Back in March, leading Scottish Bishop Joseph Devine, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Motherwell, launched an attack on gays and, more specifically, actor Ian McKellen, criticizing the motivation of the gay community for honoring Holocaust survivors, and remarking during a lecture on Christian faith in Glasgow that “[he] saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail.”
At a recent speech to gay rights group Stonewall, McKellen fired back, saying, “From the pulpit, homophobia is preached by some arrogant religious leaders who think their beliefs are superior to our inborn and, some would say, God-given nature….’We neglect the gay lobby at our peril’, he said. And when a mother asked him what he would do if his child said he had a mission to be gay, the Bishop of Motherwell replied, sympathising with the mother but not the child, ‘I would try to handle it with a degree of compassion but would not tolerate it.'”
His criticism was joined by actor Simon Callow, who spoke out in a Sunday Times interview: “The bishop is in my view a profoundly ignorant and stupid man. If he finds it offensive that gay people want to celebrate those gay people who died in the Holocaust — which was a large number of people — he’s also profoundly un-Christian. But then all churches have thrived on prejudice, it’s a means of keeping people under their control. I think they are really, really shocked at how quickly the world has moved on. They are constantly evoking some kind of specious moral authority which they’ve taken on. Nobody has particularly asked their advice on matters moral. We are working them out for ourselves.”
