Same-sex marriage could not be described as a central issue in the Holyrood election, having been legal in Scotland since 2014. However, some are keen to make it one. Earlier this week, the Daily Record published a bizarre story attacking Tory leader Douglas Ross for a seven-year-old comment about marriage.
In an ‘exclusive’ exposé the Record noted that: ‘Scots Tory leader Douglas Ross would have voted against same-sex marriage in 2014 if he had been an MSP’. Ross also made the apparently heinous statement: ‘We need to recognise both sides of the argument.’ Other papers later aped the ‘revelations’, and they were even raised in a Channel 4 leaders’ debate.
There is a disparaging attitude towards religious and socially conservative views that pervades the political sphere and the news media.
Ross has changed his mind on same-sex marriage, a fact alluded to a mere three lines into the Daily Record article. He is ‘now fully supportive of the policy’.
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