Compulsory reading

Gary Otton, my favourite secularist muckraker, has just posted his latest piece at http://www.scottishmediamonitor.com/features2.cfm?ID=42 , and shaft me sideways he’s on form!
Scottish Media Monitor first appeared in January 1996 in Gay Scotland, sparked by sickeningly inadequate Scottish press coverage of the violent murder of 35-year-old Michael Doran in Queens Park, Glasgow in the summer of 1995. Since then Gary has held the ‘proper’ Scots media and politicians to account with passion and humour.
Sexual Fascism, his subsequent book on Scotland’s Section 28, is compulsory reading for anyone who wants to know how a combination of slack, bigoted reporting and Christian fundies held back the development of a small Celtic nation for way too long. If this island is ever to crawl out of the primeval Christian swamp it’s been in for as long as I can remember you’d better hope a few copies of it start circulating here.
This month Gary’s target is Christian business (or as churches laughingly term it, charity), which in Scotland is becoming depressingly usual. He points the finger, for example at a fundie church which has managed to avoid £10, 000 in business rates in the last three years, and the educational hijacking pulled off between Stagecoach (the bus company owned by Scotland’s best known Christian Neanderthal) and Oasis (still substantially controlled by a TV vicar so far up New Labour’s backside even Rentokil couldn’t shift him). It will surprise nobody to know this means a group of schools underwritten by public money where homophobia and other evils run rampant.
I always recommend Gary’s work to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. But in particular it’s a million watt flashing DANGER sign for the situation developing here, courtesy of the Sally Ann, Broadway Bumpkins and (let’s never forget) Port St Mary’s very own Living Hell Church. You can see them daily, crawling into government broom cupboards, picking the public pocket and setting up one bogus ‘charity’ after another.
Recession won’t stop them either. If anything, parasites who prey on misery will use the current situation as an excuse to further their sinister agenda. Read Gary’s work and similarities between the scams of their Scottish chums and those currently being fermented here will be alarmingly obvious.