Minette Marrin, the columnist with whom I most often agree, put it best in the Sunday Telegraph last week. Couldn’t we just have fudged this gay adoption/Catholic objection thing, she asked? She herself, she said, supported the new anti-discrimination rules to which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is objecting; she thought their objections wrong-headed. But she wondered whether both sides might have found a classic British compromise, or — to be frank — a fudge.
It’s what I’ve wondered from the start. Life (and career) finds roles for us all, and one part of my job description has become ‘Tory gay’. Another is ‘insistent non-believer’. I am therefore duty-bound to fight the gay-rights corner in this ridiculous boxing match and, anyway, if there is to be a boxing match I am firmly on the anti-discriminationists’ side, and certainly not going to offer comfort to a Church which (for all its protestations about ‘loving the sinner, hating the sin’, etc.) plainly hates and cannot accept homosexuality. But I think Marrin’s question — do we have to have this fight at all? — is central.
So I shall propose a couple of perfectly workable fudges. We can then ask ourselves what the Roman Catholic Church’s response to them is likely to be. On that basis we may perhaps get a better appreciation of who is picking this fight. Because I rather think it is the Roman Catholic Church.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who (along with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) is trying to position the Church as the victim of discrimination, has been making much of what (on the Today programme) he called his co-religionists’ ‘freedom to act according to their conscience’ and the state’s refusal to allow a ‘public space’ for the Catholic conscience.
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