.

On Scotland

Police were inundated with over 7,000 calls in the
first week following the passage of Scotland’s Hate
Crime and Public Order Act last month.

Where tartan, tweed, and Highland Games began:
The land of Gaelic-gathered tribe and clan;

Where Scots and Angles, Britons, Picts, et al
Would push the Romans back to Hadrian’s Wall;

Where William Wallace fought for liberty
Against the yoke of English tyranny;

A land of kings—most of whom were “James;”
Of queens and lords, pretenders who made claims;

Of Robert Burns, born seventeen fifty-nine,
Whose famous legacy is “Auld Lang Syne;”

And now a land of hate crime legislation,
On bended knee to left-wing provocation.

.

.

Cheryl Corey is a poet who lives in Connecticut. “Three Sisters,” her trio of poems about the sisters of Fate which were first published by the Society of Classical Poets, are featured in “Gods and Monsters,” an anthology of mythological poems (MacMillan Children’s Books, 2023).

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


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46 Responses

  1. Cheryl Corey

    To clarify: First enacted in 2021, it was recently updated to include “inciting hatred” and “insulting” behavior – punishable for up to seven years in prison.

    Reply
  2. Warren Bonham

    Well done! It looks like William Wallace was hanged, emasculated, eviscerated, and quartered for nothing. Thanks for shining a light on this.

    Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      The practice of quartering was particularly gruesome. I wonder how many young people today know about it, let alone the particulars of how it was done.

      Reply
      • Warren Bonham

        Don’t give the Scottish legislators any ideas on how to punish wrong-speak

    • Joshua C. Frank

      This is what I was going to say. It makes me think of a quote I read: “ Every time I look at Atlanta I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.” John Shelton Reed

      That I will be accused of endorsing slavery for saying that only proves his point. Say what you will about the South at that time, at least they preserved traditional ways far better than the North was doing.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        John Shelton Reed was right on target, Joshua. Atlanta is in worse shape today than it was after that lunatic Sherman burnt it.

  4. Julian D. Woodruff

    What do we want? Fweedom from cats! (Wats, that is! As elsewhere there are definitely rats in Scotland.)

    Reply
  5. Phil S. Rogers

    Visited Scotland about 20 years ago. It was a beautiful country, from the border with England north to Edinburgh and around Lock Ness, with many old castles, highland games, pipe bands, and a great history. The people were nice. Unfortunately they have allowed their country to be invaded. I would not go back today.

    Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      I was reading a book on Scotland’s history as I composed the above piece. The pages described a land of violence and struggle in its early years, but the people were proud, hardy, and resilient. I suppose it’s no different than the rest of Europe, as well as the USA.

      Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    This is what happens when a nation (the U.K.) does not have a written constitution. Any law is possible, if there are enough idiots to scream for it.

    Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      This from Gateway Pundit: “A 27-year-old German politician has been convicted of incitement to hatred for discussing rape statistics in Germany.
      Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a local leader in the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, was fined and given a criminal record for asking questions about the disproportionate number of migrants from Afghanistan convicted of sexual assault.”

      Whenever government has a knee-jerk reaction to “do something” – be it the Patriot Act post 9/11 or the warrantless FISA renewal, it always leads to loss of liberty. Even the rushed through anti-semitism bill from our House of Representatives may prove problematic. There are always unforeseen consequences to governmental dictates.

      Reply
  7. Brian A. Yapko

    This is great, Cheryl. Astonishing to see how this land of kings and warriors is now populated by snowflakes. One foul creature tried to have J.K. Rowling arrested for daring to “misgender” him. Half of us at SCP would be arrested for sure.

    Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      These hate speech laws empower special interest groups. They seek to exact conformity and terrorize people into silence.

      Reply
  8. Paul A. Freeman

    Everywhere seems to be getting more authoritarian with redefinitions of ‘hate’.

    Journalists are particularly at risk. We’re not far from having legislation like ‘Insulting Turkishness’ as a way of silencing free speech.

    Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      The way I look at it, Paul, is that “hate” is a thought/emotion that can’t be legislated out of existence. Far better to educate than legislate. To criminalize “hate” is just piling on.

      Reply
      • Paul A. Freeman

        You’re perfectly right Cheryl. The Westboro Baptists come to mind, who pass hate down from one generation to the other.

        What’s beginning to happen now is that freedom of speech is being labelled as ‘hate speech’ as an excuse to suppress free speech. This seems to be happening more and more in democratic countries these days.

    • Joshua C. Frank

      Paul, you participate in redefinitions and accusations of hate on here all the time. If you don’t like when others do it, isn’t that a reason to stop doing it yourself?

      Reply
      • Paul Freeman

        Alas, Joshua, my reply to you seems to have been removed to spare your ire.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Well, I can’t exactly fault you for that, because I’ve said things to you that were removed for the same reason.

  9. Diana Sheldrick

    Let me get this right….You are all upset about not being able to spread hate about other people? If this protects people who are vulnerable, then it is a good thing. If that does not include you – then be grateful and use your privilege to help others.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Have you ever heard of the First Amendment, Diana? Here in the United States, we can say whatever the bloody hell we want.

      Reply
      • Paul Freeman

        The poem states that it’s about Scotland, not the USA and its first amendment.

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Yes, but this dumb broad Sheldrick is commenting at an American website. She’s also a Canadian, so I could just as well have told her to mind her own business.

    • Brian A. Yapko

      I must concur with Dr. Salemi here, Diana. I will give you my additional take as an attorney. Of course hate speech is hateful. Incitement to violence is wrong. Yelling “fire” falsely in a crowded theater is wrong. But a law which simply criminalizes the things that you say (and by extension the things that you think) is subject to abuse by the disgruntled, the insane, the vicious and the vindictive. Human nature cannot be micromanaged in this way without serious consequences. Such legislation leads invariably to the Inquisition — the rack, the screw and the burning at the stake — simply because your words offend another. Witch hunts become inevitable. (“That horrid man called me a blank, Arrest him!”) Why do you gloss over the fact that there were 7000 complaints in one week alone. Does that not tell you how willing people are to exploit this “law of interpersonal respect?” That is not “protection.” It is the gestapo. You can’t legislate human emotions without causing serious damage. Criminalizing non-violent speech will force people to walk on eggshells with each other and it will lead to absurd and unjust prosecutions. This is a recipe for seething hatred, not a kumbaya-type lovefest.

      Reply
    • Yael

      The truth sounds like hate to those who hate the truth. History has shown that hate speech laws lead to the eradication of verbal truth, which results in human degradation, extensive loss of life, and idiocracy.

      Reply
      • Cheryl Corey

        Yael, we live in a world gone mad.

    • Joshua C. Frank

      Yet you liberals have no trouble spreading hate against Christians, conservatives, men, white people, and everyone else you falsely call privileged, especially those who happen to belong to more than one of those groups (I’m all of them).

      If you insist on hating us, at least be honest about it. Don’t claim to be against hate when you’re the hateful ones.

      Reply
      • Paul A. Freeman

        Joshua, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        You have gone on record with hateful statements against the other poets here, so you need to take the giant sequoia out of your eye or shut up.

        The rest of us are sick of you and your trolling.

      • Paul Freeman

        I get the feeling that ‘trolling’ in your world means having a different opinion to you and not being a lockstep sheeple. I apologise if my free speech offends you.

  10. Sally Cook

    Recently, leaving the doctor’s, I made a joke about an inanimate object. Titters ensued. Then a cautionary comment floated forward to the effect that my joke was not a “proper” one.

    I did not turn because I didn’t want to know who had said such a stupid thing, but shouted back those are the best jokes !!
    Laughter broke out.
    I sensed I had made some friends. But I was sad, Sad that people are so easily cowed, that humor is being destroyed. Where are the comedians of previous generations? People need to laugh. What they don’t need is to be forced into a false sympathy for ideas and attitudes they couldn’t care less about. Others are free to make themselves laughingstocks if they wish, but why should we be be legislated by a minority into conformity?

    Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      One of my favorite comedians is Dave Chapelle, who pokes fun at everyone, black or white. Just think of all the old school comedians who’d be censored today.

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      What has happened is that we have allowed a new kind of society to develop — one where the self-designated “weak and vulnerable” have been given veto power over anything that the rest of us want to say or do or think. Our schools and mass media all work to nurture a generation of wilting flowers, losers, snowflakes, crybabies, and weaklings, all of them desperate for special treatment and attention as “protected classes.”

      And one major problem is that a great many simple-minded religionists (of all denominations) go along with this situation because they have convinced themselves that this is what God wants. Just listen to the bullshit from the mainstream churches.

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        It is a thorny problem that God has placed us believers in a situation in which it is nearly impossible to live in the way the same God intended for us to live. Despite all our efforts, we face more and more restrictions, a kind of “secularist dhimmitude,” as Rod Dreher put it.

        If this isn’t what God wants, then He is weak or aloof. Since I know these things not to be true, what’s left is: this is what God wants—not for people to abandon the faith, but for believers to suffer. After all, Scripture and Church teaching both tell us that suffering is good because it purifies us and brings us closer to God, and all the saints attest to this.

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Joshua, I understand your position, but that is precisely the kind of suicidal religionist-speak that prevents us from being any kind of real threat to the enemy.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        If you know of something to do about it that others haven’t already tried and failed, I’m all ears. Despite, and maybe because of, our efforts, things just get worse and worse. We’ve been hoping things will get better for a long time, and it’s just not happening.

        But I believe we’re living in the End Times, and therefore there is nothing to do but get people turned toward Heaven before Jesus comes to judge the living and the dead. That’s one of my aims in writing what I write.

        It is not “suicidal religionist speak” that prevents us from being any real threat to the enemy, but the fact that the enemy has assimilated almost the entire world, even so-called “Christians,” into its collective. People don’t want to be saved anymore, as I’ve written about in my poems.

        I understand your position. I believed it for a long time. But I finally realized that I was refusing to face the fact that we’ve been waging “the culture war” for a long time against a superior enemy and consistently lost.

        Rod Dreher, in his review of the book The Boniface Option (which does have many good points amid its failings), explains it all better than I can:

        https://roddreher.substack.com/p/reviewing-the-boniface-option

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Joshua, I knew we would have this argument sooner or later. I knew it two years back, when you mentioned in one of your postings at a discussion thread that you did not really care if Western culture and Western society were destroyed and swamped by its foreign enemies, since it was already too corrupt for your taste. I knew immediately that there was a wide gulf between us.

        I don’t know Isker and his book “The Boniface Option,” but from Dreher’s review I gather than the man is exactly the kind of fighter we need now more than ever — a man who realizes that wars aren’t won by kindness and understanding and humanitarianism, and that unless you can summon up real gut-wrenching HATRED for the enemy, in all of the enemy’s forms, you don’t have a bloody chance. Give me Isker over Dreher, since the latter seems to have a bad case of sentimentalism.

        So I won’t argue anymore with you. Our respective viewpoints are fixed, and neither of us will change them.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        I think you’re right. Because of the respect I have for you and all your knowledge, I tried to see things your way. But ultimately, I couldn’t reconcile it with my Catholic faith, and my conscience won out.

        I think the difference boils down to the fact that I see the Catholic faith as more important than Western culture and would therefore sacrifice Western culture for the Catholic faith. I hate modern Western culture as much as you and Mr. Isker do (and he is right about a lot of things), but I think it comes from a different place.

    • Paul A. Freeman

      Sally, strangely I came across your anecdote concerning a joke about the inanimate object just after I sent the limerick below to a national newspaper which may be too prudish to print it. It was also in a competition, but didn’t, er, rise to the occasion.

      I’m sure Joseph will enjoy the limerick, too.

      Statue of David Limerick

      “The Statue of David’s a failure,”
      say some for its lack of regalia.
      But clothing aside,
      most critics deride
      its modestly-sized genitalia.

      Keep that sense of humour!

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Male genitalia were usually kept small and unobtrusive in Classical Statuary, except for statues of Priapus and sexually aroused fauns or satyrs. Michelangelo was well aware of this, and also knew that the David was on a religious theme, and also on the political idea of Florence as a brave little city standing up to its bigger and more powerful enemies. Big genitals were simply inappropriate on all three counts.

        If Michelangelo had made the genitals large, the ordinary Florentines would have guffawed and said “Ma chi cazzo!” And the statue would have gone down as a joke in art history.

      • Paul Freeman

        Lol. It wasn’t you grumbling in the waiting room, Joseph, was it?

    • Lannie David Brockstein

      On May 9th, 2024, Sally Cook wrote:
      >>> “Recently, leaving the doctor’s, I made a joke about an inanimate object. Titters ensued. Then a cautionary comment floated forward to the effect that my joke was not a “proper” one.”

      >>> “But I was sad, Sad that people are so easily cowed, that humor is being destroyed.”

      ~~~~~

      Sally, how ironic for that to have happened at a doctor’s office, when “laughter is the best medicine” and there is no such thing as a politically correct joke!

      As Big Pharma is the biggest buyer of advertising space from the mainstream media and the Big Tech social media platforms, along with its being a major sponsor of the universities, it is therefore Big Pharma that is largely responsible for propagating the Woke’s comedy-killing cancel culture and its sick in the head ideology.

      The bullshitters are spiritually descended from those who worshipped the golden calf. That is why they are “easily cowed”.

      From Lannie.

      Reply
  11. C.B. Anderson

    There is one thing the Scots still do well, and that is making fine whisky. One clan motto is “Stand Fast!” but that might not be the best thing to do after having imbibed a considerable portion of the aforementioned amber fluid. Tonight, for me, it’s Clynelish.

    Reply
  12. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Cheryl, you have captured the very essence of a Scotland I love. I am certain William Wallace is spinning in his grave. Angela Merkel’s wannabe, Nicola Sturgeon took great delight in leading Scotland down the heather path to ruin. I hope this hateful (Oh the irony) Hate Crime and Public Order Act is quashed by the furious ghost of Wallace… soon.

    Reply

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