Dear Editor,
I would like to thank the three secularists for their letters against me (22 December).
Leslie Thomson inadvertently makes my case for me when he states that the Catholic midwives should not expect their jobs to be changed to suit their philosophy.
That is precisely the point. They had been midwives for 20 years when the job was changed by the health board and they were then compelled to participate in providing abortions – something they had not done before and which the 1967 Abortion Act allowed them to be exempt from.
Robert Canning repeats the mantra that “secularist groups have no wish to exclude views from public debate” and yet this is precisely what they do.
They automatically exclude any view which they deem as religious and thus, for example, in their current campaign against Labour leader Jim Murphy they continually refer to him as a “Catholic fanatic” and state that they don’t mind his Catholic views providing he never actually acts upon them!
This is the secularist idea of inclusion.
Finally, Neil Barber repeats the other myth of the secularist creed, that “secularism has no religious or philosophical position at all”.
To disprove this all you have to do is visit the secularist web pages where you will see that pro-abortion, pro-same-sex marriage and even in the case of the Scottish Secular Society, pro-independence are the “secular” positions.
The various tiny secularist groups are in fact using secularism as a Trojan horse seeking to impose their extremist “liberal” views on the whole of society and then telling us all that we must obey their absolutist state.
The Catholic midwives are just a foretaste of where this absolutist intolerance will lead us.
David Robertson
Solas CPC
Dundee
http://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/letters/secular-attack-1-3641577
The letters to which I was responding are here – http://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/letters/midwives-too-must-fit-into-the-system-1-3640585