The Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh and leader of the 800,000 Scottish Catholics, has protested against the new legislation adopted by the government which would permit homosexual couples to adopt children, in spite of the fact that a consultative referendum had shown that 89% of the Scottish population are contrary to gay adoptions. The law on adoptions published in Scotland last week for the first time permits unmarried couples, both heterosexual and homosexual, to adopt children. Similar legislation came into force in England and Wales at the start of this year. The cardinal called gay adoptions “a perverse social phenomenon” and, referring to the ignored referendum, declared: “So clear a contempt for the results of an exercise in consultation make me doubt the value or the sense of participating in further consultations”. The Scottish Catholic bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, has also protested: he has written to the Scottish first minister Jack McConnell, asking him to abandon the legislation, but McConnell has refused and expressed his view that the government is not threatening family values with the new legislation.
