A Right Rammy.

 Cardinal Keith O'Brien.

I am not inclined to jump into an ongoing public stooshie too often, but it strikes me that my local RC Heirach has gone off rather loudly in public on the subject of Same Sex Marriage. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9122961/Gay-marriage-is-like-slavery-Catholic-leader-says.html for further details  My objections are not to his saying what he said - after all, it's a free country and he is an RC Archbishop, so was scarcely likely to give it anything like a ringing endorsement, as that isn't the line RC theology or ethics take.  No, it's more that I find his allegory with the re-introduction of slavery singularly inappropriate - the proposal is to give freedom to LGBT people to wed their best beloveds, not to deprive those who want to marry a person of the other gender of their freedom to marry.  I also find his intemperate language frankly offensive.  But it seems odd to me that this is the same Archbishop who back in 2000 appointed an RC chaplain to the Scotland 2000 Conference on Christianity and LGBT issues and sent a fairly supportive message to encourage it's dialogue.  I seem to recall that I was on the the steering committee at the time!  Either he's radically changed his mind through some spiritual or intellectual epiphany or reflection (which could perhaps say in public - closer contact with Pope Benedict and his thinking might have had this effect) or that Red Hat he got has  radically changed his sense of what it is to be a Bishop of the RC Church and made him more Ultramontane in his pronouncements than in days of yore.  Archbishop Nichols in Westminster seems to be rather more efficient at communicating the Party Line without gratuitously offending a heck of a lot of people.  As this shows http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/02/28/archbishop-nichols-reaffirms-soho-masses-after-criticism/  Mind you, the comments column suggest there are a fair pochle of bigoted and viciously homophobic RC laity and clergy who read the Catholic herald.  Is it the Daily Mail for the Pope's 1st XI?