“Our party is firmly against discrimination of any kind. While I understand the sincerity of the views of Catholic adoption agencies, I don’t believe that you can compromise on an issue of this nature.”
Watch more here:
Subscribe
-
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
-
Like us on Facebook
-
Subscribe to our feed
-
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Most Read
Search
Op-eds
-
Why community politics matters (Mark Corner)
-
A Federal Britain: 1. Renewing democracy through fair representation (Iain Donaldson)
-
A roadmap to Queer Equality (Tara Foster)
-
A strange but welcome feeling (Jennie Rigg)
-
Fifteen years ago today…… (Caron Lindsay)
-
The Joy of Six 1528
-
Endometriosis and acetylation
-
Reform makes first gain from Conservatives in this by-election cycle
-
How Chancellor Reeves torpedoed the economy
-
Council by-election results scorecard 2026-2027
-
The Disneyfication of Hayley Mills
-
Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial
-
Survation now put Andy Burnham 10 points ahead in Makerfield
-
A perpetual pirouette of prevarication?
-
Michael Meadowcroft: A Liberal of Intellectual Rigour and Uncommon Integrity
Recent Comments
cim
As far as voting complexity goes, there's two separate bits to that. 1) How difficult it is to understand how to vote? Closed List is exactly equal to FPTP, ...
Iain Donaldson
As we are neither a member of the EU, nor likely to be in the near future, I won't comment further on Tom's observations other than to say that with the excepti...
Jennie
Tristan: ah, so anyone who has had their ovaries removed or gone through menopause is no longer a woman? Thanks for clearing that up. It'll blow your mind to...
Simon
The Greater Manchester Mayor has devolved powers of the NHS for example than the Greater London Authority and it's Mayor have....
Geoff Reid
Two very basic questions for community politics practitioners with respect to Focus leaflets... Does this leaflet leave any space to say, however briefly, why w...
15 Comments
Except Colin Breed and Richard Younger-Ross.
It’s a sad fact that this move will simply mean that many Church adoption groups will simply stop operating.
I don’t like to agree with Michael Portillo but he rightly asked the question in a program last week, “would any gay couples even approach a Catholic adoption agency anyway when they could go elsewhere?”
If they are interested in the welfare of children, rather than simply in indocrination of their own organisation’s latest moral code, they won’t stop operating. That may be a big ‘if’, of course.
It would be interesting to have had this debate with the views coming from the people working at the ‘coal face’ rather than simply from the people toward the top of the Catholic church. There may have been rather less unanimity – and there wasn’t much in religious groups outside the Catholic hierarchy.
My feeling is the world is moving on, and sooner or later they are likely to have to go through a rewriting of that morality just as they did over masturbation in the 1990s.
Jen,
I take your point but we’re dealing with people who sincerely believe same sex parenting is against a child’s interests. You and I think it is an irrational belief, but we have to recognise it’s a sincere belief (as Ming does in his film).
It’s because of that belief about children’s welfare that they may pack up and call it a day.
This is a case of something that we can’t fix by legislation.
You can only affect someone’s conscience by persuasion and dialogue- in particular liberal Christians arguing for modernisation of old doctrines.
I fear this legislative bashing of people with good intentions, out-dated beliefs, and will not actually improve the life of a single child or gay adult.
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church is going to do is shut down its adoption agencies. The reason those agencies exist is not because the RC Church cares a fig about the welfare of children (rather rich coming from Murphy-O’Connor, paedophile-protector-in-chief) – it is because the Church wants to ensure that as many children as possible are brought up as Roman Catholics. If the agencies go, many children will be lost to the Church (and unavailable for abuse, of couse). So the agencies will continue functioning, whatever the state of the law.
In this country, we are far too deferential to religion. Or at least to certain religions. Not to Pagans, who are the semi-legitimate targets for cheap sneers. Or Hindus, who are told that they cannot display their sacred symbol, the swastika.
Anyone recall the hypocrisy of Tony Blair (who believes in transubstantiation) attacking Glenn Hoddle for expressing his belief in karma?
I am amazed that the RC lobby has lost out to the gay lobby inside the Labour Party. Thankfully, on civil liberties and clean government issues, Charlie Falconer is doing some useful work.
That picture of Ming is dreadful. It looks as if he has been lined at the roadside for summary execution by the Gestapo!
anthony – by refusing to place children with gay couples these agencies are restricting the range of families the children they are responsible for can be placed with and thereby reducing the chances of them finding the best family for them. In doing so they are clearly placing their own doctrine ahead of the best interests of the children.
“If the agencies go, many children will be lost to the Church (and unavailable for abuse, of couse).”
That’s a pretty despicable comment IMO.
“Or Hindus, who are told that they cannot display their sacred symbol, the swastika.”
When – AFAIK there is no prohibition on using the swastika in this country. I’ve used it on anti-BNP leaflets and there’s one on the front of this months Searchlight magazine.
“That picture of Ming is dreadful.”
AIUI Google selects the middle frame of the clip as it’s preview image so it is quite hard to edit to get the frame you’d prefer.
HM, what is pretty despicable is priests abusing children and the Church leaders protecting them (including Cormac Murphy-O’Connor when he was Bishop of Arundel and Brighton). Not much sympathy for the victims, obviously. As always, the Church comes first.
It is Angela Merkel who is proposing to tell Hindus that they cannot use the swastika. She wants to impose a swastika ban on all EU member states. The same will presumably apply to the Basque Lauburu – including the one emblazoned on the front of a house in Brockham, Surrey. Rather ironic, given the fact that the Basques were the very first victims of the Nazi war machine. Indeed, Basques continue to be the victims of ethnic cleansing (Itoitz Dam) and were only recently subjected to the arbitrary closure of a newspaper (Euskaldunon Egunkaria) and the imprisonment and torture of its editor, all at the hands of the supposedly democratic Spanish state.
HM, I probably didn’t make myself sufficiently clear in my original comment. There is SOCIAL pressure on Hindus not to display the swastika, which I consider is misconceived. There is not – as yet – a legal prohibition on the display of the swastika in the UK. The swastika is an ancient symbol which pervades the prehistories of cultures from Galicia to China. It was, as the Hindus remind us, a symbol of peace until an intellectual lightweight in Munich appropriated it for an ultra-nationalist political party.
What a dreadful video. Why has he got a tree growing out of his head for most of it?
You were clearly implying that Roman Catholic adoption agencies served the function of providing an available pool of children for abuse. That’s pretty unjustifiable and despicable allegation IMO.
Trying to justify it by an unrelated issue doesn’t change that.
HM, I am not “clearly implying” anything, except in your imagination. I am pointing to the hypocrisy of the RC Church in claiming to care about the welfare of children, given the endemic nature of child sexual and physical abuse within the Church, and the attitude of Church leaders towards it. Catholic adoption agencies do, therefore, provide the Church with an available pool of children to abuse. Any activity which puts children under the control of priests is going to do that. (And I am not even referring to the mental child abuse of coercively indoctrinating children with religion.)
I should point out that while the RC Church has a truly appalling record in this area, other religious bodies are not without blemish. Even the cuddly Church of England had the sadistic child abuser, Geoffrey Fisher, as its boss for nearly two decades.
HM, examine your conscience before you blow off criticism of the Church in such a peremptory fashion.
“If the agencies go, many children will be lost to the Church (and unavailable for abuse, of couse).”
If that is not an implication that what is it?
That the Catholic Church has a number of peodophile priests is not at doubt nor that it has been quite disgraceful in covering it up. That is though some way short of an institutional structure to procure children for abuse.
“HM, examine your conscience” – and precisely what is that supposed to mean?
Also ask yourself why the various churches are so reclutant to have women in their upper echelons. Might it perhaps have something to do with women having a habit of speaking out against child abuse?