"Haven't we all done things we regret when we were young?"

I don't know. For years the Peter Tatchell's of this world have been saying “don’t knock it til you’ve tried it”.

It appears that if someone takes them at their word, trying it, then knocking it, that’s a bad thing.

Shouldn’t we all profit from experience?

Cardinal O’Brien was the most high-profile and outspoken opponent of gay marriage in Britain, condemning it as a “grotesque subversion”.He warned that the plans, supported by the governments in Westminster and Holyrood, would open the way to “further aberrations” and said society “would be degenerating even further than it already has into immorality.”

 He can see into David Cameron's mind ! The good Cardinal seems to be pretty much on the case.

His comments earned him the title “Bigot of the Year” from the gay rights group Stonewall.

So what else is new ?

But last night Evan Davis, the BBC presenter, who is gay, posted a message on Twitter suggesting that the Cardinal’s fierce rhetoric might have been a way of suppressing his own “torment”.

* spits on floor *

The bad news is that our sin is ever before us. But there's good news too...

If only he'd just murdered someone forty-odd years ago !

Then the Indie and Guardian would have been asking why he's being hounded by vindictive hangers and floggers, and saying 'haven't we all done things we regret when we were young?'.

 


My offences truly I know them;
My sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned;
What is evil in your sight I have done.




(FWIW, I do think that priestly chastity, honoured more in the breach than the observance for at least the first thousand years of the Church, has been highly dysgenic (as well as perhaps unscriptural - wasn't St Peter married?). Look at the number of great Britons post-Reformation who grew up in a vicarage - Hooke and Wren, Ben Johnson, Hobbes, Nelson, Austen, Coleridge, the Brontes for starters.

Similarly in medieval Europe we see that prominent rabbis and Talmudic scholars had more children than the average.

But for the Catholic nations (and pre-Reformation northern Europe), priests, a traditionally high status occupation, had few acknowledged children - certainly much fewer than average, tending towards zero in the last few centuries.

If some of the brightest and best don't breed, it's not good for any population.)