Bigotry is a dirty word

Last updated : 09 March 2011 By Grandmaster Suck

Over 20 years ago I read an article in the Spectator magazine by an English lady living in Scotland. In it she recalled her horrified reaction as a Roman Catholic to the openly-expressed prejudices displayed by her co-religionists when she moved to Scotland with her Scottish husband.

She related one incident where she had complimented the on-screen performance of the STV Gaelic presenter Cathy MacDonald and her husband’s laconic reply dismissing the praise - “she’s a bigot.”  Translation - she’s a Protestant.

It’s a vignette most of us would recognise.  Amongst a certain section of the Catholic population there is a Pavlovian reaction to any contrary opinion which immediately sees the target of their spleen dismissed as a bigot. For instance, should you choose not to support a system of sectarian apartheid in education you will more than likely be labelled a bigot.  

A variant of this is to say “you’re using the same arguments as the Orange Order” in the hope that the target will be terrified to continue for fear of being subjected to a hate campaign.

I’ve fairly often encountered a moral blind spot where members of the Catholic community steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the problems within that group - it’s always a minority, it’s only a reaction, etc. And they are loath to use the B-word to describe members of their own community - an example being the description of the repertoire of Celtic fans being ‘political’ rather than an unclean hodge-podge of bigotry.

Another example you could use to illustrate Protestant and Catholic words is the use of the words devout and staunch. In polite company a church-going Catholic will be described as being “devout” which the church-going Protestant will be described as “staunch.” In less polite society the Protestant will be described as a bigot merely for failing to subscribe to the tenets of Roman Catholicism.

Fifteen years ago or so Celtic FC launched their Bhoys Against Bigotry: ostensibly to tackle, you guessed it, bigotry. A few months later the late Tommy Burns explained that the campaign was really about fans who were bigoted against Celtic as Celtic themselves had no bigotry problem...

In common usage in Scotland the word ”bigotry” is so devalued as to be almost meaningless. By over-use and misuse it is commonly seen as a casual insult to be used by Catholics against Protestants.  

It is that perception which means that any campaign which uses it as a name or a slogan will immediately be treated with suspicion by the majority of Rangers fans and hence is doomed to failure.