[St Charles Owl]

No it doesn't, jim. She's much less of a bigot than her more vitriolic or dismissive critics. She's more tolerant of others' views than her critics are of her views.

Considering her constituency, her constituents might actually want her to vote in the way she would have done. As a minority group, their views should surely be considered. Or is it just groups that you agree with?

Anyway we're all prejudiced in some way, either against someone living by her religious beliefs or against the way various minority groups get their agendas accepted as though they are the majority.

To be fair Ritchie, the essence of tolerance is to allow people to live their lives as they wish (within certain laws of course) but we are not talking about someone living their by their religious beliefs, we are talking about someone governing by their religious beliefs and thats a whole different matter.

Surely the leader of the SNP is the public face of its platform, of the wishes and desires it has as to how Scotland is governed and what laws should be, she clearly does not approve of gay marriage for starters in which case how can the SNP reconcile their leader being against that?

Her constituents can absolutely demand things of her and maybe thats why she is their representative but there are some key human rights issues that I would have thought the SNP hold somewhat sacrosanct and she has come out against that. The vast majority of right wing Christians over here are decent people but if they were allowed to create or direct laws based on their religious convictions then they would ban anything LGBT, abortion, sex before marriage, divorce, black people voting etc etc and ultimately the majority of people do not want that.