Alex Salmond supports homosexual marriage

5 May 2011

Only days before the Scottish Parliament Election Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has declared himself in favour of homosexual marriage.

This leaves concerned Christians with very little choice in their constituency vote, but they do have Scottish Christian Party candidates on their Regional ballot paper.

This last minute revelation from Alex Salmond is par for the course.  Just as the main parties would not declare what cuts they would make prior to the last General Election, and some even said the opposite of what they are now doing, such as raising VAT, so the Scottish electorate are being taken for a ride by political sleight of hand.  This is government by stealth - hiding from voters and even from one’s supporters what are one’s true opinions until it is too late to do much about it.  Many postal votes will have been cast before it became clear what Alex Salmond’s position is.

Now Stonewall, the homosexual lobby group, plans to send training packs into every primary school in Britain.

Investigative journalism is dying a slow death.  It would have been easy for any journalist to make a story out of this weeks ago, but instead they allow the party leaders to control the agenda.  On Newsnight Scotland last night the pundits complained that “the campaign has been dire”.  The media has itself to blame for a boring show.  Day after day the media focused its attention on the five main leaders and we were served the same clippings of leaders repeating the same words with little challenging interviewing.  There are multitudes of journalists writing screeds of column inches but they cannot find room for the opinions of the smaller parties.  The dumbing down of our society to the few sound bites that politicians, and the media, think that the public can digest is almost complete, but one cannot then complain that one cannot make an interesting story out of a few clichés strung together.

Unlike the media, the public do not want a colourful show.  They want politicians that they can trust.  Instead it is electors’ questioning at hustings which is revealing the position of politicians.  Increasingly, hustings are disappearing and it is Christian churches which are hosting hustings.  Unpaid electors are doing the job that paid journalists are expected to do.  The STV has been more innovative and interesting than the BBC.  It had a series of interviews with party leaders and had the imagination to include the minor party leaders on its Face-to-Face programme, although each was very brief.

Having discovered at a hustings that none of the politicians represent your interests, what do you do you?  At least the Scottish Christian Party is on every Regional ballot paper.

Some backers of Alex Salmond will now feel that they have been served a cold fish.