I came across another of those political quizzes. This one matches you up with the US Presidential candidates. It’s quite smart.

You can choose which topics you’re interested in by distributing 20 points among 14 categories. I gave one point to each category then bumped up a few areas where I feel strongest. It then gives you a set of questions based on those topics.

Once you’ve answered them, it ranks the Presidential candidates in order of similarity. You can go right into each question and see how each of the candidates would answer each question, with all kinds of quotes, voting records and suchlike to back it up.

Of course, it’s not very fair for me to be waxing lyrical about American politics. I have never set foot in the country, and chances are I could have different views on American political issues if I actually lived there. A lot of these are very US-centric questions rather than the big ideological picture.

Still, it is interesting to learn a bit more about the candidates. The names we all see are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani. Sometimes John McCain. It’s not often you hear of any of the others. But it’s important to learn about them.

I remember at around this stage of the last US Presidential election we were discussing the Democratic candidates in our modern studies class. Trying to work out which of the candidates were the most important, our teacher immediately scored off John Kerry because he was a no-hoper! (In retrospect, she was actually probably right.)

Anyway, the quiz. The candidate who comes out as most similar to me is someone I’ve never heard of before — Mike Gravel. We are 81% similar, with very similar views on drugs, civil liberties, gay rights, crime and punishment, abortion, environment and immigration. But we have dissimilar views on social security and economics.

Second is someone else I’ve never heard of — Christopher Dodd, with 75%. We are different on social security and very different on economics. Dennis Kucinich also has 75%, but we disagree on taxes and budget, social security and economics.

Of the big guns, Barack Obama is fourth with 74% (different on taxes and budget, social security and very different on crime and punishment (Obama supports the death penalty)). Hillary Clinton is 66% similar (different views on taxes and budget, drugs, social security and very different on crime and punishment).

All of the Democratic candidates score more highly than the Republican candidates. The top Republican candidate for me is Ron Paul — 9^th with 61%. We have very similar views on drugs, civil liberties and crime and punishment, but very different views on immigration, health care and abortion.

Rudy Giuliani only comes out 13^th with 47%. We have very similar views on environment and gun control, but very different views on gay rights, Iraq and foreign policy, health care, civil liberties, drugs and crime and punishment.

My least similar is my namesake, Duncan Hunter. We are only 30% similar, with similar views on social security (and even that is only because neither of us has an opinion on it).

Via Blah Blah Flowers.

No doubt he will be tearing up his Labour membership card after reading this article: “Dennis Goldie, who is also known for his outspoken opposition to gay rights, is the frontrunner to become the Labour candidate in Falkirk West.” (Via)

I’m a bit late with this post. It’s old news really, but I still have a few thoughts about this issue of Catholic adoption adoption.

I finally got round to reading last week’s edition of The Economist a couple of days ago, and they had a piece about the issue (link requires subscription I’m afraid), saying that:

…it steps into the mine-ridden terrain where liberty… runs up against equality

This face-off between liberty and equality vexes many. Indeed, who wouldn’t want liberty and equality to be present in a society? If one threatens the other, what a difficult choice to make.

Perhaps surprisingly, The Economist comes down on the side of equality in this instance. But I would have thought that it would be better to aim for liberty. After all, if a society is guaranteed liberty, at least there is still a chance that it could achieve equality. Meanwhile, if equality is the main goal of a society, there is very little chance of achieving liberty as well.

To illustrate this, think about the adoption row. If Catholic adoption agencies are told that they must allow gay couples to adopt, their liberty to decide who they can and cannot serve has been taken away from them. If, on the other hand, Catholic adoption agencies are left to do as they please, there is every possibility that they would one day allow single sex couples to adopt from them. After all, as The Economist notes:

Give it time

Part of the unease over the gay-discrimination rules is that they are new. It would not occur to many to defend the exclusion of black adoptive parents, for example. Churches, like societies, do change. Just as most Christians have reconciled themselves to lending money at interest and most Jews do not examine the labels in their clothes to see if they contain mixed wool and flax, so homosexual parents may come to seem another variety in the bewildering gamut of family structures.

Attitudes change over time. Surely one day even the bigoted Catholic church will find itself accepting homosexuality in much the same way that racism is now seen as abhorrent when not so long ago it wasn’t.

And I want to make it clear that I am not siding with the Catholic church here. I want to say it loud and clear: the Catholic church is a bigoted organisation. But it is for precisely that reason why I find these attempts to force Catholic adoption agencies to allow single sex couples to adopt from them bizarre. I mean, it can hardly be as if there is a huge queue of gay people waiting to adopt children from such a bigoted group.

It was like a few months ago when legislation was passed to allow gay people to stay in the guest houses of bigots. Because gay people were really banging the doors down waiting to share a roof with homophobes. Wow, you really released the shackles there.

Whatever happened to that good, liberal, democratic principle of “you are a fucking arsehole but I will defend your right to be a fucking arsehole” (I paraphrased that you know). As Will P says in a strongly argued post:

We agree to disagree. If they want to cite religious reasons for not letting me seek to adopt a child with a hypothetical future partner, then fine, I’ll go somewhere else…

So that I can go to lengths to which I’d never really bother to go to express who I am, devout members of various faiths (and the gay adoption issue is just one example of this, which is why I’ve pluralised that sentence) are no longer free to express their deeply-held religious principles. In short, in our quest to be ever more liberal, we have become illiberal. We are on a dangerous course: we must stop now.

Much of this debate feels like chippy score settling than anything else, much in the same way that the ban on fox hunting was more to do with annoying some toffs more than anything else. I don’t think this really has the interests of gay people at its heart.

This does put me in the slightly odd position of agreeing with The Devil’s Kitchen. Of course, Bookdrunk is right to criticise that Catholic Church for their stance on homosexuality. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Two people can have opposing viewpoints and they are allowed to disagree with each other. What’s wrong with accepting this and ending it there?

No, it’s not a five minute chat with an average member of the public. It’s a cursory glance at the blog of your representatives.

Scottish bloggers continue, even after all these weeks, to stare at Councillor Terry Kelly’s blog with astonishment. If anybody wants to know what I mean when I say parts of Scotland are just one massive rotten borough, just take a look at this incredible blog and remember that a plurality of voters actually elected this man.

Luckily, via Clairwil comes news that he is gaining notoriety beyond Scotland — he has been featured on Labour Watch.

Councillor Kelly’s only support in the blogosphere appears to come from his own daughter, Rayleen Kelly. Ms Kelly’s latest post slams BLOGGING BULLIES. Which is quite funny given that a couple of months back she called Martin Kelly and David Farrer “madmen” under the heading “PEOPLE ARE STRANGE” and implied that they actually needed psychological help (yes, the profession that Ms Kelly deleted was “psychologist”).

As Clairwil has found, Councillor Terry Kelly also likes to imply that people are mentally ill — simply for disagreeing with his viewpoint. It is this pious attitude that really pisses people off about Labour.

The Kelly clan’s blogs give off that familiar air, the claim that Labour is the only party worth supporting — or else you must be some kind of horrific freak (such as a right wing nationalist, a label that Councillor Kelly astonishingly managed to indirectly attatch to me). But they never actually manage to explain why, instead resorting to personal attacks and bullying. This is behaviour which appears to mirror certain real life encounters, oh, and this one as well.

Terry Kelly’s favourite trick seems to be to accuse the SNP of being homophobic — a claim which takes a lot of brass neck for a supporter of a party that put Ruth Kelly in charge of equality. And not very sensible when one of the Scottish blogosphere’s biggest voices is an SNP member who happens to be gay. Oh dear.

It really is time people like this were booted out of office. I’m not referring specifically to the Councillors Kelly. I mean Labour as a whole. As Clairwil says in the comments to her post:

I work in a fairly grim part of Glasgow and a Labour stroghold to boot and I am at a total loss as to what they have done to inspire such loyalty. I look around and see everything at best staying the same and still out they troop and vote Labour. Why?

The stick with Labour no matter what mentality has done nothing but create career opportunties for tenth raters. If I had the time I’d put together a tactical voting site to unseat Labour in the May elections. They really are hopeless.

As Will P says, the STV voting system being used in the upcoming local elections will surely help. As things stand, Councillor Terry Kelly is a walking advertisement against Labour (as if the we really needed another one!) and against the First Past the Post electoral system. If he is still a councillor after the third of May I would actually advocate the scrapping of representative democracy; it would clearly be doing us no good. We’ll have to make sure his blog gets as much publicity as possible before the election to prevent this.

Update: Will P launches Terrywatch!

Update: Clairwil: Terry Watch- A Call To Arms!

That’s not what I said. That’s what Ruth Kelly said last year when she tried to bat away questions about her ties to Opus Dei.

Funny, because that’s not what she’s saying today.

I think that over the past couple of years, the level of understanding within government of the scale of the threat that we face from… Islamist individuals and organisations has really increased and I think that as a result of that we have to take to a new level our partnership with those Muslim organisations who are showing real leadership on those issues.

So is your faith a private matter as Ruth Kelly said last year, or is it a matter for state intrusion as Ruth Kelly has said today?

Ruth Kelly has rejected claims that the government is “demonising” Muslims, after reports it is to ask universities to spy on student suspects.

The communities secretary said many groups understood the need to work in a new way to “face up to” the threat.

She urged council chiefs to help battle extremism - saying it was an issue for all communities, not just Muslims.

Ruth Kelly — the communities minister — is a person who refuses to say whether she believes that sex between two consenting adults is a sin or not. She is a member of an extreme religious organisation that advises women on what they can and can’t wear. But she will defend her precious Labour government whenever it criticises a different religion for advising women on what they can and can’t wear. It is sickening.

Phil Woolas — whose brief covers race relations — suggested that a teacher should be sacked for wearing a veil. I doubt very much that Aishah Azmi’s decision to wear the veil at work genuinely created a barrier to communication.

Has Phil Woolas ever actually been in a classroom? Most schoolchildren spend the whole lesson just staring down sullenly at their desk, doodling on their jotters or gazing at somebody they fancy. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are some pupils who don’t even notice their teacher has a veil on or not!

More seriously, it is a fact that people are able to take in more information when they are not looking at the speaker’s face. Taking in information from somebody’s face is a waste of brain power. I find myself that when I have to listen carefully I end up focusing on a stationery object in middle distance. So in what way is covering your face going to make people listen less?

It is true that if somebody has hearing problems then they will have to look more at the face to understand what they are being told. But this shouldn’t even be an issue because Aishah Azmi was prepared to teach her class without the veil. Yet Phil Woolas still wanted her sacked.

That’s the person with responsibility for race relations adding to the chorus of whining about Muslims currently emanating from senior government figures. Attacks on Muslims appear to have increased ever since Jack Straw made his comments about the veil.

Congratulations to the communities and race relations ministers for doing their best to pour petrol on this race relations fire.

Update: And here is Mr Eugenides’ view.