bishop joseph devine: gay people aren't a persecuted minority. incidentally, remember the good old days when oscar wilde was jailed for being a homo?

It's always fun when a member of a religious group that campaigned against the right for gay people to have the same protections under the law as the religious says things like this:

The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell and president of the Catholic Education Commission, said gay rights organisations aligned themselves with minority groups, such as Holocaust survivors, to project an "image of a group of people under persecution".

He warned that the gay lobby – which he labelled "the opposition" – had mounted "a giant conspiracy" to shape public policy.

Leaving to one side the ironic claims of the global queer conspiracy made by a world religion with a central authority figure - and ignoring the idea that the appearance of persecution is often generated by one group (say, Catholic bishops) trying to demonise and deny the rights of another (say, gay people) - even a total cretin would remember the large number of gay people (and people merely suspected of being gay) who were sent to die in concentration camps during the holocaust. Perhaps, just perhaps, that's the source of that occasional historical juxtaposition.

Particularly delightful is the Bishop's barely concealed disgust that a gay man has been publicly recognised for his charitable work instead of thrown in prison for being a hideous bender:

He went on: "In this New Year's honours list, I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail. "It's a very small group of people, but very active and organised – and extremely indulgent. The opposition know exactly what they're doing. We don't."

People sent to prison for being gay? Why, that almost sounds like some kind of persecution, you know.

While we're playing the game of remembering instances of "I can't believe it's not persecution" from, oh, almost five minutes ago, let's revisit the prolonged religious objections to the Sexual Orientation Regulations - which did absolutely nothing more than extend to gay people rights already accorded to the religious.

There was lying, further lying, the attempt to demonise gay people, and attempted blackmail, all amidst howls that a conspiracy of gay people were demanding special rights, even though those rights differed not one iota from those on offer to everyone else.

Elsewhere in reactionary opinion you can ignore, another Catholic bishop has demanded that books which criticise the Catholic church should be banned from schools, comparing criticism of the church to... holocaust denial.

Perhaps someone needs to explain to the bishops, in small words, why no-one takes the Catholic church seriously anymore, beginning with a sequence of recent press cuttings and sermons. If there's a conspiracy to undermine the credibility of the faith, it starts at home.