We all have our own thoughts about our devolved Scotland, its MSPs, its financially super-bloated parliament and some of the grotesque causes it has adopted. Well and good. The enthusiasm however that the prospect of a devolved Scotland engendered at first has evaporated into something more like a faint sense of unease. Whereas before Scots were prepared to anticipate the future with some sense of expectation, now as a result of the past eight years, there is more uneasy head swivelling and looking over shoulders at what might be in store than interest in what is going on.
Our parliamentarians and the political parties they represent in Scotland have an agenda, and in the light of what they have already produced, no longer a hidden one. It is an agenda that has nothing to do with Christian belief or morality. It is for what they call a civilized society.
The programme for a ‘civilized society’ has always included matters such as the abolition of the death penalty, subsidies on medicine, food and clothing, the abolition of all forms of censorship. Perhaps more sinister in moral terms, all the prophets of ‘civilization’ have called for reform of the laws favouring abortion and divorce. The blueprint for the Swinging Sexual 60’s whose consequences nationally we have lived through, much to our cost, contained all of these.
The arrival of the Scottish Executive on the moral atmosphere of Scotland with its intention, undocumented, unannounced and in 99% of instances, unwanted, to produce what it considers a civilized society had much the same impact as the arrival of the monster in the film ‘Alien’.
In one of the most frisson-effective scenes in film iconography, it crashes through John Hurt’s chestwall, and most of the rest of the movie is spent by crew members either chasing it, or it chasing them. I feel that there is an analogy there for what has happened in Scotland since 1997. Christians are either chasing up behind the new morality proposed, adopted and passed by our MSPs or the new morality is chasing after Christians, determined to eradicate them.
Think back. When the referendum about devolution took place, was there any thought in voters’ minds as they trailed towards the polls that within a few years the end result of putting their X on the paper would be the prospect of distribution of the morning after pill without parental consent through pharmacists, GPs and clinics?
Of same sex adoption? Of what has been called ‘state sponsored sexual abuse of children’ ie in sex education in schools? Of the Sexual Health Strategy and the abolition of Section 2a? Of the one year quickie divorce?
I think not, nor do I think that many of those voters wanted that. What they have got has been an outright ignoring of reports and recommendations from religious groups on such issues as abortion control, homosexual activities, under-age sex and so on, and relaxation of any constraints that existed on these. If there seems to be an excessive emphasis on sexual matters and activities in the list I have made, that’s because the way to the ‘civilized society’ that its prophets called for starts at the most intimate, in sexual matters.
Just about the last thing that should be offered to such a group with such an agenda, is more control over sexual matters. Yet I read in a Sunday newspaper recently that rumblings can be heard in the Scottish establishment calling for transferring more powers to the Scottish parliament from those currently reserved to Westminster. One such was the transference of abortion, presumably together with human fertilisation and embryology, genetics, xenotransplantation and vivisection to Edinburgh control. Just imagine what tricks our ‘civilized’ MSPs could get up to with more sexual controls on Scottish women. This should be avoided at all cost when we look at what has happened already.
Among MSPs’ most pressing recent discussions has been concern about the question of killing lobsters painlessly. An appropriate choice for them to moon over. Lobster pots are designed so that the lobster can crawl in, but cannot get out. Our MSPs have done something similar to our moral climate. What they have set in place cannot be reversed. Like lobsters, we have all moved down a one way system and there is no way we can get out or get back. The genie may be out of the bottle, but the lobster is in the pot.
