LongTimeLurker

You might want to check up on some of the past escapades of the SNP in that part of the world. Names like William Wolfe and John Lambie would help you along. Before there was a serious danger of the SNP actually winning an independence referendum, local politics in some parts of the central belt in places with more than a passing resemblance to Shotts sometimes took on more than a hint of a Proddie leaning SNP vs RC leaning Labour quality.

...and Whitburn where the SNP have controlled the local council in the past and did hee haw to stop the walks.

One lot wear bowler hats and spell whisky wrong the other lot don't.

De Valera and co weren't allowed to attend Douglas Hyde's funeral. Out of date nonsense not going to a funeral over something like that but it's misleading to suggest it hasn't been a two-way street.

May have been in Ruth Dudley Edwards' Faithful Tribe. Been a while since I read it and ah cannae mind.

My grandfathers brother was married to a black woman and was from an Orange family. It may have happened in my extended family. Wouldn't know though because he died before my time. There's plenty of valid angles to attack the LOL such as crap deliberately provocative music and dubious dress sense without bringing bogus ones like race into it.

Have seen it claimed that the LOL on Merseyside is about 10% non-white. No idea if it is true or not.

How about wearing LGBT badges to mass and filming the reaction? That could be good for a laugh. Used to urge a lesbian lapsed RC I knew to go to confession and say "bless me father for I have sinnned. I have been living an openly lesbian lifestyle for five years..." just to have a laugh at what the priest would say in response as a way to recover from the trauma of an RC childhood.

From what I remember the SNP dabbled with trying to ban walks pre-devolution in councils they controlled like Angus, but ceased and desisted once the ECHR was included in Scots Law from 1998 onwards. My personal take would be that yes they do have freedom of association and that means the actual lodges have a right to walk, but it's not clear to me that respect for celebration of a traditional culture automatically extends to tolerating having a blood and thunder flute band belting out Sloop John B for reasons that have nothing to do with celebrating the musical legacy of the Beach Boys.

There have been lots of Orange walks in places like West Lothian and Falkirk when the SNP have controlled the local council. It is disingenuous at best to try to portray sanctioning walks as support for them. It is ironic in the extreme that the main obstacle to a populist ban on this stuff, which would very much have been possible under the traditional Westminster system, is something that the SNP is very much championing at the moment (i.e. the ECHR), precisely because it is not part of the traditional Westminster way of doing things that David Cameron wants to go back to where Europe is concerned.

You obviously didn't understand the comment I made. The exemption to FoA under the ECHR is valid health and safety type considerations. That has to apply to everybody in an even-handed sort of way without picking and choosing, who you like or don't like. If you insist on now repeating over and over again how much you dislike the Orange Order and view them as Scotland's answer to the KKK on you go. I'll only respond further to people, who actually address the point I am making about the manner in which it is actually possible to curtail this stuff when as the SNP very much want but the Tories don't, the ECHR is part of the legal system.

The fact that you like one lot and intensely dislike the other has SFA to do with their rights to freedom of assembly.

If Yes campaigners are going to be allowed to meet there in large numbers it basically does, because picking and choosing what to allow rather than applying a blanket ban on health and safety grounds would be a form of discrimination that contravenes FoA. The irony is that it is the SNP and Holyrood that is championing the ECHR right now rather than the Tories and Westminster that very much want to axe it in a UK context, which would open the door to kneejerk populist legislation on this, but our flute playing friends will be of the opinion that they are celebrating the latter's defence of civil and religious freedoms.

The council is telling you the reality of it. Freedom of assembly is a protected right under the European Convention on Human Rights, which is now part of Scots Law since the Scotland Act that set up devolution.

Having attended non-denom schools (admittedly 30 to 45 years ago) my response to that would be what religious curriculum? Any RE I ever got was token at best with a strong hint from the teachers that only looneys actually believed any of it. Any residual role of the CoS should definitely be completely eliminated, but the people who make the most noise about this are usually trying to justify ongoing tribal division in a way that bears little or no correlation with what actually happens in practice.

Meanwhile for those in contact with reality, there is no God up in the sky looking down on us and the differing brands of the Jesus myth continue to be used cynically by some at least as an excuse to keep the proles in the west of Scotland divided. At some point those of a progressive disposition might question whether schemes like Easterhouse and Drumchapel would be the way they are and whether something closer to a Scandinavian social democracy could not have been achieved instead out of all these years of Labour municipal dominance if there wasn't a tribal schism in working class Scottish society and the left hadn't compromised its principles and ditched core socialist notions of secularism to stay on the good side of the RC spiritual hierarchy.

Think the role of the CoS (there is one that is in the relevant legislation) is to inspect the standard of RE in non-denom schools or something like that. The legislation that is in place is almost a century old and reflects a very different Scotland from today's secular post-Christian society.

Moronic to say the least and something that is a clear BoTP, but I'm not convinced (but certainly still open to persuasion) that it's really any more noteworthy in the big scheme of things nowadays than equally moronic songs about zoophilia aimed at Aberdonians when all of the people singing it probably never go anywhere near a church and are motivated by dislike of Celtic rather than anything related to differing views over transubstantiation or something like that. Politicians, who exploit the lingering tribalism, pretend there's still a huge rigid polarisation of Scottish society like there was 50 or 60 years ago, but the reality is that Senga has been marrying Declan, and Siobhan has been marrying Derek in recent decades and there is a younger generation growing up now, who can often easily swing both ways on these things.

Take away the sky fairy angle as has happened over the past two generations as Scottish society has secularised and all that's left is a backward ancestral tribalism that revolves around what type of school you went to. The political parties with the exception so far of the Greens don't want to touch this issue because there are still enough older voters that actually believe in the sky fairy stuff to make backing full all out secularism with a complete separation of church and state a potential vote loser for them if there wasn't a broad based consensus across the political elite. So instead what we have got until very recently is politicians (Labour, the SNP and Lib Dems have all been at it in recent times, and the old Unionist party that was the forerunner to the Conservatives was very much defined by it) trying to appeal to voters (mainly but not exclusively on the RC side of the fence, the SNP in the Monklands East by election would be an example of the opposite) on a visceral level by tapping into this tribalism in a hot button sort of way. To paraphrase McDairmid it's time to pit the clathe ower the parrot on this stuff and move on.

By way of a reality check. There is no God just as there is no tooth fairy and no Santa Claus. The overwhelming majority of the younger generation grasp this. Splitting children up based on differing ways to worship an imaginary sky fairy is backward and grotesque.

Best way to end so called "sectarianism" is to integrate the schools. Until the politicians and the chattering classes in general are willing to tackle that they should just shut up about it, because they are part of the problem.

They are coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho,...

The Magna Carta, a bit like the literature of Shakespeare and Dickens, is over-rated in terms of its impact in the big scheme of things. Something each generation learns about from the one before and then passes on uncritically to the next out of force of habit as part of the shared set of myths of the nation. It actually very much makes sense to separate Enlightenment ideas from those of the Reformation given it very much revolved around separating church from state. That is something that has yet to be achieved in the UK and was at the root of the failure to comfortably accommodate the island of Ireland.

That's the point of the sovereignty of the crown in parliament notion within English legal tradition (Scots law is often said to differ a bit about where sovereignty ultimately lies with the people being claimed to be ultimately sovereign, but it makes little practical difference). The idea is precisely that parliament rather than the monarchy ultimately holds all the power and can do as it pleases in legislative terms with no US style written constitution to firmly entrench individual rights and freedoms as a counterbalance. The UK predates the Enlightenment, so it missed out on that sort of stuff in constitutional terms at least until the ECHR was signed up to and the authority of the court in Strasbourg was recognised. Cameron's desire to go down this route puts him in Jobbik sort of territory.

Under the traditional Westminster system there was no written constitution and the sovereignty of the crown in parliament gave a parliamentary majority the power to do pretty much anything it wanted, so rights like that were not firmly constitutionally entrenched, but more of a convention respected by tradition that could be suspended whenever it was convenient for those in power to do so. A lot of SNP types would love to ban the walks once and for all. They haven't tried because they know that European Convention on Human Rights makes freedom of assembly an entrenched right that has to be respected by local councils. David Cameron wants to be seen to reduce the influence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg as a cynical ploy to keep UKIP at bay. Nicola Sturgeon is happy to do anything that drives a wedge constitutionally between Scotland and England, so will use the way it is the ECHR is entrenched into the Scotland Act of 1998 to do the opposite.