Another celibate man in a frock talks of ‘foolish’ gay marriage

Another suitable case for treatment has been sounding off in Scotland about same-sex marriage.

It would render marriage “meaningless”, avers the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti. And those who advocate it are “foolish”.

Earlier this week it was Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of the Catholics in Scotland (see Gay marriage would “rewrite nature”, says celibate man wearing a frock).

As to whether marriage is meaningless, is that not a question for those who are married and not those whose vocation renders them unable to be so (unless they give up their nonsense, of course)?

And why is allowing same-sex marriage foolish? In what way? Only fools advocate same-sex marriage? Everyone who advocates same-sex marriage is a fool, an idiot, a prat?

The 2010 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey found that 61 per cent of the Scottish public support allowing gay couples to wed. Are they all foolish – 61 per cent of the entire population (some of them, no doubt, followers of the Catholic Church if not all its tenets)?

Nope. These blithering idiots of preachermen don’t think much for themselves. They don’t need to when they have a huge canon of Catholic literature to make up their minds for them.

In a letter to the Herald this week, Conti wrote:

In a proposed consultation regarding the redefinition of civil partnerships, we are talking not of human rights or of civil liberties, nor of legal or fiscal equalities, but of redefining a particular relationship to give it a meaning it doesn’t possess.

We would use a word which carries huge significance, and render it meaningless in respect of one of its essential attributes, its capacity to create a natural family – I mean of course marriage. That 60 per cent of the population, according to one poll, is of a mind to accept that change may suggest to some a liberal society, but to others a foolish one.

There you go, then. It’s a foolish society.

As for redefining a relationship to “give it a meaning it does not possess”, who gives things meaning? Meaning is an entirely human concept. Humans attach meaning to things, and meanings change according to how things are viewed.

Oh, I was forgetting. Catholics don’t do that sort of thing. Only God breathes meaning into things. Silly me!