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Mario Conti is pursuing
a cause which should be
consigned to the dustbin
John Cameron
Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, in his sermon to mark the seventh anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI, once again returned to the theme of gay marriage.
He referred to the danger of tolerance being transformed ‘into a kind of tyranny in which religious views are the only ones which seem unworthy of respect and acceptance’. Society, he claimed, was descending into ‘ethical confusion and moral disintegration as the government and judiciary slip society’s moorings from the capstans of virtue’. Finally he criticised those who would ‘redefine marriage without reference to children or the natural law, putting quality and diversity on a higher level than faith and reason’.
Well that is all good knock-about stuff but at the heart of it all is an attempt to restrict the role of the secular government to merely safeguarding current laws and practices. He maintains: ‘It is not its role to recreate our society according to passing fashions and ideologies or to redefine nature in terms of persons, their rights or natural institutions’. Yet in recent times there have been far greater changes to the law on citizens’ rights than the present proposals on same-sex marriage, in particular the position of women. In the face of opposition from interested parties – mainly male-dominated institutions – the government has raised them from second-class citizens to full legal equality.
The secular government has also extended equality to people of colour as it did earlier, to the great and lasting benefit of the Catholic church, to people of all faiths and of none. It should not be a matter of regret that during the late 20th century equality was gradually extended to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
Discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity is now illegal in housing, employment, the provision of goods and services and in HM forces. As for his claim that the intention is simply to marginalise religion, Quakers, Unitarians, Liberal Jews among many others wish to be allowed to perform same-sex marriages.
I look forward to a time when this dispute – which seems jarringly ridiculous even today – will be relegated to the dustbin of history and children will be taught about it alongside slavery and the burning of witches to show how we have far we have progressed from barbarism.
The belief that economic growth would promote Chinese democracy has proved fanciful and looking at India’s chaotic and unresponsive political system one can see why. Its infrastructure has hardly moved on since the Raj while its nightmare bureaucracy is a relic of the time when its leaders were educated at the London School of Economics.
China’s single-party system has been remarkably successful in education, housing and healthcare and its environmental controls are more coherent than those of Europe. Every year it produces millions of graduates in maths and the hard sciences whereas Scotland has comprehensively destroyed its excellent schools for party political reasons.
In spite of a recent downgrade, China’s economy is still growing at 8.5% with no sign of the property bubble and banking collapse predicted by so many Western investors. Yet the chance of Chinese living standards catching up with America’s any time soon is remote and some of the areas of western China are unbelievably poor and backward.
In terms of per capita income, China is still miserably poor – worse than Russia or Brazil to say nothing of Greece – with less than one-quarter of the equivalent US income. To make the kind of Singapore breakthrough from poverty to genuine affluence, China must shift from quantity to quality with even greater productivity and innovation.In the end it will need to shake off the shackles of government fiat because, in spite of all the post-crisis anti-market hysterics, investment needs to be driven by economic returns.
China also needs to rebalance its economy, strengthen its banking, liberalise its currency movement and must start to wean itself off an excessive dependence on exports. Its interests are best served by financial liberalisation and, while it can safely ignore the West’s renewables mania, its energy production can and should be more widely based.
A toxic legacy of the grossly misconceived ‘one-child’ policy is the ominous prediction that the ratio of workers to the retired will be the same at that of Italy in a mere 20 years. Yet with the dreadful cultural revolution consigned to history, the central government has accepted that traditional culture is integral to Chinese society. That culture has been heavily influenced by Confucianism and there is no obvious clash between modern democratic ideals or human rights and that ancient philosophy.
The rising oriental giant already has the intellectual, manufacturing, creative, innovative and productive firepower to render Scotland utterly irrelevant to the world economy. Instead of readying our young people for the fiercely competitive world which awaits them Alex Salmond promises Scotland will be ‘a beacon for progressive opinion’. Well I am sure that is terribly important just as it was essential to have the deck-chairs neatly arranged on the Titanic as it slipped into the depths of the North Atlantic. But we already depend on imported Asian medics and the Scots and their politicians have a lack of understanding of science and technology so total it is almost a thing of wonder.
John Cameron is a physicist and former Church of Scotland parish minister
