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There’s a bit of a storm brewing up here in Glasgow that’s now hitting the national headlines, and it all just goes to highlight some of the deep-seated bigotry that still exists (and there was me thinking we might have a nice liberal society…). The story, in a nutshell, is that a few firefighters in Glasgow refused to hand out fire safety leaflets at a Gay Pride march earlier this year. They’ve been disciplined, but today the catholic archbishop of Glasgow, a Mr Conti, publicly supported them.

Here’s what’s so very very wrong with this picture, and Mr Conti’s backing of the firefighters: Firefighters are public servants, and one of the core duties they have to perform is fire prevention. A key part of that is getting out and increasing awareness of the risks. Unfortunately, some firefighters chose to let their personal feelings get in the way (hiding behind a supposed fear of “taunts and jokes”, when these men presumably deal with things most of the rest of us wouldn’t consider in their emergency callouts), and consequently refuse to serve a section of the community they are supposed to be helping. Take it to its (silly) extreme, and you could well have firefighters choosing to not service particular emergency calls due to some bias, preference or opinion on their part. It really is the thin end of a long, nasty and ugly wedge. For all their protestations, the emergency part of their duties is just one part of it, and they cannot and should not distinguish between which parts of their job they do.

Whilst I don’t see that Mr Conti has an opinion any more significant or worthy of respect than anybody else on this hunk of rock, he seems to be highly regarded by some folk (for reasons I can’t fathom if this is what we have to go on). I think the firefighters in question got off very lightly, the issue is showing every sign of refusing to disappear as it should (with duly disciplined staff). Indeed, attempts were made to try and “move on” only yesterday, until Mr Conti stepped in. But I fear that his public and forthright, not to say badly misguided backing of them, will now make this a touch-stone issue for future problems here. This would only further mask that this is a case of bigotry on the part of a small number of people who seem to think they can pick and choose how they perform a core public service, and hide behind a fig-leaf called religion.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 10:19 am and is filed under Atheism, Glasgow, Personal, Politics, Scotland, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.