As in interesting insight, Jane Carnall writes in the Guardian …
My lodger, a nice Catholic librarian, once told me that at her Highlands church the anti-gay marriage postcards were put on a table at the back, no one taking much interest …
OK, a bit of background. The cardinal had 200,000 postcards preprinted with his homophobic demand then distributed to all Scottish parishes. The idea is simple … hand them out as folks attend mass, then collect any that have been signed and send back.
So how many did he get back? 28,000 … or to turn that around … 182,000 parishioners took one look, refused to sign and simply tossed it to one side (insert applause for them here).
There is of course the usual PR spin …
“Scotland for Marriage” and other opponents of same-sex marriage point to figures stating that 77,508 responses to the Scottish gay marriage consultation, only 36% were in favour of gay marriage and 64% were against.
Is this really true, are 64% opposed?
Apparently not; if you count all the responses, then you find 49% in favour. Oh but wait, almost 20% of those responses came from outside Scotland – apparently from online forms set up by the Christian Institute and Christian Concern – so you also need to filter out that irrelevant bigotry as well. (Can I claim that “no true Scotsman” would behave like that, would that be a logic fallacy?)
Bottom line – count just the feedback from Scots and you discover that 65% of Scots are in favour, so the claim of 64% opposed is complete fiction. To confirm this number, Ipsos-Mori carried out a poll last month and found that 64% were indeed in favour, so clearly the claims being made by “Scotland for Marriage” are utterly bogus.
Wheels are now in motion … it is happening and will be law by 2014.
This is all very encouraging, Scotland is moving forward.
What of course is also truly encouraging is that while indeed the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Scotland (and elsewhere) might have firmly archored themselves to medieval morality, the majority of the Catholics are themselves rather sensible forward thinking folks and have given priority to being decent human beings as demonstrated by their willingness to simply ignore the Cardinal’s daft homophobic postcards.