I dedicate my song today to three birthday celebrants today. We wish happy birthday to Liam Walsh who comes from the Irish village of my birth in Portlaw, Waterford, and Johnathan Jets Deady who also lives in Waterford, Ireland. We also wish a happy birthday to Miriam Abboud who lives in Lancaster, Texas, in the U.S.A. Enjoy your special day, Liam, Johnathan, and Miriam.
My song today is ‘No Matter What’. This song was recorded by British singer-songwriter Calum Scott for the special edition of his debut studio album, ‘Only Human’. It was released on 19 October 2018. It is a song about a ‘Gay man’ coming out to his parents and being accepted for who he is. When he tells his mother, she says:
“I love you no matter what. I want you to be happy son, and I just want you to be who you are. She wrapped her arms around me, and said don’t try to be what you’re not, I love you no matter what.”
Scott describes ‘No Matter What’ as his "most personal song" and the song he is "most proud of". The song tells the story of Scott telling his parents he was gay and their reactions of loving him ‘no matter what’. Scott said "It was a song that I always had to write and a song I never thought I'd be able to share. This song has so many bones behind it and has such a wider discussion, not only about sexuality but about acceptance." He added, "This hopefully will be a movement. I want to help people, I want to inspire people, I want to make people more compassionate”.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The three cruelest forms of discrimination I have ever witnessed in my 78 years of life have been against women, people of non-white skin, and homosexuals. I accept that there are many more areas of discrimination practiced in society today, but none have ever been as vociferously expressed.
I acknowledge up front that though I have never ‘knowingly’ discriminated in thought, word, or deed against women or people of dark skin and have spent over fifty years actively agitating for their equal rights in all things on their behalf when it comes to the ‘Gay’ person, my conversion came much later in my life. The reason for this later learning was because the nature of my prejudice ran much deeper. Indeed, the very core of my cancer against this perceived imperfect replica of man resided in the heart of my own masculine identity and a degree of masculine insecurity I must have held. Today, I want to address you on how I managed to rid my heart and head of this ingrained bias and discrimination against men who I found difficult to call ‘men’, and whom I saw as being masculine mutations of Adam who seemed happy to indulge in all manner of sexual deviances that came naturally to their ‘unnatural character’.
Before 1967, the Law of the land, the Church of the State, and all other Churches, and Society, in general, were unified in their abhorrence of the homosexual act. Indeed, the very fact that women were never perceived as having the same sexual deviances as their Gay counterparts is indicative of which specific part of the homosexual act between two men generated the most disgust in heterosexuals.
The 1967 Sexual Offences Act in England and Wales legalised homosexual acts on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21, and yet another thirty years would pass before telling another that someone was ‘Gay’ would result in the common response of “So what?”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We all discriminate to some measure; it is only human. It is an inevitable part of every individual’s behaviour pattern and value system to discriminate in favour of this and against that. Indeed, without the ability to discriminate, one could not have the avenue of being able to create a value system of any description.
None of the above, however natural, does not make our discriminations fair and proper to display or enact. As creatures whose behaviour and response patterns are largely a result of the experiences and conditioning processes of our development, how our parents and guardians seek to nurture us is not necessarily our nature to automatically adopt. For example, although I consider myself a person who today chooses to live my life as a Christian, I believe that had my parents been of the Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist belief when I was born, in all probability I would have been inducted (some might argue ‘indoctrinated’) into their religion, and I would still adopt a similar belief today as a 78-year-old man, whatever freedom of thought I imagine myself to possess.
Prejudice can be generally described as being a preconceived judgment or opinion. Such is an adverse opinion or leaning is formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge is known to substantiate its presence. Prejudices display an irrational attitude of hostility that is directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics. Initially, the prejudices within society may have been religious, political, or ones of social class, but over the years they have been greatly added to include those prejudices of gender, disability, sexuality, skin tone, race, culture, etc., etc.
I was born in 1942 and was brought up during the 1950s and 1960s. I was born in Ireland into a family of Roman Catholic persuasion, and at a time when the parish priest ruled supreme in the country village. My parents and their first three of seven children migrated to West Yorkshire during our first five years of life. Being both Catholic and of Irish descent were two common prejudices we experienced from the start of our lives in West Yorkshire. We may have been accepted as decent human beings by some English neighbours but during our earlier years living on a newly-built council estate, we were rarely welcomed. Some of the worse insults and jibes our family faced were being called Irish tinkers on English land, living in a new property, stealing English jobs, lowering worker’s wages, and jumping to the front of the housing queue just because we had larger families to support. Does any of this sound familiar today in 2021?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
England in the 1950s and early 1960s was a very racist country and landlords often placed notices in their windows with bold lettering proclaiming ‘No Blacks. No Irish, No Dogs!’ Non-white citizens were discriminated against in the workforce, in housing, and in all manner of accommodation. Black migrants fared worse of all within any institutional bodies, associations, clubs, or unions, and were denied admission to and acceptance by a British, white, polite society.
Largely because my own life had been saved by the skill of a West African surgeon at the age of 11 years as I lay in the hospital close to death with multiple and critical injuries, my perception of and attitude to non-white citizens was much different from that of the next white person in the bus queue. I automatically held positive feelings towards the black person and West Africans in particular.
Before I had even left my teenage years behind, I became an active advocate for the rights of the non- white person in a country where racism ran rife, and the only protest march I have ever been on was to free Nelson Mandela after his initial imprisonment, and before he became a household name. Because of my positive childhood experience in Batley Hospital with a West African surgeon who saved my life against the odds, I naturally felt closer to the dark-skinned person than most of my white-skinned neighbours. Indeed, as the youngest trade union shop steward in Great Britain at the age of 18 years, fate afforded me the ideal opportunity to stand up for what I believed in instead of just wearing the badge behind my coat lapel.
The textile firm I worked at in Liversedge refused to hire a West Indian applicant to fill a job vacancy on the sole grounds that he was ' a man with black skin’, so I brought 400 mill workers out on strike. It was a ‘cause célèbre’ at the time and received national press coverage. We stayed out on strike until the mill owner eventually backed down, by which time the West Indian decided not to take up the job. Being the youngest textile shop steward in Great Britain at the time, along with being able to persuade 400 white workers in a race-rife country to strike on the principle of employing a black worker, secured me enough press publicity to bring my ‘powers of persuasiveness’ to the attention of the higher echelons within the textile trade union. I was offered funded sponsorship to obtain a degree at ‘Ruskin College’, but because I had set my mind on travelling in America when I was 21 years of age, I graciously declined. Despite this refusal of mine, however, I became a lifelong anti-racist protester and have forever remained committed to that cause.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
As regarding my discrimination of women, along with the whole of the male world, man has discriminated unfairly against women ever since time began. While much progress has occurred in most areas of equal opportunities, there is still a long way to go. It took a century for women to ‘get the vote’, another half-century for them to ‘get the pill’ another fifty years to ‘get closer to breaking through the glass ceiling’ of all previous positions blocked to them in Church, State, Business and Society, because they were women! I grew up at a time where the world was still regarded as being man-made, and the little woman’s prime roles in the home involved ‘making love’, ‘making up the fire’ on a cold morning, and ‘making the meals’ for the man of the house. These being her main roles, she would be allowed to consider herself as being the mistress of the home, and her prime responsibility would take place in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the lounge/dining room. These prime roles would naturally be accomplished between given birth to the required number of children desired by the master of the house to carry on the family name.
Over the last fifty years, I have worked to stand up for ‘Women’s Rights’ wherever I could. Between 1990 and 2002, I held over two thousand (2000) storytelling assemblies in Yorkshire schools (mostly Primary Schools). I would visit different Yorkshire schools every morning and most afternoons for over twelve years as a budding children’s author. During all my school visits, it became evident that girls were still getting a poorer service from their class teachers than boys. Boys would make more noise, more trouble, and demand much more teacher attention, which they invariably received. Even in their careers which they could look forward to when they left schools, it was the boys who would be educationally guided toward being wagon drivers, plumbers, doctors, surgeons, pilots, priests, bishops, politicians, and parliamentarians, while girls (while they wait for Mr. Right to marry them) could perhaps aspire to be typists and office workers, hairdressers, canteen cooks, nurses, cleaners, and the biggest job of all; mothers-waiting-in-the-wing for Mr. Right to come along and marry them.
The late Catherine Cookson and her husband, Tom, who had been friends of mine for many years, helped me address this sexual inequality between girls and boys in primary schools. They paid for the first limited-edition publication of the ‘Action Annie Omnibus’, which are twelve seasonal stories about a young ‘tom-boy’ girl who never gives up trying and is as good as any boy in anything she undertakes. ‘Action Annie’ is not the type of girl to wait about for things to happen or to get better. She gives life a helping hand along the way. ‘Action Annie’ can do whatever any boy can, with bells on. Since that first publication of ‘Action Annie Omnibus,’ the book is in constant publication and is available from amazon.com, with all book sale profits going to a charitable source.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
My hardest prejudice, which it took me many years to overcome and positively address was the common prejudice that 1960 Great Britain had against homosexuals. Even after the ‘1967 Sexual Offences Act’ that legalised homosexual acts in England and Wales, on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21, I still found the notion of two men being sexually involved with each other as offensive to my sensibilities and as repulsive to my macho view of ideal maleness as was humanly possible.
It took me far too long to even face and confront my homosexual prejudices, and almost as long a time before I would even accept the undeniable presence of this prejudice. I had my strong religious views to contend with, and a life of heterosexual conditioning which instinctively informed me that homosexuality was at best a deviant and unnatural sexual practice between two men that was rightfully criminalised. At worse, I held a deep revulsion at the mere thought of one man placing his penis in the orifice of another man, making a connection for which it was never designed to couple. It also seemed the ‘queerest’ of all things to sensually kiss a person of the same sex, besides being wholly ‘unnatural’ to be turned on by such actions!
These thoughts disturbed my mind and initially made me feel uncomfortable in the presence of any homosexual man. Looking back, I can now honestly say that being more prepared to brand such behaviour as being a deviant and disgusting practice performed by ‘perverts’ and probable ‘child molesters’ seemed to have the effect of positively reaffirming my own sexuality in every respect as being ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’ more than sensing my own deeper prejudices at play.
I now find it ironic that the very term being “a man’s man” was a macho heterosexual term that was regularly trotted out by John Wayne types as being a badge of toughness. I am not sure of what precise image being called “a man’s man” would drum up today?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In 1970, I became a Probation Officer in Huddersfield; a job I performed for over 27 years. At a time, when most new Probation Officers leaving their training courses, their colleges, and their universities were followers of working theories propounded by such eminent people as Jung, Rogers, and Freud, etc, in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, there were few brave enough to become a follower of ‘Behaviour Modification’. Not me, however. I was always more pragmatic in my approach whenever it came to helping people. While I did not consider it to be irrelevant ‘why’ a person did this or that wrong, or ‘how’ they came to behave thus (their motive behind an act), I also knew that even if one could discover such insightful knowledge, the knowledge alone would not change the unsatisfactory situation, and the person would still not have changed their bad or harmful behaviour in the meantime.
It was the desire to be able to change people’s bad response patterns before needing to know why and how such behaviour developed and formed which made me consider ‘Behaviourism’ as being the most effective working practice of bringing about positive changes in the life of an offender. At the time, there was no other Probation Officer in West Yorkshire of any rank who practiced ‘Behaviour Modification’, and very few Probation Officers in the country were into ‘Behaviourism’. The reasons were numerous, but to many British workers, ‘Behaviour Modification’ was an American working method that had been largely discredited following the adverse publicity it had received having previously endorsed electro-convulsive treatments (aversion therapy) as being an acceptable form of treatment and work practice. During its earlier period, ‘Behaviour Modification’ got itself ‘a deservedly bad name’ after it tried to change many types of behaviour by the combined use of electric shock treatment allied to deviant visual imagery or unwanted behaviours. Among such inappropriate use, was the initial ‘Behaviourist’ belief that homosexuality was a deviant form of behaviour that had been ‘learned’ and could therefore experience being ‘unlearned’ and ‘reconditioned’ back to more ‘natural ways’.
This was one of the most shameful, the darkest, and worse side of ‘Behaviour Modification’ which made most workers shy away from its practice as being an ethical method of working. But there was so much good within the ‘Behaviour Modification’ model for my inquiring mind to ignore; so much common sense I was not prepared to discard. After all, I had been a Roman Catholic all my life, and even though there were things about Roman Catholic belief and practice I did not accept as being ‘Gospel’ where truth was concerned or indeed ‘Christian’ in attitude in some instances, I never once seriously considered leaving the faith and following another. Why then should I react any differently?I would remain a ‘Behaviourist’?
I am so pleased that I stayed within the flock of ‘Behaviourism’ to witness the discipline discard its more discriminatory views, along with any disreputable and previous dangerous method such as its support for Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT). Within a matter of five years after becoming a Probation Officer, ‘Behaviour Modification’ had witnessed a fundamental restructuring of its methods in America and across the western world. It had radically cleaned up its act.
The discredited views upon homosexuality which had been propounded by Behaviourist of the past were abandoned, and the mind became as important in the working processes of bodily response change as did the individual’s body and muscular responses. Gradually, what was once known as ‘Behaviour Modification’ became known as ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’. After the Behaviourist had abandoned their disreputable beliefs about homosexual behaviour being ‘changeable’, it began looking for reasons to support the new theory that being ‘Gay’ was not a learned behaviour, therefore it could not be ‘unlearned’ and was a state of nature as opposed to nurture.
‘Behaviour Modification’ graduated into becoming ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ and has been accepted as being one of the most ethical, effective, and morally practiced of all current working methods of psychological, psychiatric, probation, and social work bodies. ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ was much more than a change in name. This was a change in working emphasis which corresponded with the recognition that homosexuals are born that way because of their ‘nature’ and not because of their ‘nurture’. No longer was Gays perceived ‘unnatural’, and it was accepted that there was no ‘moral justification’ in seeking to change their homosexual behaviour.
And so, my long-held prejudice against the gay man or woman became instantly redundant in my value structure, not because of some religious, societal, or moral conversion but because of scientific and medical academic fact! My one-time revulsion that had previously put a nasty taste in my mouth to match the nasty thought inside my head and the uncharitable feeling inside my heart had also gone, enabling me to change my words of describing a homosexual person in orientation to that of being ‘gay’.
Even refusing to use the term ‘gay’ instead of ‘homosexual’ for many years was merely one more way of personally maintaining my old prejudice longer than was necessary. I will not pretend that every negative thought or feeling or image that I associate with being homosexual today has been eradicated from my mind, because I feel sure it has not, any more or less than centuries of negative conditioning of blackness in a white man’s world, along with a more negative concept of womanhood in a man-made-world.
What I also learned over the years since I first believed in the efficacy of changing inappropriate behaviour, is that any present-day ‘cognitive behaviour therapist’ (C.B.T. worker) has no moral justification in seeking to change the behaviour of any other person, unless they are first willing and desirous of changing their own inappropriate behaviour. I have also learned that behaviour which was established over many years cannot be changed overnight and that the stronger the initial prejudice was, the greater the amount of positive effort is required, and the longer the length of time is needed to change it for the better. It is unrealistic to think otherwise, and some might even consider it dumb to believe that the social conditioning of the behaviour of any nation over many centuries is likely to be ever fully changed for the better in a few decades.
What I do know is that many of my good friends today are non-white, gay, female, English, and Protestant. Why a few are even Cliff Richard fans and love Marmite.
Love and peace
Bill xxx