Laws should not be used to “recreate our society according to passing fashions and ideologies” a senior Roman Catholic Archbishop has said as he criticised plans to redefine marriage.
Mario Conti, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, cautioned against those who want to redefine marriage “without any reference to children” and also warned of a further descent into “ethical confusion”.
Speaking on Sunday, the Archbishop also hit out at those who put “the claim of ‘equality and diversity’ on a higher level than faith and reason” by their attempts to redefine marriage.
Contentious
His comments follow the Scottish Government’s consultation on same-sex marriage which closed in December.
The Westminster Government has also launched a consultation on the issue. It asks the public if they “agree or disagree” with rewriting the definition of marriage.
However, it also makes clear that it is a matter of how not whether the contentious change will be introduced.
Tolerance
In his comments on Sunday Archbishop Conti said: “It is certainly not the role of law to recreate our society according to passing fashions and ideologies, nor to redefine nature whether in terms of persons and their rights or its natural institutions.”
The Archbishop also cautioned that “we are witnessing the transformation of tolerance into a kind of tyranny in which religious views are the only ones which seem unworthy of respect and acceptance”.
And he added: “Our society will descend further into ethical confusion and moral disintegration the more that those in Government and the judiciary slip society’s moorings from the capstans of virtue.”
Attack
Earlier this month Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the most senior Roman Catholic in Britain, also criticised plans to redefine marriage.
He said the “innumerable benefits which marriage brings to society” should be recognised and not ‘attacked or dismantled’.
The Cardinal also dismissed claims that proposals to redefine marriage were about rights, saying that “all the legal rights of marriage are already available to homosexual couples”.