If David Cameron can support gay marriage - so can Alex Salmond.

      The campaign against the Scottish government's proposals to legislate for gay marriage reached critical mass last week - if you'll excuse the pun - with two senior members of the Scottish Roman Catholic hierarchy backing the former SNP leader, Gordon Wilson's call for a referendum on the issue.  Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow and Bishop Joseph Devine of Motherwell have condemned same sex marriage as an abomination. "Those in government need to be respectfully reminded", said Archbishop Conti, that a mandate to govern does not include a mandate to reconstruct society on ideological grounds, nor to undermine the very institution which, from the beginning, has been universally acknowledged as the natural order and bedrock of society, namely marriage and the family".  In other words: Alex, get your pink tanks off our lawn.  

    Archbishop Devine went even further: "We now have a straight fight between faith and atheism, morality and amorality, a culture of life and a culture of death,” he said last week. “The institution of marriage should not be corrupted by the transient fashions of society or by malevolent forces seeking to undermine the place of religious faith in society.”  This is turning into a Holyrood epic, with pointed hats firmly pointed at the SNP government. Alex is ducking for cover. 

   Now as an atheist, or rather a humanist, I have to object here that the gay marriage issue is not about undermining religious faith and undermining he natural order of society, whatever that is, still less an attack on religion.  Actually, if truth be told, the concept of same sex marriage is a triumph for the traditionalists and for people of faith.  It is an admission that there is something more to love than living together and that relationships need 

to be put on a firmer moral foundation. That moral foundation for - most people - still seems to be the essentially the Christian, to the extent that marriage is a Christian institution. 

 The fact that even gay people - the ultimate sexual outsiders- are now are seeking the sanction of marriage is surly the most obvious confirmation of that.  If there really is a straight fight going on, the Christians appear to have won.   That so many senior figures seem not 

to realise this is strange.

   Only twenty years ago, atheists, feminists and marxists condemned the "nuclear family" and marriage as a bourgeois institution that served to oppress women and block social progress.  Marriage was seen as inherently conservative, as a transmission belt for reactionary attitudes of nationalism and patriarchy.  Radical pyschiatrists like R.D. Laing - who has heard of him recently - railed against marriage as the  cause of mental illness and even extreme political movements.  In the sixties and seventies, people tried all sorts of alternatives to marriage - communes, 'open' relationships, serial adultery.   Marriage appears to have emerged from arguably the greatest challenge it has faced in its two thousand year history. 


    Gay marriage is now supported by the Quakers, the Episcopalian Church and unitarians.  The Church of Scotland has opened the door for gay marriage by accepting in principle the presence of openly gay and lesbian ministers.  It would surely be inconceivable for the Kirk to allow homosexuals to speak God's word from the pulpit and yet not allow them to marry each other.  Why is it that the Roman Catholic hierarchy seem to want to make this a political issue rather than a moral one?  

   I am treading into deep waters here and I don't have my arm bands on, so I'll leave it there.   The Church hierarchy is seeking to hijack the Scottish government's current consultation on the subject. And it has done pretty well so far, especially now that the former leader of the Scottish National Party, Gordon Wilson has come out in favour of a referendum on gay marriage.  He hopes it will be rejected.   I'm really not so sure: the only opinion poll I have seen on the issue suggests that 60% of Scots favour legalising gay marriage.   But judging from column inches, the Bishops are ahead on points. 

We always said that the SNP's uncanny unity under its leader Alex Salmond couldn't last, but who would've guessed that it would be gay marriage, not independence lite or keeping the Queen – that would threaten the unity of the nationalist movement. And who would have guessed that Gordon Wilson, the most respected elder statesmen of the Scottish National Party, should be leading the splitters. Mr Wilson says same sex marriage is a “danger to Scotland” because it will lead to “social disintegration, sexual confusion and greater intolerance”.

Since he stood down in 1990 Mr Wilson has largely avoided policy debates so as not to be accused of being a back-seat driver. He speaks for a large number of ordinary SNP members and cannot be dismissed as a homophobic nutter. Worse, his call for a referendum on gay marriage evokes memories of Section 2a and Brian Souter's “Keep the Clause” referendum in 2000. Mr Souter is, of course, the SNP's principal pay master, having funded most of its election victories and has deep pockets. SNP MSPs like Bill Mason and Bill Walker have tabled motions critical of same sex marriage – a move which caused the Nationalist MEP Alyn Smith to refer to “the small, mean angry heads of bigots.”

This is all horribly reminiscent of 2000, when the newly-devolved Scotland seemed to be tearing itself apart over whether or not teachers could refer to homosexual relationships in class. Only it's not Donald Dewar, but Alex Salmond who finds himself battling on two denominational fronts. On the one hand the Roman Catholic Church has been mounting a determined campaign against gay marriage – undermining the SNP leader's attempts to court Scotland's 600,000 strong Catholic community on issues like denominational schools or the Act of Settlement. Now, he has Free Church member Wilson on his back. Salmond has said he personally favours gay marriage, but opposes it being imposed on `”unwilling denominations”.

Yet,in Holyrood most people thought that gay marriage was pretty much a done deal. Even the Tory leader David Cameron supports gay marriage - “because I am a Conservative” as he told the Tory conference last week. Civil partnerships had been so successful that it seemed a mere technicality to give the same sex relationship the same status as heterosexual marriage. The Church of Scotland voted in May to allow gay and lesbian ministers, opening the way for recognition by the Kirk of gay marriage. When the Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon announced a consultation on the issue last month she said that the SNP government was “minded to support gay marriage”. She didn't realise that she was walking into the same moral minefield that blew up under the Communities Minister, Wendy Alexander in 2000.

It took a speech by Tony Blair to the Scottish Labour conference the next year to kill the Keep the Clause issue when he said that the idea of pupils being force fed gay sex education was “utter nonsense”. It is time for Alex Salmond to do the same. He can't allow this issue to fester away in the SNP undergrowth. He needs to show leadership and imagination to prevent this issue becoming a nationalist schism. Like Blair should confidently argue the moral case for same sex marriage while reassuring social conservatives that priests and ministers are not going to end up in court for violating the Human Rights Act.

Gordon Wilson's claim that society will disintegrate because of gay marriage and that Christians will be “ostracised and discriminated against” is neither reasonable nor rational and the First Minister should address this head on. The idea that same sex partnerships undermine marriage is surely wrong: if anything it strengthens the institution in an age when it is under threat from divorce and cohabitation. Gay couples have discovered that they need more than just a recognition that they are financial partners. They need to make a formal commitment to each other, and in a sense to become one moral personality. While marriage may have been sanctified by the church, there is no legal or historical justification for saying that marriage is an exclusively religious institution. The European Convention on Human Rights regards the right to be married as inalienable and irrespective of faith. 

This surely is the way round this awkward question. Leave the religious vows to the church and marriage to the people. In civil society, discrimination on grounds of race, colour religion or sexual orientation is of course intolerable. But this does not mean that individuals are forced to act in a way that violates their conscience. Members of the Roman Catholic will still be allowed to exercise discrimination of the mind by continuing to regard same sex relationships as a violation of God's word.

I can understand that there is a risk that Peter Tatchell or other gay activists might seek to make a test case out of a free church minister's refusal to conduct a gay marriage. But I can't see any prospect of it succeeding. So far as I am aware there has been no attempt to demand that homophobic passages in the Bible should be censored, or that wee frees attend re-education classes organised by the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender outreach workers.

Personally I don't particularly like the idea that gay couples might be barred from being married in certain churches, but I don't particularly schools that discriminate on religious grounds either. However, there's nothing to be served by going to war over these anachronisms. And it doesn't help for members of sexual minority groups to force confrontations with people of faith any more than for religious leaders to make hysterical declarations about gay marriage leading to the end of civilisation as we know it.

Live and let live is always the way to resolve these difficult issues of conscience. Gay marriage is coming whether its opponents want it or not because the couples themselves demand it. As with the issue of gay ministers, religious organisations only marginalise themselves by excluding people who love each other but happen to be of the same sex.  True Christians should surely embrace them.