This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

More than 30 years ago, when my wife and I decided to move to Scotland, we did so for one primary reason.

We’d both grown up in Northern Ireland and the conflict was still unfolding. We wanted to have children while in our mid-20s and had no intention of raising them in a divided and bloody country.

However, there was a secondary reason we chose Scotland. It seemed a country ready to embrace the future, somewhere equality mattered. Ireland, both north and south, remained a place of bigotry in the 1990s. Today, the Republic has taken huge steps forward, and even the north has progressed, despite its legion of problems.

My wife and I were proved right as our newly-adopted country ditched the homophobic Section 28 laws and legislated for equal marriage. Soon, Scotland was being praised as one of the most LGBT-friendly places on Earth. It felt good to live in a nation of such modernity and decency.

Three decades later, so many of those positive steps forward have been walked far, far back into an ugly past. Today, our LGBT community is fearful, isolated and feels demonised. This should be a source of great shame for Scotland.

Read more from Neil Mackay:

• We aren’t a nation of strangers, but I have become a stranger to this land of cruelty
• Politics is a sadist's realm, a whirlwind needs to sweep these monsters........
  

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