BBC headline: Cardinal Keith O’Brien snubs gay marriage talks with Scottish government.
Snubs? The cardinal snubs? Talks on same-sex marriage with the government? Is Scotland a theocracy? Why was the Scottish government inviting the cardinal to discuss legislation in the first place?
Scotland’s Roman Catholic leader – Cardinal Keith O’Brien – has suspended direct communication with the Scottish government on gay marriage.
The move is in protest at the Scottish government’s support for the introduction of same-sex marriages.
The cardinal has turned down an invitation to discuss the issue, leaving any talks to officials.
This is all backward. It assumes that the normal and good state is that the Scottish government and the Catholic church collaborate on legislation, and that that normal good state is disrupted when the cardinal protests the governments plans by refusing to collaborate.
That’s wrong. The normal and good state would be if cardinals concerned themselves with church affairs and the people who care about them, and refrained totally from interfering with the duly elected government. Cardinals are not elected by the citizens (or even the members of their church), and they are programmatically anti-secularist. They think they have instructions from god, and that fact makes them very unfit to interfere with governments.
So it’s good news that the cardinal is not interfering with the government.