My Little World10

Well it is Easter so it was bound to come up

firstly, christians whinge about bookies being open on good friday for the first time - whinge away, welcome to secular britain, bitches - that was easy

and then there's this little doozie - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7308997.stm

a bill on embryo research, not a huge issue here tbh - until now! in general british people have rarely given a monkeys about this sort of thing - religious types whinge, we don't listen yadda yadda 

same old same old here - and then a scottish catholic cardinal (yeah, bit of a minority) starts screaming 'frankenstein' and urges MPs to defy the whip, if they even use it - then several Labour MPs and even ministers started saying they would refuse to vote for it regardless of a whip

now my views on the actual bill aside (i support it, it's too late not to now really)

why is a minority religion getting a say? 9% of this country is catholic (or 'papist' if you're a rule britannia type) - and i doubt all of them are devout

(fyi - Labour is likely the most catholic of the 3 parties, CofE being called 'Tories at prayer' sums them up and Lib Dems generally are quite secular, being the liberals)

so c.650 seats in the commons - so around 60 catholics in a perfect world (or none, hah!), Labour have c.350 seats so c.30 catholics? (altho it's probably that most of them are in Labour) seems fair - if we're going to vote on religious grounds the only way i can tolerate it is if it's representative - say there were a hundred+ catholics, and they voted according to their 'conscience' - is that fair? they weren't elected on religious grounds, but a religion gets a bigger say than it represents nationally

this is not to advocate going back to catholic restriction pre-1829, in theory it doesn't matter if all 650 of them were catholic, as long as they don't bring their religion into politics - if they aren't elected on a platform of their personal beliefs then why are they allowing the pope to influence them? they are representatives of constituencies, if i were an MP for a firmly catholic or anti-bill constituency i would follow their line, despite my feelings - it's an unlikely scenario but serves to illustrate a point

you can object to the bill, but as a servant of the people you pledged to serve them and vote in their best interests, not your own - so like i say if the catholics are firmly against this then I can only accept around 60 'catholic' votes over this - otherwise this is a breakdown of democracy and an abuse of trust

nb i appreciate that there is other opposition to this besides catholics - but it's the biggest issue and the most repulsive