If anyone is displaying dogmatic, unforgiving attitudes, it is Harvie
IAM deeply disappointed by the Scottish Green Party’s attitude toward Kate Forbes. I have always felt their policies were a good fit for my values, and was impressed by Patrick Harvie’s performance in interviews in the lead-up to the 2014 referendum.
I wrote to The National defending Forbes’s faith-based values when she ran for party leadership last year. She stated her personal opinion on marriage, gay marriage, abortion etc openly and honestly.
As far as I remember, she also stated that she would not seek to undo any measures she was asked about, only that she would not have voted for them had she been in parliament when they arose.
As I said at the time, the Free Church is very aware of human fallibility and the need for understanding and forgiveness. When Forbes was considering putting herself forward this time, she said that if she was wrong about anything, she hoped someone would tell her. She strikes me as very much the sort of person I want to see more of in our politics.
I am afraid that since the gender issue came to the fore, the Green leadership have lost the plot. It is not at all clear that most people in Scotland are convinced by the trans orthodoxy the Greens have espoused. If anyone here is holding dogmatic, “unforgiving attitudes”, it is Patrick Harvie. I have voted for the Greens on the list in the past, but I don’t think I will be doing so again. Robert Moffat
Penicuik
FOR a party that espouses an unambiguous and ostentatious position regarding, among other matters, clean environments, the Greens spent a great deal of time during FMQs on Thursday spewing out a surfeit of toxicity borne along in dark and brooding clouds of vitriolic emissions. The selfrighteous and the narcissistic would be heard, and so the martyrdom of Kate Forbes continues.
While Messrs Harvie and Greer promote the rights of the LGBT community, might they not perhaps acknowledge also, and with equal vigour, the fundamental rights of freedom of religion, and, importantly in this particular instance, freedom of conscience?
Hell hath no fury like a Green spurned, and so a member of the Free Church of Scotland has become a stumbling block for them as they struggle, in their heightened state of frustration, to understand completely the meaning and the significance of the notions of tolerance and discrimination. But then, the notion of “progressive” has been equally problematic for them.
The Bute House Agreement allowed a rather malevolent genie out of its bottle, and it’s not taking kindly to having lost its liberty! Patrick Hynes
Airdrie, North Lanarkshire
FRIDAY’S edition carried an article which described Ross Greer as “the youngest-ever MSP to be elected”.
I am afraid that I cannot accept that as a valid comment. He was, indeed, the youngest-ever MSP to enter the Parliament, but to describe the process by which he gained entry as being elected is stretching things,
He did not gain his position because anybody voted for him as an individual. He was inducted into the parliament because the Scottish Green Party gained sufficient second-choice votes to entitle them under our apology for proportional representation to nominate an individual to the seat.
That isn’t being elected, that is being appointed and he, in fact, does not represent a single, solitary constituent by obligation! He represents the Scottish Green Party, and any affiliation to the rights of the voters is secondary to that fact.
It matters not a whit whether he is a good parliamentarian, nor even whether I agree with his policies and performance or not – they are not sufficient for him to be described as having been elected.
He is a beneficiary of that which I regard, as do many others of my acquaintance, as a system designed to mock democracy.
Les Hunter
Lanark
AT Thursday’s FMQ’s Patrick Harvie had a question – Ruth Wishart described him as “winning the wasp-chewing impersonation hands down”. At teatime he was on Radio Scotland saying Kate Forbes was wrong in her views. Is he really saying those of us who don’t agree
with his views are all wrong? Is this Green democracy in action?
Their views on sex and gender have worried and upset many many women who want safe spaces in toilets, hospitals, prisons and shelters. I don’t know one woman (other than Green MSPs) who supports the idea of self-identification and malebodied persons in female prisons or anywhere else.
We know conversion therapy is wrong but why replace it with chemical and surgical conversion, which in my mind is even worse?
He wants us to accepts his views but he will not accept opposite views. Is he telling us that if we don’t agree with his views we cannot serve in government or in public life? Winifred McCartney
Paisley
IN his letter of May 11, Andrew Haddow compares religious belief, a choice, to being gay, which is not.
Those holding religious beliefs are absolutely entitled to protection from persecution but it is acrobatic reasoning to claim that religious freedom should include the right freely to discriminate against others. Neil Barber Edinburgh Secular Society
THOUGH I agree with Rob Gibson (Letters, May 7) on land value taxation (which already exists indirectly, eg in the form of income tax on land-rent), I reckon council tax should, to that same end, not be scrapped but reformed.
The whole levy should be on site values, which are publicly created, with houses exempted so as not to deter improvements. And it goes without saying that revaluations must take place every few years, before they become a political hot potato.
George Morton
Rosyth