There has recently been a considerable furore over Cardinal Keith O'Brien's attack on the Abortion Act:

Cardinal O'Brien said: "We are killing - in our country - the equivalent of a classroom of kids every single day.

"Can you imagine that? Two Dunblane massacres a day in our country going on and on. And when's it going to stop?

"I can't change the teachings of Jesus Christ. I can't change the 10 Commandments. That's what I'm ordained to teach and to preach: 'Thou shalt not kill."'

Emotive stuff, but none of it can come as a surprise. These are the long-held views of the Catholic Church, and views which they have every right to hold. The Abortion Act has been in place for 40 years and has withstood plenty of religiously-inspired criticism in that time. Is anything different now?

Writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free, Tim Luckhurst thinks that there is something different:

Keith O'Brien's provocative speech is a warning. The church wants powers over abortion devolved to Holyrood because it believes MSPs can be persuaded to return Scotland to the dark ages. There is too much evidence that it may be right for any pragmatic liberal to persist in the myth of devolution as a promoter of progressive values.

This presents liberals with a quandary. In general, the liberal view of abortion is that it is a matter for personal morality, not for the state to ban or promote. In any case, abortions occurred before the Abortion Act legalised the procedure, and would continue to occur if the Act were repealed; the only difference is the safety of the procedure itself. But liberals are also in favour of devolution - power should be held as close to the people as possible. Luckhurst appears to have made his judgement: the Scottish Parliament cannot be trusted with powers over abortion, lest it decide to ban it.

Is he right? There are two answers that liberals could give to his concern:

1) If abortion is a basic human right - the right of control over one's own body - then any ban on abortion would be invalid. But this is a legal, not a political question, and it's a question which may not have a clear answer at this point in time. Liberals have never believed that democracy has the power to trump human rights - we cannot vote to enslave our fellow citizens, even if 99% of the population voted for it. Part of the role of the law is to ensure that government does not go beyond reasonable bounds in regulating our activities; this is what the concept of rights is all about. If there is a right to abortion then, yes, the Scottish Parliament would have to accept that it cannot ban the procedure.

2) Even if we do not see abortion as an absolute right, it is not clear that a ban on abortion in Scotland would have any real effect. It would merely mean that women wanting abortions would have to travel to other parts of the UK to get them. In this case, the strength of devolution is shown: if one devolved area makes a law that its citizens disagree with, they have the possibility of travelling to other areas where the law is different. By allowing this variation in laws we, at least in part, insure against the possibility of oppressive laws. It is unlikely that an anti-abortion law in Scotland would survive for long given the impossibility of enforcing it upon the people of Scotland.

Furthermore, I think Luckhurst is being sensationalist in suggesting that a ban on abortion is likely. It is not, and would be vigorously contested if it were raised. To use this vague possibility as a stick to beat the concept of devolution with is nonsensical. Devolution is here to stay, and we have to learn to live with the debates that this brings, even if it means fighting old battles over again to confirm our principles.

Stephen J Gould famously argued that science is not in conflict with religion because it answers a different kind of question. The two are non-overlapping magisteria. Science says nothing about the Trinity, and religion says nothing about the photoelectric effect. This view is not universal: Richard Dawkins argues in The God Delusion and elsewhere that science does speak about religious claims and says that they are false.

But does the concept of non-overlapping magisteria apply to religion and politics? Perhaps not historically, but since Catholic Emancipation, since Charles Bradlaugh was permitted to take his seat in the House of Commons as an atheist, we have enjoyed a happy situation where religion does not divide us politically, nor vice versa.

This is perhaps surprising. Religion and politics are both in the values business, most politicians are religious and are inspired by their faith to work through their politics. Why then aren't the Labour Party Catholic, the Conservatives Anglican, the Liberal Democrats non-conformist, the Greens Buddhist, Respect Muslim? Of course these influences do exist at least a little, but we have learned from bitter experience, from Cromwell the puritan, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere that it does not make for social cohesion or good politics for religious and political allegiances to coincide. We have instead a political culture that people of any faith and none can participate in equally. Or at least we aspire to that.

Is this culture beginning to break down? Does the principle that faith or lack of it should be no barrier to any office mean that there should be no objection to having a member of Opus Dei responsible for anti-discrimination policy? (Links: Mayor Watch, Lib Dem Voice, The Labour Humanist, Millennium Elephant)

Indeed. There should be no objection. My objection is to having an Opus Dei member who agrees with Opus Dei policy in charge of anti-discrimination policy. It should never be assumed that adherents to a faith agree with the political views of their faith leaders, even if those leaders insist that they must.

Religious neutrality is a tremendous asset of our political culture, and it would be madness to abandon it. But concern to maintain this neutrality has perhaps led us to tread too carefully when we should be standing up for our values.

We should not feel obliged to agree with people whose reasons for their political views are religious. If we do, we may find that more and more policy areas will find themselves under the religious banner, and more political debates will become one-sided. Where today it is faith schools and discrimination, tomorrow it will be scottish independence and trade policy.

Some will see this as bringing badly-needed values into politics. But this is missing the point - politics is already about values. We oppose discrimination because it is wrong. We support the health service because curing the sick is good. And politics is already a process by which different values compete. Join in, bring us your values and your arguments, but you are not doing anything different to the rest of us. And you will find people of every faith and none on both sides of just about every political question.

Gould's non-overlapping magisteria represented a desire to avoid a conflict between science and religion that Dawkins would rather not avoid.

Politics and religion overlap big time, and always have done. But when this overlapping is explicit, it can make us uncomfortable. We have avoided a conflict by experiencing that overlap in the minds of individuals, and not in the institutions of faith and politics. For this reason I am particularly wary of Ruthy Kelly's claims to be able to compartmentalise her political duties from her religious beliefs.