YOU might have seen the popular meme format based on a scene from the comedy series Community, where the character Britta – a white woman – says: “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.”

“You can excuse racism?” comes the shocked reply from Shirley, a Black woman.

Well, it seems the SNP are a living, breathing meme.

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The party leadership can excuse joining an anti-abortion protest outside the Scottish Parliament. Veteran Glasgow MSP John Mason did so last month, after being the one and only MSP to vote against the introduction of “safe access zones” around abortion facilities earlier in the summer, which have been put in place to prevent harassment and intimidation of patients and staff.

Yet, apparently, none of this was included among the reasons Mason has now been expelled from the party.

In fact, the list of things the SNP can excuse appears to be a rather long one – and that’s only the list of matters concerning Mason.

The SNP can excuse appropriating the introduction of a Baby Loss Memorial Book in parliament, as Mason did last year, to lodge a motion arguing that abortion should be regarded as a “tragedy” in the same way as miscarriage or still-birth, and calling for “equality for all unborn babies”.

They can excuse – albeit issuing a “reprimand” in this particular instance – publicly describing anti-abortion protests outside hospitals as “offering help” and accusing health professionals of “pushing abortion”, as Mason did back in 2022.

They can excuse “visiting” an anti-abortion protest outside a hospital, which Mason confirmed he had done in an email to campaign group Back Off Scotland in 2021.

They can even excuse introducing a motion calling on the Scottish Parliament to “restrict abortion”, which Mason did in 2019.

All of this, the SNP can excuse.

But, as we learned when Mason was suspended from the SNP in August and expelled in recent days, they draw the line at denying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

This was the sole reason cited by the party for his suspension, and don’t get me wrong, it’s a good reason. Mason’s comments on Twitter about the atrocities in Gaza – in which he said that “if Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed 10 times as many” – were callously dismissive and utterly offensive.

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But then, so have been his comments on a number of other issues – which raises a lot of questions about why this is where the SNP leadership was finally willing to draw the line.

Over the years, outcry from inside and outside of the SNP over Mason’s efforts to curtail the rights of women to make their own reproductive choices and healthcare decisions has been met with a heavy silence from those who had the power to do anything about it.

Of course, it was also clear that Mason wasn’t going to end up with any sort of ministerial position. However, I’m sure that was cold comfort to the women who had to listen nonetheless to his stigmatising contributions in parliament or in the media, or to those in his own constituency, whose SNP candidate in the past three elections stood in opposition to their rights.

It seems that women have been very easy for the SNP to ignore.

Still, this isn’t all the party can excuse.

When it comes to Mason, the SNP were also quite willing to excuse voting against same-sex marriage, and defying the party whip to vote against gender recognition reform.

They were also able to excuse his speech in parliament in 2022 on the need for religious freedom around conversion therapy, in which he compared gay relationships to acting on the urge to “eat too much chocolate or drink too much alcohol”, adding that “we sometimes need to say ‘no’ to ourselves”.

Those last words were, to me and many others, shocking to hear coming from an elected representative of a progressive party in a progressive country, spoken in our national parliament.

They are also clearly at odds with the current policy positions and ethos of the SNP – so why were they deemed unworthy of censure, while Mason’s latest foray into the outrageous has been dealt with so decisively?

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There are a couple of obvious answers. One is that it has been all too easy for Mason to hide behind the veil of religious freedom, while seeking to restrict the freedom of others. Issues like abortion and LGBT rights are often treated as matters of “conscience”, and Mason is known to be a devout Christian.

But if our democracy is a secular one, surely religious beliefs should not be preached in parliament in aid of debates over policies which will impact on all of us?

The question of what is considered a matter of “conscience” is a funny one, as it most often rears its head in parliament in relation to issues where religious beliefs might become significant. As an atheist, I would argue that we should all seek to act with our conscience wherever possible.

But in an electoral democracy, most people vote for political parties and the policies and values those parties represent. In that context, it also has to be a party’s right to take action against representatives who rally against their core values.

Of course, what constitutes a party’s “core values” will remain debatable, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for anything that one might object to on religious grounds to be automatically excluded from that list. Following the parliamentary career of Mason, though, one could be forgiven for thinking that’s exactly how it works in the SNP.

There is, however, another answer for why Mason has been ejected this time, for this reason, and it might be even more disheartening. Mason’s comments about Gaza arose from an argument on Twitter in which he was defending not only his own recent decision to meet with an Israeli diplomat, but the decision of External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson to meet the same ambassador.

There was a major fallout within the SNP over the Scottish Government’s decision to take the meeting and to initially defend it, despite the party’s strong opposition to Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Some demanded that Robertson be stripped of his ministerial role.

I can’t help but wonder if Mason’s comments provided the SNP with an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: appear to be taking a strong pro-Palestinian stance by punishing a backbench MSP, while keeping Robertson in post, and finally getting rid of Mason without annoying the wrong people.

All’s well that ends well. But for whom exactly has this ended well? Surely not for the women, LGBT people and allies who called for Mason’s expulsion or deselection for years, and who have been given no vindication by a decision which continues to sweep all of Mason’s prior offences under the rug.

And hardly for the Palestinians either, for whom the legitimisation of the Israeli state by a representative of a national government is surely more significant than the social media remarks of a backbench crank.

As a longtime critic of John Mason, you might expect me to be celebrating. Somehow, I don’t quite feel like it.