In last week’s column, I drew attention to the role of Christian privilege in shaping debate about the appropriateness of someone like SNP leadership candidate Kate Forbes – a member of the hardline Free Church of Scotland – replacing Nicola Sturgeon at the head of the party and the Scottish government.
Forbes’ defenders insist that ‘tolerance’ demands that her sincerely held religious beliefs (she admits, for example, that she would have voted against same-sex marriage had she been an MSP in 2014) should not be considered in assessing her bid for the top spot at Holyrood, no matter how bigoted those beliefs are.
As I noted last week, such a twisted view of ‘tolerance’ bears a striking resemblance to the ‘religious freedom’ rhetoric that the American Christian right has been using and abusing for decades to enshrine a privileged status for conservative Christians in US law. With this, they can roll back rights and carve out ever greater conscience exceptions that allow them to discriminate against those they other, especially members of the LGBTIQ+ community, at the expense of equal accommodation in the public square.
