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Monday 1 June 2009

Charity slams Scottish government connivance

The gay humanist charity the Pink Triangle Trust (PTT) – owner of this blog – has condemned Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s SNP government for its apparent connivance with the Catholic Church over its attempt to get exemption from legislation on gay adoption.

The PTT’s secretary George Broadhead says in a press release:

We understand that the SNP government has been secretly working with the Catholic Church to defy legislation on gay adoption. It seems that Fiona Hyslop, the SNP education secretary, has lobbied Whitehall for Catholic adoption agencies to get an “indefinite” exemption from the legislation, and has told the Church she was “comfortable” with plans by a Glasgow-based Catholic adoption service to refuse same-sex couples.

It seems that Hyslop has had meetings with Church representatives about how to turn away same-sex couples. She and the St Margaret’s Children and Family Care Society have discussed plans to reword the charity’s constitution in order to allow the agency to provide its services solely to heterosexuals.

Given that the SNP is officially in favour of gay equality, this a highly retrograde step. It is quite unacceptable that any publicly funded service should be allowed to discriminate against gays or any other part of the population.

The PTT welcomes the intervention of the Humanist Glasgow MSP Patrick Harvie, who is said to be tabling questions to the government next week on this matter and has declared, ‘Any attempt to get around the law should be stopped.’ ”

1 comment:

Diesel B said...

Scotland is a great country but the SNP's tawdry "Braveheart" racism goes hand-in-hand with this kind of sly, underhand, anti-gay manoeuvring. They are just the BNP in kilts.

It is a blatant appeal to the worst trait of Scotland's large and often bigoted Catholic community, as well as their dour, unsmiling Protestant counterparts.

If the SNP persists, perhaps the English taxpayers who have so generously underwritten the SNP's self-government pretensions should simply pull the plug?