Mick Hartley

The Indie present it as a case of hard-line Catholics battling the forces of progress:

She is a devout Catholic and member of the Opus Dei sect. His leanings to Rome have been rewarded with audiences in front of successive Popes.

So, when Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly team up to deny gay couples equal access to church-run adoption agencies, as we reveal today, it is little wonder that their opponents believe it is the “Catholic tendency” at work.

“We are descending into a spiral of immorality,” said Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of the Catholic church in Scotland, when that country brought its laws into line with those of the rest of the UK to allow local authorities to place children with gay parents, just before Christmas.

Now, a further change in the law to remove from Catholic-run adoption agencies the right to ban gay people threatens to provoke a full-scale battle throughout the UK.

But, whatever your views on adoption by gay couples, the Catholic-run adoption agencies surely have a right to run their agencies according to their own beliefs. If you’re part of a gay couple and want to adopt, then don’t go to a Catholic-run agency.

The BBC quote environment minister Ben Bradshaw:

Mr Bradshaw told the BBC’s Politics Show he would be very surprised if the Government was thinking of “bowing to pressure from conservative Catholics.”

He added: “This Labour Party has an excellent record on equality. We’ve got ride of most of the discriminatory laws against lesbians and gay people.

“I think that this is an issue of equality. It’s exactly the same as saying you can’t have a child for adoption because you’re black or because you’re a woman or because you’re disabled,” he also said.

But is it the same? That’s the whole issue. Catholics would argue that it isn’t: that the fact of prospective parents being gay and of the same sex is highly relevant to the bringing-up of a child. Gay parenting doesn’t offend me personally, but I can certainly understand a moral position that does find it offensive, in a way that I couldn’t excuse, for instance, a ban on dealing with black couples, or mixed-race couples.