Catholic Labor MP's Experience equals homosexual ignorance
A Labour Party Member of Parliament who said that she voted for the government’s “gay marriage” despite her Catholic faith, “seems to be suffering from the modern disease of terminal non-judgmentalism,” said one of the country’s top advocates of traditional marriage today.
“This is not surprising, considering the way in which the dictatorship of relativism has not been resisted in many Catholic homes, schools and churches,” added Anthony Ozimic, communications manager for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), who have been leading a national campaign against the bill.
Catherine McKinnell
Catherine McKinnell, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne North, said during debate on the bill in the Commons that she was speaking not as someone who believes “strongly that either side of the argument is absolutely right, but because I can see both sides.” She said that her views were “inextricably bound” to her “experience,” and that though she had struggled with the requirements of her faith, ultimately her “experience” won.
McKinnel said that in her “close-knit” Roman Catholic family, she had a homosexual brother who was two years older than her, and with whom she was close. Now, she said, her children are also close to their uncle and his partner.
“My children do not put titles on it, or boundaries on its meaning. They do not put judgments on its worth. They see two people who love and care for each other, and who face the joys and trials of life together,” she said.
She said she had met with teachers and other constituents who feared the bill will curtail their right to express their religiously-based moral beliefs, and said, “I understand the pressures.”
She referred to her own education “in an all-girls convent school,” which she described as having been “thorough but balanced.”
“We were taught the Catholic Church’s view, the humanist view, the atheist view, and the views of other faiths, and we discussed and debated issues, from abortion to euthanasia, with a broad and balanced approach. That is what I want for my children, and I believe that that is entirely possible as a result of the bill as drafted,” she said.
She added that she has “taken on board” the issues surrounding “faith education” and “having protections in place, so that people are free to learn of different views—views about Christian marriage and what the state teaches”. She said she felt “reassured” that the bill provided sufficient protections for those “with a religious view of marriage to practise and teach their understanding of marriage,” as long as it is “done in an open, inclusive and tolerant way”.
She believes, she said, “in a society and state that do not discriminate on the grounds of race, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation or religious belief.”
McKinnell was also among a small number of parliamentarians who announced they would no longer accept internships from the Christian Action Research and Education (CARE), a Christian advocacy group that runs crisis pregnancy centres and supports the effort to help people overcome same-sex attraction. McKinnell told BBC Newcastle radio she would not fire her current CARE intern, but that she had severed her relationship with the group.
SPUC has frequently thanked the hierarchy of the Catholic Church for their stand against the bill.
Ozimic, a Catholic, said that many in the fight against the bill have lamented the “negative influence of bureaucrats at national and diocesan levels in the Catholic Church in England and Wales”. “However,” he said, “thankfully there have been some signs of hope recently at the national level and with appointments of new bishops.”
The choice of men to fill the role of bishops is largely decided by the Vatican’s nuncio in consultation with the sitting episcopate. The current nuncio to Britain and Gibraltar is Archbishop Antonio Mennini, appointed by Pope Benedict in 2010, who has been responsible for the choice of a number of new men who have broken ranks with their confreres’ more accommodating position on homosexuality and abortion.
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