And today in gay news…
Given the not-so-subtle erosion of anti-discrimination legislation aimed at protecting gay people over the past few months, I can’t say that I’ve set my hopes very high for the outcome of many court cases in this area. It was more than a pleasant surprise, then, to read this article about the legal appeal of a marriage counsellor sacked for refusing to counsel a gay couple who had come to him for advice.
Legal actions concerning religion and sexual orientation have been particularly fraught recently, with calls from the former Archbishop of Canterbury to replace the regular judicial process with a panel of hand-picked judges with a “proven sensitivity and understanding of religious issues” in cases dealing with religion v. sexual orientation discrimination. The result of this case, too, has been heavily criticized by Lord Carey, who accused the judge in the case of downgrading religious concerns, and who accused the judiciary in general of moving towards a ‘secular’ rather than a ‘neutral’ state.
There are two main problems I have with what was said by Lord Carey – firstly, you can’t hand-pick the judiciary. It would not be deemed acceptable to select a panel of black judges for a race discrimination trial, or a panel of feminist or only female judges for a sex-discrimination trial, so why should this be any different? Can you imagine the furore that would be caused if Stonewall issued a statement calling for only gay judges to hear this case? I can only imagine what the Daily Fail would have to say.
Secondly, there’s no excuse for discrimination – that’s the point of anti-discrimination legislation. Lord Carey accuses the judiciary of allowing for the makings of a situation where Christians are, effectively, banned from the workplace. But what he seems unable to understand is that as long as someone does not refuse to do their job for certain people, as long as that person does not behave in a discriminatory fashion, they have little to fear. You don’t see gay lawyers refusing to work for Christian clients, or gay chefs refusing to cook for Christian diners – but if they did, there would be legal protections in place for those people humiliated or distressed or just plain hurt by the barb of discrimination.
In any case, the judgement handed down by Lord Justice Laws is beautifully worded, and excellently put. To put whole chunks of it down here would be a little intimidating, but my favourite extract from the Guardian is as follows:
“We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.”
What do you make of the ruling?
I heart Laws LJ.