Peter Tait, a former mussels farmer from the Shetland Islands, is running for the Scottish parliament as an independent candidate and his opponent is a little unusual.
Tait will be running against marriage equality, he has announced. He believes “COVID is possibly related to it.”
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“At the last election I stood on an issue that I thought we should be doing as a nation, this time I am standing on an issue that I think we should not be doing as a national community,” Tait told the Shetland News, “and that is gay marriage.”
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Voting for him, he argues, is a way to vote against same-sex marriage.
“It is by its very nature a more divisive issue than last time, but as a community, we have never had the opportunity to oppose it,” he said.
Asked if he thought there would be a backlash to his controversial statement that would cost him votes, the succinct former fisherman replied, “I suppose there likely will.”
He says he “just wanted to make my case well, irrespective of votes.”
That’s a good thing, because this isn’t Tait’s first run for elected office. The last time around, he picked up a total of 31 votes.
Same-sex marriage has been legal in Scotland since 2014.
