End of the Road for Homophobic Christian Counsellor

I’ve written about Gary McFarlane before – the devout Christian who was fired from Relate because he felt he couldn’t counsel same-sex couples on so-called ‘religious’ grounds. McFarlane then went on to an employment tribunal, claiming religious discrimination, but failed when the panel ruled he had been obliged to abide by Relate’s equal opportunities policy, which he’d refused to do. The High Court has thankfully now confirmed the panel’s ruling, and has come out fighting, following former Archbishop George Carey’s support for McFarlane:

The senior church figure called for a specially-constituted panel of judges with a “proven sensitivity and understanding of religious issues” to hear the case.

Lord Carey said recent decisions involving Christians by the courts had used “dangerous” reasoning and this could lead to civil unrest.

The judge’s ruling continued: “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.

“The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments.

“The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law, but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.”

A great line there, attacking Carey’s position, and the whole notion that religious belief should ever trump the rule of law. Carey’s line though was quite outrageous, seeking to suggest that anti-gay discrimination by theists somehow wasn’t bigotry at all. Sorry George, according to the rule of the land, anti-gay discrimination is bigotry from however you look at it, and the religiously devout should not have an opt-out from the same rules which apply to everyone else, however (outrageously) discriminated against they then feel. Laws though completely rejected Carey’s entire premise:

“[But] the conferment of any legal protection of preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however long its culture, is deeply unprincipled.”

He said this would mean that laws would be imposed not to advance the general good on objective grounds but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion since faith, other than to the believer, was subjective.

“It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society

“Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No-one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims.

Stonewall quite rightly points out the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007. Noone, despite Chris Grayling’s wishes, who provides goods or services in the UK can opt out – that’s the point. Sadly though,completely missing the point, Carey felt the need to say this:

As reported in The Guardian, Carey said the judgment “continues a trend on the part of the courts to downgrade the right of religious believers to manifest their faith in what has become a deeply unedifying collision of human rights.”

“It heralded a ‘secular’ state rather than a ‘neutral’ one. And while with one hand the ruling seeks to protect the right of religious believers to hold and express their faith, with the other it takes away those same rights. It says that the sacking of religious believers in recent cases was not a denial of their rights even though religious belief cannot be divided from its expression in every area of the believer’s life.

“Oddly the judge doesn’t address the argument that rights have to be held in balance and he is apparently indifferent to the fact that religious believers are adversely affected by this judgment and others.”

I know it’s his job to stand up for his religion as well as his faith, but this is blatantly ridiculous. The judgments all acknowledge that the right to religious belief and the right to protection from anti-gay discrimination are often in conflict and will always be in tension. But Lilian Ladele and Gary McFarlane had equal opportunities policies which they weren’t allowed an opt-out from. If they did any theist in the country could then behave according to whatever mad thing they believed legally, rather than be obliged  follow the secular laws made by and applicable to everyone else in ‘a reasonable society’. I’m sure this will keep coming back, but it’s become an interesting illustration of how the Christian Church in this country increasingly feels the need to fight to keep its special privilege, be it Carey’s unelected place in the House of Lords, or the previous (because it wasn’t codified otherwise) tacit right to discriminate against gay people.

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