SCOTLAND: Top Anti-Gay Activist Confesses To Child Porn Charges

The Scottish school board administrator who was a leader in the campaign against repealing the UK's anti-gay Section 28 law has confessed to possessing and distributing child pornography. Enacted in 1986 during the Thatcher administration, Section 28 made it illegal to "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."

Alan Smith - then Scottish School Board Association president - was a key figure in bus tycoon Brian Souter's failed fight to keep Section 28. The SSBA were bankrolled by Souter during the campaign that ended in 2000 when Donald Dewar repealed a bar on discussing gay issues in classrooms. Shamed dad-of-two Smith, 53, now faces jail a fter after being snared with 4000 child porn photos on his computer. He admitted distributing indecent photos of kids in 2006 and having the material at his home last year. While sending the sick images to other paedophiles, Smith was working in primary and secondary schools. He mixed with pupils as a director of the Learning Game, an education firm in Milngavie, Glasgow. Norma Corlette, his former boss at the firm who went into liquidation two years ago, said: "Crucially, no member of our staff was allowed to work with children without a member of the school staff accompanying them at all times. This policy was rigorously enforced across the organisation." Smith was caught when Metropolitan Police officers monitoring suspicious web activity tipped offcops in Scotland. His Paisley home was raided last June and on his laptop there were more than 4000 vile images. Police also found Smith had communicated with another chatroom user known as Babylover1.

Famed UK gay activist Peter Tatchell nails it: "Alan Smith's conviction for child pornography confirms the theory that people who oppose gay equality are often hypocrites. They pose in public as icons of moral virtue while privately leading immoral, debauched lives. Their attacks on gay people are diversions to disguise their own sexual crimes."