The SNP leadership contest should not be about Kate Forbes’ religious faith but that issue has quickly come to dominate. The 32-year-old is a member of the Free Church of Scotland, a small outfit that hews to Scripture on the sanctity of marriage and life. Now that she is running for SNP leader, she is being asked whether she would have voted to permit same-sex marriage had she been an MSP at that time.

She says ‘no’, but that she would do nothing as First Minister to roll back rights already established. She has spoken about how her Christianity instructs her to love her neighbour and how that would drive her to serve all people to the best of her ability.

That ought to be the end of the matter. It is not. Parliamentary colleagues who initially supported her have fled, apparently having only just learned that Kate Forbes is a Wee Free.

Some are puzzled that she has not ‘tempered’ her views, as though it was a matter of popping up Mount Sinai and asking the Almighty if He could make a few tweaks because some of His commandments are ‘not a good look’. Others say politicians are free to express their beliefs but must be prepared for robust criticism. I quite agree, and look forward to policy debates free from accusations that reasoned disagreement will direct hatred and harm at vulnerable people.

A prominent Scottish lawyer tweeted that ‘it matters to me whether my First Minister believes that my marriage is valid’. Elected officials are not moral arbiters. They are lawmakers. Their power to invalidate your marriage exists only in their willingness or ability to do so legislatively, which Forbes has said she wouldn’t do and which the political arithmetic at Holyrood would not allow her to do.

Marital love is the ultimate personal commitment between two people and its validity is determined exclusively by the parties to that commitment. Investing in a stranger, let alone a politician, the power to affirm or deny your marriage invites them into your relationship, somewhere they have no business being. It also inserts you into somewhere you have no business being: another person’s conscience.

Some are puzzled that she has not ‘tempered’ her views, as though it was a matter of popping up Mount Sinai and asking the Almighty if He could make a few tweaks because some of His commandments are ‘not a good look’

Demanding affirmation from strangers can be made to sound benign, even righteous, but it is the totalising imposition of a tyrant. It is not enough that the law permits you to live your life as you please, you insist that others explicitly approve of how you live it. That way of thinking spells the end of freedom of conscience. Nor, if we go down this route, is it obvious how we cabin it to senior offices like First Minister. If failing to believe in same-sex marriage makes you unsuitable to be FM, why doesn’t it also make you unsuitable to be an MSP, or an MP, or a councillor?

What of other professions where issues of marital status come up routinely? Should a disbeliever in gay marriage be practising as a solicitor or an accountant or a relationships and sex education teacher? If saying that God ordained marriage as a male-female institution invalidates same-sex marriages and harms the dignity of those in such relationships, why should anyone be allowed to express this view in any circumstance?

I am a Catholic. I believe that Jesus Christ was the Word made flesh, the only begotten Son of the Father and the saviour of all mankind. I believe that salvation comes only through faith in Him. I believe the Pope is doctrinally infallible. I believe in transubstantiation: that at the point of consecration in the Holy Mass, the bread and wine become the substantive body and blood of Christ.

These beliefs are the core of who I am. If they were refuted tomorrow, I would have nothing left. Yet I appreciate that others do not share them. They have their own religious beliefs or they have none. I don’t demand that candidates for public office affirm my beliefs. I don’t consider anyone who fails to ‘validate’ my ‘identity’ and ‘lived experience’ as a Catholic inappropriate for high office. Provided they don’t want to limit my religious liberty – and quite a number of them do – I don’t care what’s in their heads or their hearts.

Here’s the rub, though. As well as being a Catholic, I also happen to be gay. But while demanding that Kate Forbes affirm my sexual orientation is seemingly reasonable, I suspect asking her opponent Humza Yousaf to endorse my religious selfhood would not be. I don’t think I have a right to tax either candidate’s conscience in that way. They each have their beliefs (and non-beliefs) and should be as free to exercise them as I am mine.

Kate Forbes is being Farroned. A few years ago, some journalists and political opponents targeted then Lib Dem leader Tim Farron for his Christian beliefs. I said at the time that, in their intolerance, secular progressives were resurrecting the Test Acts and putting them in reverse. Doing so would only drive Christians from public life and with them would go their conscientious campaigning on issues progressives care about, such as welfare, Palestine and nuclear weapons.

I’m not sure some progressives care about that now. I suspect that, drunk on their own modern (and therefore superior) sense of virtue, they simply regard orthodox Christianity as bigotry that must be suppressed. Some Christians characterise this position as: pluralism for me but not for thee. Not anymore. These progressives don’t want tolerance, they want submission.