Here’s a question for you; Sevco fans can’t really be planning to make a homophobic banner for the Ibrox game, featuring Kieran Tierney and Patrick Roberts can they? I mean, this is just internet chatter, isn’t it? It has to be.
Even they wouldn’t go so low …
Except, yes, some of them would.
And some of them probably will.
I trust that if such a banner appears that it will be slammed from every avenue in the media and the game itself. I trust that it will be highlighted to the world, and the repulsive creatures responsible for making it dragged through the courts for their due denouement.
I trust the club will be asked serious, hard, questions about how it ever got into the ground.
But I won’t hold my breath for any of that.
The bile on the Sevco fan sites in relation to our two players is truly something to behold.
Some will wonder why I’ve bothered to highlight it; here’s the answer.
Because it’s necessary … but I won’t go too far overboard.
I will highlight its existence without going into detail, and I do so for the same reason I continually highlight their songs and their other sick obsessions.
These people are a disease.
Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. It just allows them to multiply.
Hey, everybody knows this stuff is out there.
Ignoring it isn’t an option. Confront it and kill it.
Society needs to speak out against these people, and in a way that stops their sicker ideas in their tracks. This stuff is absolutely unacceptable, and apart from it being targeted on two of our players it flies in the face of public campaigns to confront homophobia in football which are long overdue. This is still the great unconfronted bigotry in the sport; we recognise all other forms of discrimination and hate, but somehow this one never properly gets tackled head on.
If a homophobic banner like this ever appears in a football stadium in Scotland I will regard it as a dark day in our history and a monumental defeat for common decency. It will be like seeing a racist slogan daubed on a bed-sheet and flaunted in one of our stadiums; it’ll be a Year Zero moment that shames us all.
Highlighting it after the fact just won’t get the job done.
This one has to be strangled at birth, stomped on like a cockroach crawling across a kitchen floor.
The idea is being discussed in private forums; I’ve been sent a few emails on it. The people responsible think this is a bit of banter, that it’s hilarious … I’m not joking.
I’m not going to publish any of this information directly, because I might inadvertently put some people in harm’s way but it’s out there and a lot of you know it is.
The idea is being joked about on public forums too.
A lot of people in their support are itching for it, and would find it hilarious. The Peepul amaze you with their ability to trawl the swamp, but this would be a step so far over the line … but the kind of “fans” who bring Big Jock Knew banners to games are already well across the Rubicon.
I would not be surprised at anything they did.
But you don’t need to have access to their private message boards to see the kind of vile comments as make you want to despair.
On top of that, these Peepul apparently haven’t twigged that making written allegations of that nature, in a public domain, is in fact libellous. When it comes with a homophobic edge it’s also a hate crime. Suffice to say there’s enough on some of the public threads for the police to have a field day making charges and arrests.
Their hate crimes unit wouldn’t need to do overtime again this year.
The forum owners themselves might think they are safe from legal liability, and in terms of libel they probably are, but when they allow posters to put up stuff that contravenes hate crimes legislation I’m afraid that their position is less clear-cut, and exposes them to consequences they’d rather not consider if they want to sleep at night.
Every single club has fans who take poking fun at, or attacking, their rivals to obscene lengths. That’s par for the course. But I know of no other clubs fans, anywhere, who excel at finding new and horrible ways to reveal their own ignorance and hate.
The depths of it continue to astonish me.
The world will be watching that game at Ibrox … how much shame do they really want to heap on their own club? They can’t really be thinking about doing something as horrendous as this, can they? Well, I guess we’re going to find out.
It will only take one group of scumbags to do something that makes all of Scottish football despair. My information is that some are planning to do just that, and I know that many of their fellow supporters will be as horrified as the rest of the country is. The people who would do such a thing aren’t football fans at all, they are on the margins of humanity, but they can still be stopped by raised voices inside and outside the support they hide amongst.
I think it’s way past due that the ordinary, decent fans at Ibrox made some noise about the people who are dragging their club, and their reputation, into the gutter with stuff like this.