On Thursday 3rd May 2007 Scotland goes to the polls to elect MSP's to a new Parliament and councillors to "represent" us in the various local councils around the country. This may seem a while away, but our politicians are already preparing for battle!

It may be timely to start doing homework on how those standing for election view the concept of freedom of faith, freedom of speech and freedom of worship in this country - freedoms which were won a cost by people such as our covenanting forefathers.

The following incident was reported last year:-

On 13 January 2006 the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, said in a sermon that the moral teaching of the church was being undermined. The Archbishop said that he and other "bishops are very concerned at the way in which the institution of marriage is undermined, and the family, which should be at the very centre of the state's concern, marginalised." He went on to say that: "Recent legislation to introduce civil partnerships dangerously weakens the uniqueness of marriage as a time-honoured, legally-recognised and protected social reality and a fiscally-privileged entity. It also implicitly places homosexual acts on a plane of moral equivalence to marital love."¹ The Archbishop also pointed out that Pope Paul VI in his Humanae Vitae "warned about the dangers of separating conjugal love from procreation".²

The Green MSP and gay-rights activist, Patrick Harvie, wrote to the Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police asking him to investigate the Archbishop's remarks believing they should be prosecuted. Patrick Harvie said: "What he [Conti] said was clearly homophobic. This is a matter for the police."³

Ronnie Convery, Director of Communications for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, replied that "This particular publicity stunt is not worthy of serious consideration... It does however show once more that there are none so intolerant as the so-called champions of tolerance." He added it was the duty of bishops to preach the truth and "Attempts to bully them, and ultimately gag them... are a disgraceful attack on our traditions of free speech and religious freedom."⁴

References

• ¹The Times, 14 January 2006 and The Catholic Herald, 20 January 2006
• ²The Catholic Times, 22 January 2006
• ³Sunday Herald, 15 January 2006
• ⁴Scottish Catholic Observer, 20 January 2006

Web Links
Read more about attacks on religious liberties in the UK (and beyond) here