"Tony Blair has promised a decision next week on whether Catholic adoption agencies will be able to opt out of gay discrimination laws."Hmmm - feel much the same way about it all as this blogger.
A couple of men in frocks wrote to the PM saying:
"rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning".Except they can be - and are. Especially if you include in your 'rights of conscience' mental stuff like female circumcision and hacking people's heads off.
I'm slightly embarrassed about my prior defence of Ruth Kelly. Obviously her religious beliefs do indeed stop her from doing her job properly.
She could always move to Scotland.
Update: From the Scotsman:
"CATHOLIC adoption agencies will defy new anti-discrimination laws, the Church warned last night, as the row over allowing gay couples to adopt threatened to divide religion and politics."Eh? Religion and politics are supposed to be divided.
5 comments:
If practicing homosexuals are not accepted as suitable adopters by the Catholic church on grounds that they do not adhere to the tennets of the faith, what of all the heterosexual couples who likewise break that 'moral' Catholic code by using contraceptives, which are also forbidden by the same moral teaching of the church?
If they are allowed to adopt (and it is not simply barren couples who do so)then this would imply that the use of contraception is no longer considered to break that code by the Church hierarchy.
If this is the case, then perhaps they might like to consider telling us - in fact what about a Church educational program encouraging the use of responsible contraception? Might save all the trouble of finding adoptive parents for those children who are born from unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
I don't see how we can reasonably have a Papist opt-out. An opt-out for all cases of conscience might be reasonable - it would make explicit the obvious truth that endlessly inventing "rights" is bound to cause conflict between these purported rights.
Also, remember this:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=302752005
and of course, this:
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=225&id=1917022006
Dearieme, what the hell are you saying?
I am saying, James, that if we continue to invent "rights", then it will get increasingly difficult to avoid their conflicting with each other.
If I have the right not to have cattle cruelly slaughtered in my country, and Jes and Muslims have a right to slaughter cattle in their preferred way, then we have a conflict. Ditto Sikhs and motorcycle helmets and, no doubt, plenty more. "Rights" is a cul de sac: probably what we need is a rather small set of rights, jealously guarded, plus - as someone said recently - a convention of civility to each other. And, I suppose, a sense of humour - who can resist hoping for a couple of Catholic ex-priests to try to adopt a child? Or, indeed, priests. Or, indeed, priests from a diocese ruined by child-abuse cases. Or, indeed....
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