Kate Forbes And The Right To Free Voting
On the distinction between private faith and public politics - and those who reject it
A surprising number[1] of people are arguing that there is something wrong and illiberal about Kate Forbes finding herself in difficulty explaining the tension between her - specifically fundamentalist - Christian beliefs and her public political role. Allusions are made to Tim Farron’s similar (albeit smaller scale) difficulties - and he himself has stepped forward to give a not-terribly-well-considered interview arguing the same thing.
The short version of the argument is that “Christian participation in UK politics is being overscrutinised and unfairly discriminated against because of their beliefs - not just relative to the irreligious, but also relative to non-Christian religions”.
This a bad argument on almost every level. Most obviously, Christians are and have always been well-represented in parliament and over-represented in leadership roles.
It is not ‘overscrutinised’. The British norm of separation of private faith and public politics extends to the point where we don’t even have a single record of MP religion (not even the publicly declared ones!). Nor is it really possible to look at Kate Forbes and Tim Farron and see people *too well-practiced* in explaining where they deviate from that norm. Both Forbes and Farron were in their respective parliaments for *years* before it came to light how much the deviated - that seems like textbook *underscrutiny* to me (and maybe not to their benefit!).
Nor are they being ‘unfairly discriminated against because of their beliefs’ - in both cases the primary focus is on *public voting behaviour in their job*. MPs/MSPs who keep their private faith separate from their public political role have no issue.
And here we hit the point where a lot of people kept trying to argue “Why won’t they go ask a Muslim MP this question? They never would because …” despite the fact Kate Forbes was running against Humza Yousaf, an observant muslim who has publicly supported gay marriage since at least the 2013 vote[2] and was able to articulate the British norm around religion and politics succinctly when he was, of course, asked the same question:
No, non-Christian moderate religious MPs are not being unfairly under-scrutinised. Nor, indeed, are *Christian* moderate religions MPs. Yes, a lot of the discourse has simply chosen to discount the validity of the Christianity of most of the Christians inside and outside parliament with an implicit “if you’re not a fundamentalist, do you really count as Christian?”.
So we have an argument - whose every point is false - premised on the asserted value of religious tolerance - and unfair treatment of Christians - which it implicitly undercuts by implicitly discounting the majority of Christians.
What is the actual substance of the argument? It’s not about Christianity - in fact, it’s not even about religion (who think Kate Forbes have found it easier to say “I’d vote against gay marriage on secular grounds”?). It’s about how fundamentalism rejects the distinction between private beliefs and public politics (votes in parliament!) - something which British moderates (religious or otherwise) all agree on.
Two last - I promise! - concluding points.
One of the most common defences I’ve seen is “yes, well, maybe - but it’s all irrelevant because there’ll never be another vote on it.”. This is a bad argument for scrutiny in general - like walking into a court and trying to assert you can’t be held responsible for things that happened in past (quoting Heraclitus and Hume as a legal authorities). But obviously worse in politics where issues are never perfectly nailed down and voters *always* have to read across issues (seconds after someone argued this it turns out Kate Forbes was also in favour of religious exemptions for the ban on gay conversion therapy - who could have guessed!). Moreover, this was the argument most recently made for electing Jeremy Corbyn (“yes … some issues re: euroskepticism and foreign policy … but they’ll never come up in the future and if they do it’ll never really matter who the leader of the oposition is”).
I’ve talked about the bad things in this argument - but there’s one bad thing missing from the argument. Let’s say you *do* believe it’s not acceptable to scrutinise Kate Forbes over how she’d vote in parliament because you believe it’s a trangression against religious liberty/free speech. What are you arguing *for*? That those questions not be permitted to be asked? That voters aren’t allowed to consider them? You can be very concerned about ‘cancel culture’ … but still feel that it would be a worse cancellation for voters not to get to evaluate MPs/MSPs on the basis of how they say they would vote.
In conclusion, there *is* a problem in how MP religion is scrutinised in the UK - fundamentalist Christian MPs - who have distinct minority opinions both on political policies *and how faith should dictate discharge of their public role* - do not receive adequate scrutiny. Specifically, on the key question of whether they view the separation of private faith from their public role as valid or invalid. Viewing it as invalid is a legitimate *political position* which deserves proportionate public scrutiny (even though that will necessarily involve questions about faith that would otherwise be private).
These debates *should not happen all on the day someone steps up for leadership* (or, in Farron’s case, years later!) - they should have been happening from the beginning of their political career. Not as ‘punishment’, but because scrutiny is a positive right - it helps people get better at explaining themselves on an issue - which is obviously something both were and are very much in need of.
P.S. It scours my soul to produce so much text without data, I may have to try to amalgamate public MPs religious adherence information in expiation.
[1] 1 (One) would, for me, be a surprising number in this context.
[2] There are, of course, people still trying to argue for a conspiracy behind him being away on ministerial business during the vote itself. Strangely, they are not able to explain what the advantage of not voting in parliament for *something you are currently and subsequently advocating for* would be or exactly what the relevance is. The implication seems to be that his local mosque follows some very specific form of Islam *so very conservative it only reads Hansard*.