THE leader of the Scottish Family Party, the country’s new right-wing, pro-Brexit, anti-feminist political movement, has defended comments comparing same-sex marriage to incest.
Party leader Richard Lucas also denied a sick joke about the murder of Jo Cox posted on his Facebook less than a week after she was killed was “making light of her death”.
Launched earlier this month, the Scottish Family Party say their “central goal” is to get elected to Holyrood and “fill the void” left by the mainstream parties’ abandonment of “Judeo-Christian-inspired values of traditional Western civilization”.
This would include campaigning for “people experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction” to “seek counselling,” scrapping public funding for the Scottish Human Rights Commission, and allowing golf clubs to have men-only membership.
This isn’t Lucas’s first brush with politics. He left Ukip last year after falling out with David Coburn, describing the MEP as “unsavoury”.
Writing in the Agenda column in yesterday’s Herald, Lucas said his new party was, in part, a result of the “feminist orthodoxy” he claimed was driving public policy in Scotland.
“We aim to confront the cosy Holyrood consensus, interrupting the monochrome virtue-signalling that currently passes for debate in many areas,” Lucas wrote, adding that his party was “pro-family, pro-life, pro-freedom of speech” and “anti-identity” politics.
Scottish Family Party policies around homosexuality are somewhat controversial.
In schools, the party want children taught “about the correlations between homosexual relationships and physical and mental health problems”.
They also call for an end to the NHS paying for the revolutionary HIV prevention drug PrEP.
Scotland became the first part of the UK to have the medication on prescription.
The Scottish Family Party say it “facilitates a person’s sexual recklessness”.
Last year on his Facebook page, Lucas mentioned the Holyrood petitions committee’s rejection of a call to legalise incest – and drew comparisons with same-sex marriage.
“[The committee] disagreed with the notion that mutual love alone serves to validate a sexual relationship. Is this the same parliament that introduced same-sex marriage, accepting unanswerable arguments such as these?”
Then, two days before last year’s referendum on the EU Lucas, a fervent Brexiteer, joked on his Facebook page that one reason to vote Remain was “no deranged gunman has attacked a Brexit campaigner”.
Speaking to The National last night, Lucas rejected claims he was joking about Cox’s murder. “The letter you’ve picked up was a humorous one written at a time when I felt that the murder of Jo Cox was beginning to be presented as reason to vote Remain, and I was obliquely mocking the reasoning that one should vote Remain because Jo Cox had been murdered. I was obviously not making light of her death”, he argued.
He also denied comparing homosexuality with incest. “I said that similar arguments can be made to justify incest that have been accepted to justify same-sex marriage. Some of the logic used to argue for same-sex marriage can also be used to argue for incest. I stand by that.”
He added: “With regard to correlations between homosexual sex and physical and mental heath problems, we’re just stating the facts. If you can find someone to claim that there is no correlation between same-sex relationships and mental and physical health problems, we’ll happily debate with them. We don’t want gay people to suffer from such problems and obviously hope that they can be supported and treated as effectively as possible.”
Colin Macfarlane, director of Stonewall Scotland, dismissed Lucas and his party, saying: “Going retro is quite fashionable but this attempt to hark back to the past by the Scottish Family Party will be a damp squib. Their views on almost everything are out of step with the values of the majority of Scots.
“We know that our rights are not a given and that equality is tenuously held.
“We can’t be complacent when those who seek to hold office set out a manifesto which seeks to cause discord amongst communities. But LGBT people do exist in every community and we must not let others suggest that they don’t or shouldn’t. “
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