ON Wednesday our esteemed MSPs voted to criminalise free assembly and public prayer for a couple of dozen pro-life Catholic grandmothers, who according to Police Scotland have never committed a crime , and whose activities required no new public order laws ("Buffer zones around health centres to be brought in after MSPS back bill", The Herald, June 13). Now that it has been definitively established by our law-makers that the civil and religious liberties of citizens are contingent on others not being annoyed with them, regardless of how peaceful they are, can the remainder of Scotland's Catholics now look forward to parliament setting aside the rights of drunken supremacist marchers who spit on the public, assault elderly priests with scaffolding poles, and infest towns and cities across the land every summer? Or shall we see that the negotiability of essential freedoms only applies to Catholics? And the right to go about one's business insulated from criticism only to those who wish to exterminate the unborn? Christopher McLaughlin, Thornliebank. • NEXT Lent I will not be fined or imprisoned for marching to Faslane or demonstrating for Palestine or picketing Thales arms factory or demonstrating outside the Russian consulate: but I will be fined/imprisoned if I pray silently outside the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for mothers and babies going through an abortion.
MSPs are so keen to punish Catholics that only one voted in favour of the four human rights bills that the buffer z.
