The Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) is a Scottish voluntary charitable organisation that promotes humanist views. It is a member of the European Humanist Federation and the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
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Formed in 1989 out of an association of local humanist groups around Scotland, the Society's objective is "to represent the views of people in Scotland who wish to lead good and worthwhile lives guided by reason and compassion rather than religion or superstition".[1] As of August 2010, it has 6,500 members. The Society also claims to have a representative role for the 28% of Scots (as of the 2001 census) who identify themselves as having no religion. Along with the British Humanist Association, the Society believes that the wording of the census question tends to inflate the numbers of people identifying themselves as religious who were brought up in a tradition of religious belief but who either no longer believe or who have significant doubts. The Society has campaigned to persuade the Registrar General to amend the question for the 2011 census.
The official symbol of the HSS is an adaptation of the Happy Human symbol which incorporates the Saltire. The Society also publishes a quarterly magazine, Humanitie.
The Society campaigns for a secular State in Scotland, and to abolish religious privilege. Its main efforts have concentrated on seeking to allow legal humanist weddings, and to secularise State education.
In January 2001, the Society lodged a petition with the Scottish Parliament calling for the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1977 to be amended to allow legal humanist wedding ceremonies, alongside religious and civil ones.[2] Although the Act was not amended, section 12 of the Act allows the Registrar General for Scotland to authorise temporary additional celebrants.[3] In 2005, the Registrar agreed to authorise 12 celebrants from the Humanist Society, in part because of a concern that allowing legal religious weddings but not legal humanist ones might not be consistent with the right to "freedom of thought, conscience and religion", which includes non-religious belief, in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The first legal humanist wedding took place at Edinburgh Zoo on 18 June 2005 between Karen Watts (from Ireland) and Martin Reijns (from the Netherlands).
Humanist weddings have since becoming increasingly popular and, in 2009, over 1,000 legal humanist weddings took place in Scotland, and over 50 celebrants are now authorised to conduct them. The Society organises training, mentoring and performance reviews of celebrants, and submits names of celebrants to the Registrar General annually for authorisation. The Society also performs a similar role for celebrants to conduct same-sex commitment ceremonies, funerals and baby-namings, although formal authorisation by the Registrar is not required for these ceremonies since they have no effect on the legal status of individuals concerned.
The Society supports both the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill, introduced in the Scottish Parliament by Margo Macdonald MSP[4], and the campaign for equal marriage in Scotland to allow LGBT couples to be legally married as an alternative to civil partnerships.
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