A senior Catholic Bishop in Scotland has stunned equal rights campaigners by suggesting that if the Scottish Government truly believed in equality it would make incest and polygamy legal.

Hugh Gilbert, the Catholic Bishop of Aberdeen who said he ‘loved’ gay people told the Scottish Catholic Observer: “Why is it alright for a man to marry another man, but not alright for him to marry two women? If we really want equality, why does that equality not extend to nieces who genuinely, truly love their uncles?”

Surprisingly he went on to suggest that he has some experience of incest within Aberdeen: “And, if you say that such things don’t happen, that they are mere freaks of nature, extreme examples dreamed up for the sake of argument, I say you need to spend more time in the parish.”