… so let’s have some more catholic-bashing!

The BBC reports that the leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, will use his Easter message to attack “aggressive secularism” – whatever that may be!

It is a vain hope that the princes of the Catholic church will ever understand that they don’t rule here any more, that their day is waning and that they are increasingly irrelevant.

“In a reference to equality legislation preventing discrimination against homosexual people, Cardinal O’Brien will denounce what he claims is the way Christians have been prevented from acting in accordance with their beliefs because they refuse to endorse such lifestyles”.

Cardinal O’Brien seems to argue that christians should somehow be exempt from the law because of their beliefs. Why? What makes their convictions any more valid than the next person’s?

The law is NOT there to govern what a person believes – it is there to control a person’s behaviour.

I am a civil servant.  My colleagues and I are there to administer law and we are, despite what some of the red tops might say, human. We carry with us the same preferences and prejudices as anyone else, although I’m not about to start airing all of mine in public. But we are required to suspend them and act in accordance with the Acts. There have been many times over the years when I have  been required to do things that I did not believe were morally right, but I did them because that’s what the law told me to do. If I were to start putting catholics at a disadvantage because I cannot “endorse such lifstyles” no doubt the good cardinal would (rightly, for once) be denouncing me from the pulpit. And if ever the struggle between the law and my sense of what is right and fair gets too great I will quit and go and sell paint in B&Q.

I will state this again for the record. I don’t care what Catholics, or the adherents of any other religion, believe any more than I care what the wedding dress will be like, the latest “plot” in Eastenders, the sodding Olympics or any other of the myriad ephemera with which we are daily deluged. The difference is that those who take the last three on that list seriously aren’t arguing for some sort of special status.

Neither, as an atheist, do I.