Another day, another Catholic clergy shows us that leading a cloistered life might not lead to the most well-adjusted person, and it certainly doesn’t encourage an awareness of the society at large. Just last weekend, the Catholic cardinal in charge of Scotland made a whopper of a statement, in which he described gay marriage as being as morally reprehensible as slavery. From The Independent:

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of Catholics in Scotland, described gay marriage as a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right” and said the Government’s plan to reform marriage laws was “madness”.

In a stinging response to the Government’s assurances that no church would be compelled to conduct gay marriages, he wrote: “No government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

“Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalize slavery but assured us that ‘no one will be forced to keep a slave’. Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?”