catholic columnist, Dani Garavelli could gleefully write in Scotland on Sunday: “O’Brien’s mild manner and open-mindedness on issues such as gay and married clergy have made him a popular figure both in and out of religious circles. His famous New Year soirees are attended by an eclectic group of people – MPs and cabinet ministers, journalists, priests and judges – all of whom turn up as much to enjoy his company as to network”. O’Brien wasted no time saying how offended he was by accusations he was a ‘liberal’.

With Vatican sympathisers at the very top of our State Broadcaster, Cardinal Keith O’Brien could be sure that any of the institution’s lies and obfuscations would be served to every household in Scotland on a gilded plate. The BBC became an institution like the Vatican where pious Catholics like Jimmy Savile abused with impunity. But it is that vaulted position that set O’Brien apart from all the other old fools to make the backlash of criticism so necessary. So very legitimate. A hypocrisy that had to not only be exposed; but publicly reviled. Hypocrisy can indeed be the denial of some indiscrete fumblings. It can also be Nazis burning books and records containing details of their own indiscretions before incarcerating others for what they’ve done themselves. Hypocrisy doesn’t just manifest as bullying; it can become state-endorsed persecution.

It takes just one guilt-laden, confused, drunken, excited sexual encounter, wrapped in religious dogma and cant, to later manifest itself into horrible atrocities. That is what I see behind the Greek Orthodox Church building brutal alliances with Greek neo-Nazi Party, Golden Dawn, physically assaulting playgoers outside Terence McNally’s Corpus Christi play in Athens. Or when Christian Orthodox members chant and wave religious icons as they invade a gay film showing in Bucharest screaming ‘death to gays’ with right-wing militants while police stand by and do nothing. Or when police sanction violent gangs allied to the Russian Orthodox Church to attack protesters of new laws outlawing gay equality. Then, as the virus spreads amongst its sexually dysphoric hosts, I see the BNP’s Nick Griffen take his seat in an hour-long debate on Christian TV. And I see The Sun, owned by a patron of much Vatican funding, Rupert Murdoch, engaging in talks with UKIP, virtually the only Party left promising Christians untold religious privileges if they win.

As Niemöller might’ve said if he hadn’t been a former Nazi sympathising conservative Christian: First they came for the homosexuals.

Garry Otton, 2013

Articles

Policing Sex

5 November 2025 Garry Otton Leave a comment

Garry Otton

Left to Right: Chris Ringland (Evangelical Alliance), MSP Ash Regan, Karen Miller (Restore Glasgow) and Stuart Weir (Christian, Action, Research and Education (CARE). Photograph: Garry Otton.

Independent MSP Ash Regan looked suitably pious addressing the audience of around 25 Christians on her plans to legislate against men who pay for sex: “I believe in the power of prayer,” she said, before asking the audience to pray for her.

On 4^th November 2025 Ms Regan – or should we call her Ash because we’re in St George’s Tron Church of Scotland in Glasgow and everyone’s being friendly – was garnering cross-party support to get her Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) member’s bill through the Scottish parliament. It would see men convicted of buying sex hit with up to £10,000 fines and facing up to six-months imprisonment. She said she didn’t want to see men ordering women like pizzas.

Representatives from some of the more militant Scottish Churches were gathered to discuss the so-called ‘Nordic model’ of policing sex. There was Stuart Weir head of Christian Action, Reform & Education (CARE), a group that supports dangerous ‘conversion therapy,’ of LGBT+ people. Chris Ringland for the Evangelical Alliance, another organisation defending ‘conversion therapy’ and Karen Miller from Restore Glasgow that warns on its website “you can’t tackle human trafficking without prayer,” before adding enthusiastically, “three months after we started praying regularly for rescue, women trafficked into prostitution were rescued from the streets around the church where we were praying!”

The cross-party group (CPG) looking into this at Holyrood might’ve been cross-party, but it was certainly not representative of all opinions. The Holyrood group supporting her bill to outlaw buying sex was backed by the Religious Sisters of Charity, an organisation that ran the notorious Magdalene laundries in Ireland. As a punishment for having sex out of marriage, up to 11,000 ‘unsuitable women’ were locked away to do menial unpaid work in 10 Catholic institutions to pay for their keep. One of them was the Religious Sisters of Charity which had been operating since 1922. They were exposed in 1993 when the bodies of 155 women were dug up in their backyard. The Religious Sisters of Charity, along with three other ‘charities’, refused to offer compensation to their victims.

Others sitting on the committee were Labour’s Rhoda Grant who took interns offered by extreme Christian group CARE. And they could be ruthless. An intern for an MSP from the Evangelical Alliance admitted to binning letters from constituents and said in 2015, “I was glad I was the one opening the letter because I was able to bin the letter without actually showing it to the MSPs… Eventually when I left I just shredded them because I thought: I don’t want people to see this as being the way we did business as Christians.”

Also on the group was the SNP’s Ruth Maguire who was called to resign in 2019 as convenor of Holyrood’s Equalities and Human Rights committee after it was revealed in an exchange between her and Ash Regan on Twitter that Maguire had responded to a tweet praising the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s “positive feminist analysis of trans rights,” with a “FFS,” adding Sturgeon was out of step with the SNP group.

Others on the committee was Labour’s Katy Clark and independent MSP, and Baptist, John Mason who was booted out of the SNP for posting on X: “If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed ten times as many.” And lastly, Conservative MSP, Jeremy Balfour, a former Baptist minister and lobbyist for the Evangelical Alliance. Scotland on Sunday quoted him saying: “I suspect the only advantage we have (over other people) is that Christians are slightly better informed than the bulk of society and have a better understanding of how politics works.”

Ash told us she had travelled to Sweden to meet Swedish police detective Simon Häggström who enforced Sweden’s ‘Nordic model.’ This was when she helped Rhoda Grant get a similar bill through parliament, but it didn’t receive enough support. Now she was back to try again.

How Ash was going to get sufficient support from the SNP government wasn’t explained beyond hinting she already had half of them in her pocket. I doubt it. After leaving the SNP because of disagreements over what she dismissed as “another matter” is worthy of note. Along with MP Joanna Cherry she challenged reforms affecting the lives of trans people that had won cross-party support after some eight years of debates and consultations which would have brought Scotland in line with many other European countries. Her actions contributed to the UK Supreme Court ruling to overturn Scottish government legislation.

Organizations for the rights of sex workers, such as the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, as well as global human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, do not support the ‘Nordic model.’ It has been implemented in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Northern Ireland, France, Ireland, Israel and one state in the U.S. (Maine.) Since implementation, violent crimes against sex workers in Ireland have almost doubled. Only seven men have been convicted in 15 years and there has been no decrease in demand for sex workers. In 2016, National Ugly Mugs, a service which allows sex workers to confidentially report incidents of abuse and crime, showed that reports of abuse and crime against sex workers greatly increased after Ireland’s adoption of the ‘Nordic model’ approach by criminalising the purchase of sexual services. The figures stated that crimes against prostitutes increased by 90%, with violent crime increasing by 92%.

In the face of changing patterns in male sexual behaviours and many platforms where men and women meet for sex without paying, debates about the ‘Nordic model’s’ success or failure still proliferate.

The meeting was opened by Stuart Weir from CARE who, for reasons best known to himself, asked us to cast our minds back 2000 years to a woman Jesus saw needing a man without an ulterior motive. She was apparently thrilled to be touched by Jesus because it was the only safe male that had ever touched her. Having hugged and kissed a good number of sex workers and dancers without ulterior motive, I trust my position in Heaven is now secure.

The meeting was a bit slow getting down to business and started with a warning from Stuart of the disturbing nature of the film we were about to watch. We were advised that we were welcome to retreat to a quiet corner if it all became too much. The video opened with a misspelling: Prositution and the voices of sex workers describing the appalling treatment they received from men, including a woman that tried to end her life at 11. Rude words like ‘watersports’ and ‘cum-in-mouth’ were displayed as part of ads used by Direct Escort Glasgow. An internet search for them only brought me a list of fake pictures of sex workers from Japan and Asia advertising on VivaStreet. What was most disturbing was the lecherous voices of men using the sex workers. “I don’t give a fuck if you’re not 18,” sneered one. But it was a voice that sounded identical to Christian militant and UKiP member Richard Lucas that nearly had me scurrying to a corner of the room with a vial of smelling salts!

Next up was Karen. Representing Restore Glasgow, it turned out she was an interpreter for Albanian migrants. She explained the ‘Lover Boy Method,’ which involved blackmailing women into sex work before trafficking them into Scotland. Cases of PTSD amongst women escaping these nightmares were highlighted. In England, victims had 30 days to enjoy a safe space; in Scotland it was 90 days. Karen stressed “They are voiceless.” In the face of this legislation, many sex workers would agree. This was countered by Pastor Emma who cornered me at the end. She told me she only ever heard the voices of sex workers promoting the trade in the media. I asked her why someone from an organisation like ScotPep wasn’t invited. I was told that other churches were invited but they hadn’t accepted the offer. Probably too busy doing Christian things like handing out food to the homeless, I thought.

Ash was confident she would get her bill through Parliament and praised the ‘Nordic model’ success in Sweden and elsewhere. Citing Germany’s partial decriminalisation, she advised the market had exploded with an increase in trafficking and sex workers being paid less.

She felt legislation that allowed police to arrest ‘kerb crawlers’ was “going very well indeed” and explained her battle was against a “lobby well-funded by the ‘prostitution trade’.” No mention of over £2.5 million profit the Evangelical Alliance raked in annually or CARE’s £2 million. And no mention was made of the notorious Religious Sisters of Charity on the CPG.

She declared the evidence of men buying sex was in front of us all, citing a 15-story tower block with a different fetish on every level. I’ve not found that, but she might have been referring to the 7-storey Pascha brothel in Cologne which has an interesting history. She finished by saying she didn’t want to see the arrests of men, but only a ‘societal change.’

Leslie Thomson, Chair of Secular Scotland said: “The selling of sex is not even a crime in Scots Law. The actual crime is Soliciting for Prostitution, which falls under the Public Places (Soliciting) Act 2007, both the buyer and the seller can be prosecuted.

“And strangely enough, sex workers organisations and charities, including ScotPep, fully support the decriminalisation of Soliciting. The law as it stands immediately makes criminals of sex workers who solicit publicly. Therefore, the same sex workers are all the more likely to solicit by other means, effectively putting them ‘underground’ which puts them in a far greater place of danger. And of course, because the buyers also fear being prosecuted, they too will use these underground sources, which means the more dangerous among them go undetected, and represent a much greater danger to sex workers.

“And you’ll notice I have continually used the term ‘sex workers’ here. Ash Regan says that her Bill prioritises, “the safety, dignity and rights of women and girls.” While the vast majority of sex workers are indeed female, such a statement completely ignores the fact that there are also gay and transgender sex workers.

“In all the years that Ash Regan has been MSP for Edinburgh Eastern, the ward I live in, I have never once before heard her come out with anything overtly religious. I do not believe one word of her sanctimonious reference to believing in “the power of prayer”. This appears to be nothing short of opportunism to rally the support of the religious right.

“That Ash Regan is ambitious cannot be denied. Upon the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as SNP Leader and First Minister, Regan stood for the leadership of the SNP, only to come third behind Humza Yousaf and Kate Forbes. At that time, she defected from the SNP to the Alba Party, making her their sole MSP. After the death of Alba Party leader Alex Salmond, Ash Regan stood for the leadership of the party, but was defeated by party favourite, Kenny MacAskill. She then quit from the Alba Party to stand as an independent MSP, which she claims was to focus better on her prostitution Bill, which she believes she would have a better chance passing outwith the Alba Party.

“I do not wish to cast shade upon anyone’s personal life, but for the representatives of the religious right, condemning the practises of sex workers (one of whom Jesus allegedly protected), to welcome and support Ash Regan, a divorced woman, seems to be more than a tad hypocritical to me.”

According to a report published by Dr Niina Vuolajärvi from the London School of Economics, “the ‘Nordic model’ of sex trade legislation purports to target sex buyers and third parties, ostensibly removing sex sellers from criminalisation. However, this approach leaves sex sellers, in particular migrant workers, ever more vulnerable to violence and exploitation.

“This is exacerbated by broad third-party legislation, where all assistance in the sale of sex is prohibited. Under these laws, for example, landlords and hotel owners can be accused of pimping, which has led to a dire lack of housing and safe spaces for sex workers. Those who took part in the research reported difficulties in accessing health and legal services, and even in opening bank accounts.”

I care about the treatment of women. But I also defend their rights of women to run their lives how they see fit. It is economic deprivation that challenges women, not sex work. And make no mistake, we’ve been here before.

Scaremongering by Christians has a precedent. The consequences of sex in Victorian and Edwardian Britain resulted in the spread of sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies. In turn, these sparked a wave of Christian zeal and the foundation of such organisations as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, the National Purity League, the Public Morality Council and the National Vigilance Association. William Coote, the founder of the NVA believed his organisation to be in an “energetic legal crusade against vice in its hydra-headed form,” declaring in his book ‘A Romance in Philanthropy,’ published in 1916, that it was a “hand-to-hand fight with the world, flesh, and the devil.”

People were terrified of sexual diseases like gonorrhoea and syphilis. And for good reason: There was no cure. It’s why so many men conformed to Christian edicts and refrained from sex until after marriage while some would deliberately seek sex with virgins or even children.

*A line engraving of the preserved head of a syphilitic sex worker who died in 1796 with osteolytic lesions typically seen in the highly contagious second stage of syphilis. (Wikimedia).*

Prostitution and abuse of young girls in and out of brothels was rife in Victorian Britain. More wealthy Victorian men boasted their own magazines: ‘Sporting’ guides which were little more than shopping catalogues of available females. These detailed sex workers’ ages, physical descriptions, personality type, and their cost, usually £2 – £3 or £5 for a virgin. It has been estimated that there were more brothels than schools with an estimated 80,000 sex workers in London.

‘Swell’s Night Guide,’ offered “a peep through the great metropolis… with numerous spicy engravings.” The book rated individual women, describing one, Miss Allen, as a “perfect English beauty” and another, Mrs. Smith as a “very agreeable woman” with “pouting lips.”

Christians attempted to rehabilitate ‘fallen women’ with the establishment of reformatories. But living in a reformatory was worse than jail. Christians often considered women were pursuing sex work because of their own selfish desires rather than admitting it was the highest paid work women could do. Women were forced to stay in the reformatory for a minimum of two years until they were ‘cured.’ During that time, they needed to seek forgiveness from God for their sins of the flesh and repent to qualify for a roof over their head. They were woken at 5am, made to pray four times a day, attend regular Christian services, perform hard labour and be locked in their rooms by 8pm.

Christian groups like the NVA and feminists – who were normally Christian in Victorian times – found a common goal in fighting prostitution. Not until 1876 did the Freethought Publishing Company produce a pamphlet on contraception, but they were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Secularist Annie Besant, who bravely represented herself in court became the first woman to publicly endorse the use of birth control, arguing for its potential to alleviate poverty.

In his sensational exposure in ‘Pall Mall’ magazine, Journalist, W.T. Stead published ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’ proving how easy it was to purchase the virginity of a 13-year-old girl. For a mere £5, Stead purchased someone’s daughter, whom he called ‘Lily.’ This covered the cost of a medical examination to ensure that she was a virgin, and a cut to the brothel owner. The money the girl earned was taken by Lily’s parents who were alcoholics. After confirming that Lily was a virgin, the medical examiner recommended that Stead drug the child with chloroform so she would be unconscious and not put up a struggle while he raped her. The public was so horrified when they read Stead’s articles that it led to the raising of the age of consent from 13-years-old to 16 with the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 to protect women and girls. It was introduced into Parliament by MP Henry Labouchère who, at the last minute also lodged an amendment to protect young boys from the act of ‘gross indecency,’ but because there was no age of consent for homosexuals, for the following century, men of all ages would be prosecuted for consensual sex in private, providing new grist for the Christian mills. Churches were vociferous in preventing gay emancipation but didn’t enjoy the support of feminists until today when many play an active role in joining the churches in denying a small percentage of trans men and women their rights.

W.T. Stead was seen as a hero for fighting for the rights of women and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. He died on the Titanic in 1912 aged 63. Today, the Stead Memorial Fund continues to fight against sex trafficking.

Efforts to legislate and control women’s sexual passions were often clumsily administered by an elderly and inexperienced judiciary or religious leaders. But generations of young people remain determined to define their sexual behaviour outside of politics, courts and religious institutions.

Policing sexuality was not always considered entirely appropriate for an all-male police force, so, during the First World War, Women’s Patrols were paid by the police authorities to shine their torches into the faces of soldiers and police the “foolish, giddy and irresponsible conduct” of girls. Patrolling the streets, parks and open spaces, they ‘saved’ drunken soldiers from “women of evil reputation” by administering black coffee laced with bicarbonate of soda, which usually made them violently sick.

One patrol was so outraged by the sight of a “heaped mass of arms and legs and much stocking” on one of the benches along a towpath, she had the seats boarded up!

Garry Otton 2025.

Author, artist, sexual rights campaigner, secularist