A Catholic spokesman slammed the U.K. gay advocacy group Stonewall's
bestowal of its “bigot of the year” award on Cardinal Keith O'Brien,
calling the move an effort to attack marriage supporters.
Peter Kearney, Director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, said the
award “reveals the depths of their intolerance and their willingness to
attack and demean those who don’t share their views.”
“Stonewall and others have promoted terms like 'bigot' and 'homophobe'
relentlessly, in order to intimidate and vilify anyone who dares oppose
their agenda,” Kearney said Nov. 1.
“It is an agenda which the wider public does not endorse and which their excessive language has undermined.”
Cardinal O'Brien, the Archbishop of St. Andrews and Glasgow, has been a
leading defender of traditional marriage in the face of local efforts
to redefine marriage to include same-sex unions.
Stonewall, which receives some government funding, said its 10,000
members voted “decisively” to give the award to the cardinal after he
described same-sex “marriage” as a “grotesque subversion” of the
universal right to marry.
In a March 3 editorial in the British newspaper The Telegraph, the
cardinal warned that redefining marriage would have “huge implications”
for schools and for wider society. It would “eliminate entirely” from
law the idea that a child needs a mother and a father. He questioned
whether teachers who wants to tell students that marriage can only mean
the union of a man and a woman will lose that right.
“Will both teacher and pupils simply become the next victims of the
tyranny of tolerance, heretics whose dissent from state-imposed
orthodoxy must be crushed at all costs?” he asked, citing precedents in
Massachusetts to normalize homosexual advocacy.
He warned that the redefinition of marriage might set a precedent for
polygamous marriage and cause “further degeneration of society into
immorality.”
In response, the director of Stonewall ScotlandColin Macfarlane told
The Guardian that the cardinal has “gone well beyond what any normal
person would call a decent level of public discourse.”
But Ruth Davidson, an openly lesbian leader of the Scottish
Conservative Party, gave a speech at the Stonewall awards ceremony in
which she criticized the attack on Cardinal O'Brien.
She said she disagreed with Stonewall’s “need to call people names like ‘bigot’.”
“It is simply wrong,” she said, The Christian Institute reports.
In response, event attendees booed her.
Two leading banks who sponsor the Stonewall event, Barclays and Coutts,
have threatened to end their sponsorship unless it drops the prize for
“bigot of the year.”
Stonewall U.K. receives funding from many public bodies, including the Scottish government.
Kearney said Stonewall's “intolerant and intimidatory tactics” should
call into question the group's funding from many public bodies.
The Scottish parliament could legalize “gay marriages” next year despite strong opposition from religious groups and others.
The push for marriage redefinition is also evident in other parts of
the U.K. The United Kingdom’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was also
the focus of controversy after his office released a draft speech which
called opponents of redefining marriage “bigots.”