Another day, another Catholic clergy shows us that leading a cloistered life might not lead to the most well-adjusted person, and it certainly doesn’t encourage an awareness of the society at large. Just last weekend, the Catholic cardinal in charge of Scotland made a whopper of a statement, in which he described gay marriage as being as morally reprehensible as slavery. From The Independent:

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of Catholics in Scotland, described gay marriage as a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right” and said the Government’s plan to reform marriage laws was “madness”.

In a stinging response to the Government’s assurances that no church would be compelled to conduct gay marriages, he wrote: “No government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

“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?” The strength of the Cardinal’s intervention caused outrage among gay-rights activists and supporters of same-sex marriages.

Let’s begin with the obvious here. Slavery is about owning another human being. It is actually the opposite of gay marriage, in that a marriage between two consenting adults, regardless of gender, is mutual. Slavery is one-sided to say the least. Then, there’s the issue of slavery. The Catholic church had no problem with one man being owned by another until as recently as 1890, but living happily together, that’s another thing altogether.

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