The Catholic Church in Scotland has joined an array of faith groups raising concerns about the treatment of Scottish National Party (SNP) leadership candidate Kate Forbes MSP, who has received heavy criticism for her socially conservative views since launching her campaign last week.
Forbes, the 32-year old MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch and current finance secretary of Scotland’s devolved government, is a practising member of the Free Church of Scotland and has spoken publicly about her faith on multiple occasions.
Originally the presumed favourite to succeed Nicola Sturgeon, the present first minister and SNP leader, Forbes’ stated intention to halt her predecessor’s controversial Gender Recognition Reform bill and her personal opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion prompted controversy shortly after her leadership bid launched on 20 February.
Forbes’ views on premarital sex and women’s place in Church ministry have also come under fire in what critics describe as an attempt to exclude religious believers from public life.
In response, the Scottish Catholic Church has joined with Scotland’s primary Protestant denomination, the Church of Scotland and the Scottish Association of Mosques to warn the debate risks permanently damaging the ability of religious believers to enter politics.
In an interview with The Herald, Peter Kearney, the spokesman for Scotland’s Catholic bishops, expressed regret over the decline of tolerance for religious views in politics.
Wheras previously political parties would allow “certain moral matters such as such as abortion, same sex marriage and assisted suicide, to be treated as matters of conscience”, he said, “tolerance” has now “given way to conformity in politics”.
The response to Forbes’ candidacy has made many Catholics uncomfortable about entering public life, he said.
His comments were echoed by the Church of Scotland, which said in a statement last week that the discussion around Forbes displayed a “level of abuse that should never be acceptable”. Branding some attacks on Forbes “deplorable”, the spokesperson said that “as fellow Christians, we support Ms Forbes’ right to hold her beliefs, as we would for anyone else”.
Forbes’ own denomination, the Free Church of Scotland, has stated that the response to her candidacy reflected a “lamentable” degree of “anti-Christian intolerance”.
The Scottish Association of Mosques praised Cambridge graduate Forbes for openly speaking about her beliefs and described rhetoric around her faith as “deeply concerning”.
In spite of these interventions, Forbes is widely considered to have been damaged by her socially-conservative views, with several of her parliamentary backers withdrawing previous endorsements of her campaign and the co-convenor of the SNP’s LGBT caucus entering a formal complaint of transphobia against her.
John Swinney MSP, the deputy leader of the SNP, stated last week that hostility to Forbes was not based on her religious views. “It’s been unhelpful that the debate has been focused on the question of faith because in my view, it’s got nothing to do with faith,” Swinney said.
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