So What if Equality is Religious Discrimination?
A select committee-style inquiry on Christianity is to be held in order to clarify how the law affects believers, amid increasing claims of religious discrimination and persecution.
The public hearings, scheduled to last for about three months this autumn, will invite peers and politicians to examine legislation on hate crime and equality and evaluate whether changes are needed.
The inquiry is the idea of Gary Streeter MP, a Christian who chairs the cross-party group Christians in Parliament. He said that, while there was religious freedom in Britain, some groups were “whipping up an alternative view and generating fear” where there did not need to be any. He said: “That fear is growing, that voice is growing. There is a particular problem. In the last 12 months, we have had legal cases that provoked concern. These now need to be tackled.”
We have an Equality and Human Rights Commission. We have an Equality Act. We have the courts, who are well aware that in an age of competing rights claims they will have to determine, case-by-case, winners and losers. There is no need whatsoever to look at this again institutionally. What we have is a group of ultra-devout zealots, who believe they should still have the right to discriminate because of their religion, or to proselytise in the world of work.
Christians (as well as theists in general) need to grow up. I don’t care one iota if their freedom (which has never been a ‘right’) to discriminate on religious grounds has trashed by equality under the law for me. Noone has suggested for a minute that they should be prohibited in some Minority Report stylee from thinking less of me because I’m gay; they have the right to believe in pink unicorns for all I care. But they don’t have the right to discriminate against me because of the crazy ideas they have; noone does and noone should. There is nothing more to discuss.
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