‘Every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists first, in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and secondly, in each person's bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation. These conditions society is justified in enforcing at all costs to those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment.’
So wrote John Stuart Mill wrote in his ‘Essay on Liberty’. To this day, it remains the best point of departure for classical liberal reflection about which forms of individual conduct and which forms of voluntary association should be permitted in in law and which proscribed.
I was put in mind of Mill’s Essay by a brief news story in today’s Times. It concerned the objections to the Sexual Orientation Regulations, recently introduced into North Ireland and soon to be extended to mainland Britain, raised by the proprietor of a Bournemouth hotel that caters exclusively for homosexual and bi-sexual men.
These Regulations have been much in the news of late because of their foreseen likely impact on several Catholic adoption agencies that, out of the religiously informed moral abhorrence of Catholics of homosexual acts, currently refuse to place children with gay couples seeking to adopt them, their feeling unable in good conscience to be complicit in children being brought in households in which such acts are condoned. The effect of the Regulations will be to force such agencies to cease discriminating in this way or else to shut down.
The Bournemouth hotelier was reported to object to the Regulations because they will also make it unlawful for hotels like his to discriminate against heterosexuals in the way they currently do. Thus, they will too be forced to close unless they cease to cater exclusively for homosexuals which is their whole point.
The Times reports that Stonewall, a gay-rights lobby group that is a fervent supporter of the Regulations, has dismissed the hotelier's objections, saying that, in this matter, ‘equality is more important than the right to be exclusive’.
It was reading Stonewall's response to the hotelier's objections that put me in mind of Mill’s essay. Will we, as a society or as individuals, truly be better off by gay hotels and Catholic adoption agencies ceasing to be able to discriminate either in favour of or against homosexuals, as they currently can?
Do homosexuals have any interests so vital to their happiness as necessitate that Catholic adoption agencies discontinue discriminating against them when considering with whom to place children? Have heterosexuals any interests so vital to theirs as are jeopardised by exclusively gay hotels?
For my part, I just cannot see either group does.
As well as those Catholic adoption agencies that discriminate against homsexual couples seeking to adopt, there are also many others that don't. So those that do can hardly be said to deny homosexuals the opportunity to adopt. Liikewise, plenty of hotels don't discriminate against heterosexuals, so none of them need fear being denied the possibility of board and lodging through some doing so.
Rather than force all elements within civil society into a single unisex mould, as the Regulations will have the effect of doing, thereby reducing the diversity of life-styles available to society's members, a truly liberal society that values equality, in a form that does not demand an oppressive uniformity in its name, would permit as many different experiments in living as are mutually compatible and do not prejudice the vital interests of any of its members.
In sum, the Sexual Orientation Regulations are deeply illiberal in spirit, and, as such, merit the active resistance of all classical liberals whatever their sexual and religious proclivities be.