It’s Time

Just watch this video – there’s people and places that you may well recognise.

I’m very pleased to be one of the faces in the video above, which has been produced by the Equality Network to galvanise the last months of the campaign for equal marriage in Scotland. Political leaders, celebrities, thinkers and so-called ordinary folk are uniting around the idea that same-sex couples should have access to the same rights, priviledges and responsibilties as straight couples.

It’s time for the law in Scotland to allow same-sex couples to marry. It’s time for the law to be changed to allow a couple to stay married when one goes through a gender transition. It’s time for gay and lesbian couples to have not merely the same rights as straight couples but also the same social status. In short, it is time for change.

The video has been many months in the planning and producing. I think it is exciting, joyful and a credit to all involved.

One of the most impressive thing about the equal marriage campaigning in Scotland is that it has been relentlessly positive.

I was partly preaching about this yesterday, the day that the Sunday Mail (which is not the Mail on Sunday!) came out gloriously in favour of the equal marriage campaign with a double page spread and an excellent leader column. The Sunday Mail is the widest read paper in Scotland, the Sunday sibling of the Daily Record. I’ll post that sermon on here in a day or two. For now, I’ll just watch the video above one more time.

Equal Marriage is mainstream. Not, as someone suggested to me recently, merely the concern of a tiny minority.

This is an idea whose time has come.

Update
Beth’s blogging about this too – she was there!
And so is Christine McIntosh – she thinks it is time for change

Midnight Mass Sermon 2012

I don’t know whether you are ready.

I do know that this year, for me, the cumulative effects of coming back from sabbatical just recently and then succumbing to one of the nasty bugs that has been going around the city at the end of last week, has meant that my pre-Christmas rush this year seemed to be condensed not simply into a couple of days but a couple of hours.

Cesar Augustus may have decreed that everyone was to return to their own town to be counted for a census, but this year the Provost of St Mary’s has decreed that henceforth, all Christmas Cards shall be known as Epiphany Cards and that everyone who receives them shall be grateful.

In short, my planning has gone a little awry.

Thus, I found myself at lunchtime today in one of the nearest shops to where I live. It is a greengrocer and I had to decide that most of my Christmas food shopping this year was going to be bought right then and right there or not be bought at all.

As I bundled veg into my basket, the proprietor looked at me and raised an eyebrow. [Read more…]