Cardinal O’Brien wrote for the Sunday Telegraph, in which he likened gay marriage to slavery.
He wrote: “Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ‘no one will be forced to keep a slave’.
“Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?”
...
"I would say that countries where this is legal are indeed violating human rights."So, in this analogy, what, homosexuals are slave-owners? Then who are the slaves? Not O'Brien, clearly, he's another potential slave owner. He just wants us to know that "you won't be forced into the position of plantation owner" strikes him as no better or worse than "you won't be forced into the position of being taking up the arse by one of those nancies you've heard about".
As usual, the bigots end up proving my point for me. Gay marriage isn't a threat to anyone or anything, which O'Brien ably demonstrates by constructing an analogy to slavery in which he can't actually identify the people analogous to slaves. It's also no small tell that by O'Brien's own choice of analogy, it isn't the freedom of citizens that's the human right with which he is concerned, but rather the right of those in authority to issue blanket bans of activities of which they disapprove.
In short, O'Brien's argument implicitly begins with the phrase "Imagine being married to another man was as bad as being a slave. Therefore..."
Apparently this guy is at the very head of the Catholic Chuch in Scotland. Which, if nothing else, makes me rather pro-independence than I had been before. If flashing my passport at the border is the price for having this guy's influence in Westminster severed completely, then I'd consider it a fair price.
2 comments:
It's a bit unclear, but I suspect that the analogy he is trying to make (whether he just failed to articulate it, or whether the reporting didn't get it across, I don't know) is that churches will not be forced to allow gay couples to marry there if gay marriage was legalised.
It's still a ridiculous analogy, but slightly more explicable.
Yes, I confess to being slightly facetious in my post. Doubtless you're right, but it still fails to account for the fact that he can't identify who the slaves are in his ludicrous analogy.
Post a Comment