So the Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury, Mark Davies, is going to use his Easter sermon to launch a virulent attach on marriage equality! Now it is easy to get jaded about yet another religious leader attacking marriage equality and making yet more bigoted statements against the LGBT community (and then later complaining about being called a bigot no doubt!), but there is one line in the story that I want to concentrate on, when last year he:
…compared the UK ‘s push for marriage equality to ‘inhuman ideologies’ such as ‘Nazism and Communism’.
Now, I’m not going to invoke Godwin’s Law here, although I would be well within my rights to do so. This is a blatant example of how religious faith clouds people’s judgement and thinking. To declare that the promotion of equality and the basic human right of allowing people to marry regardless of gender is equivalent to Nazism and Communism is pure doublespeak. It is the precise opposite. It is restricting people’s rights, which is what this bishop is calling for, that is the equivalent of these foul ideologies.
This is a view which is morally repugnant, and should be to his “flock” (in fact recent polls do suggest the average Catholic in the UK supports marriage equality). It certainly is yet another example of why religious faith needs to be challenged and yet another demonstration of how that type of thinking, on the face of it, does harm.
