Message from Scotland for Marriage

A message from the organization, Scotland for Marriage:


Sadly, the Scottish Parliament passed the Marriage & Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill yesterday.

MSPs voted 105 to 18 in favour of the Bill at Stage 3.

The key civil liberty protections we were supporting were also voted down by an overwhelming majority of MSPs.

Clearly, this result is a huge disappointment to all of us who have campaigned in defence of traditional marriage and in favour of safeguards for civil liberty.

It has not been for lack of effort on our part. Over the last two years we have:

been active in all 73 Holyrood constituencies, with hundreds of volunteers in our network
run a fringe event at the SNP conference
distributed over 500,000 items of literature
held 90 meetings throughout the country attended by thousands of people
secured media coverage of our concerns in national and local press
kept you informed of developments
prompted you to contact your MSPs when appropriate.
We believe that we – and you – did everything we could in defence of marriage. Unfortunately, neither the Government nor most MSPs were listening.

The redefinition of marriage will have serious consequences for Scotland, particularly for people who believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

That’s why our campaign will continue. We want to:

defend the innocent victims this legislation will create
hold the Government to the assurances they have given that civil liberties will not be infringed
continue to be a calm but firm voice for marriage in the media
resist further erosions of marriage.
That’s what we want to do. But after two years of tough campaigning, our resources are spent. Please, if you want us to be able to carry on, join with us today by making a donation. Please give £25, £50 or £100, or whatever you can afford, and help us support and defend real marriage.

Your donations are secure and confidential.

Donate

Regards,

The Scotland for Marriage team

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Donations can be made here.

Some initial thoughts on the end of marriage

Not much point, really, in moping overmuch about the inevitable vote yesterday in the Scottish Parliament which saw same sex 'marriage' introduced by 105-18 votes with none of the proposed amendments adding protection for dissenting views adopted. (In fairness to the proponents of the Bill, this was generally on the grounds that such protections already existed. We shall see.) Please pray for the eighteen who had the guts to stick out against the 'equal marriage' bandwagon: perhaps those who will doubtless be calling them all the names under the sun will remember that, but for the existence of such people in the SNP, Labour and Conservative parties, practising Catholics would find themselves as unable to support these parties as they are the lunatic fringe constituted by the Greens and the Lib-Dems.

So this particular struggle is over. Perhaps the only comfort is that, as Matt Walsh points out,  the real rot in marriage as an institution set in long ago: what we saw yesterday is the burial, not the death. Perhaps the main question now is how to preserve the Catholic family against a culture which, in its economy and its legislation, at best, does nothing to support it and, at worst, does much to undermine it. But that's for the future...

For the moment, watching Waldemar Januszczak's final programme on the Rococo (series on i-player here until 11 Feb) cheered me up a little, but also prompted some immediate reflections. During the programme, Januszczak visited the island of Santo Stefano which preserved the ruins of a prison based on Bentham's panopticon design. (Other surviving panopticons (here).) This prompted me to reflect on the difference between Bentham's utilitarianism and Mill's.

There are many differences between Bentham and Mill, but the panopticon suggests two in particular. First, there is the emphasis on ideal structure in Bentham: for him, there is the possibility of an ideal social arrangement which will maximize utility in a planned way. Mill on the other hand, promotes the idea of an agonistic culture where it is in the clash of 'experiments in living' that leads to human progress. Secondly, there is the deliberate stripping away of privacy in the panopticon: prisoners will act well because they are always in public view. Mill, on the other hand, resolves at least some of the tensions in the public space that result from agonism by constructing a private space where experiments can be carried on out of others' gaze and safe from their offence.

Nothing in modern Scottish political culture suggests much in the way of acknowledgment of the importance of Mill's two amendments to Bentham. Too much is politicized: our main writers translate the exploration of the private into Tartan Noir, the personal transformed into police (polis?) procedure; the institution of the private realm of the family is translated merely into a public party for love (a previous post is relevant here). The myth of Scottish community has driven out the myth of the Scottish curmudgeon, guarding his personal space against others. Moreover, there is too much emphasis on consensus at the expense of the Caledonian anti-syzygy, the creative tension between extreme positions, and the native version of Mill's agonism.

Both these vices were visible in the Scottish Parliament debate and in the wider Scottish debate on same sex 'marriage'. Whilst the victors will doubtless be congratulating themselves on the victory of progress and a mature debate, others might well ponder the thinness of Scottish politics and culture and the implications of that thinness for the question of Independence.

Another scandal in the Scottish Catholic Church?

       Normal goings on in your local Catholic Church: clearly far too disgusting to be shown


Scottish readers of the Sunday Herald would have been greeted yesterday by a front page with the headline: 'Church rejects abused priest's plea for justice'. [Here. May require registration to view.]

I'm not sure many non-Catholics would have read much further or certainly in much detail. It's rather like reading about Syria: you know that atrocities go on; in reading an article, the details fall into the background while the sheer brute fact of another piece of inhumanity remains. Equally, you know that the Scottish Catholic Church is full of paedophile priests and and abusive and secretive bishops -and, lo and behold, here they are at it again. (The comments on the Herald site are, at the time of writing, uniformly thus.)

However, a closer read of the story does little to substantiate this sort of conclusion. Essentially, the story is about the removal of Father Patrick Lawson from a parish in Ayrshire and the failure of his appeal to Rome. (Much of the background -in a similar tone- is given in a Guardian article by the same journalist, Catherine Deveney.)

Now, here I am. I read the article. I know that there has been a history of sexual importuning in the Scottish Church. Father Lawson claims that he was sexually assaulted by another priest. The Church, he claims, has done little or nothing in the eighteen years since the assault. Neither, apparently, did the police despite his reporting of the incident.[Here.] (The priest in question, however, seems to have been removed from duties. The article makes a big deal about his being sent to a retirement home. But why not? Even elderly criminals have to live somewhere.) Lots of allegations. If I'm not a Catholic, I probably think that an allegation, reported from one side, is undoubtedly true. As a Catholic, I'm probably less sure, although a history of muddle and unsatisfactory resolution is not untypical in the case both of sexual assault in general and the Church in particular. So I'm probably inclined to believe the article here.

But then it's linked up with a) the removal from the parish and b) a general attack on the lack of 'transparent processes and procedures that suggest justice is valued'. The official grounds for removal are (apparently) 1) Father Lawson's ill health, 2) complaints about him from parishoners. The article makes absolutely no attempt to assess the complaints against Father Lawson, being content to point out that a petition from 200 parishoners in his favour has been received.

Now, I've lived through a number of this sort of intra-parish dispute. They are invariably utterly horrible and incredibly difficult to get at the truth. So I simply don't know what's going on here, neither (apparently) does Deveney and the only outside information we have is from the procedure under Canon Law -which has found in favour of the Bishop. But none of the dearth of information stops Deveney from asserting that the removal is really all about 'his stance over' the abusing priest. Perhaps, but Rome doesn't think so and Lawson is clearly extremely ill from cancer.

So what we really have is a story with very little in the way of hard fact. It is the sort of murky dispute that happens in employment and in the sort of intense personal relationship you get both between a parish and priest, and a priest and bishop. Father Lawson may have been appallingly treated. Or he may not. I simply don't know, and neither does any reader of the article. But the non-Catholics will think that they know the Babylonian Whore is at it again.

One theme running through the article is that 'civil justice' trumps 'church justice': 'Canon Law is a legal system created for a monarchy', says Tom Doyle, billed as a Canon lawyer (true, but an odd sort of Canon lawyer who thinks 'they ought to sell the Vatican to the Mormons or to Disney or something and go out and start all over again' [here]). Instead, Father Lawson is relying on an (civil) employment tribunal (which of course are well known for providing verdicts which all parties are completely satisfied with). The problem here is that being a priest isn't an employment: to apply the ethos of secular employment law to the priesthood makes as much sense as applying it to my teenager's refusal to do the washing up.

But none of this will matter to the normal reader of the Herald. The Church is like that, and here's another example of its being like that. I was struck by the analogy to the Amanda Knox case. Now, as an expert on the Italian justice system (I've watched Inspector Montalbano and the The Sopranos (who are a bit Italian)) and the case (I've got a rough idea from a couple of articles a few years ago), I know immediately that the Italian courts are not to be trusted (because Italians can't do the logical, rational stuff that we Northern Europeans can do) and that Knox is far too attractive to be a liar. And clearly, based on watching The Borgias and having imbibed the Kirk's traditional view of Catholics, Father Lawson is being shafted by a conspiracy of paedophile control freaks...

A final appeal to the Signatura is apparently under way. But why wait for that?