Have Christians Now No Other Lawful Option But to Turn the Other Cheek?

Civitas, 13 April 2010

Something must have gone very seriously wrong with our judicial system, if it lacks resources to be able to accommodate the equally legitimate, but opposing, claims of homosexuals and religious believers who consider homosexual acts so sinful as to be unable in good conscience to carry out professional tasks requiring them to condone such acts.

The condoning of homosexual activity might be thought, for example, to be necessarily being demanded of  a registrar called upon to conduct gay civil partnership ceremonies, or  a counsellor called on to provide a gay couple with sex therapy, as opposed to relationship counselling.

As things currently stand, the weight of judicial opinion seems to have come down firmly against religious believers who harbour such scruples. Currently, they are being required to discharge such professional duties or quit their posts.

Surely, there must be some more accommodating posture that the judiciary could assume in the face of current legislation?

Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, wishes to have the conundrum resolved by providing that in future only judges sympathetic to religion serve on employment tribunals dealing with such tricky cases.

Maybe, that might be a short-term answer to the conundrum, short of the unlikely prospect that one or other of the two parties giving rise to it undergoes something tantamoun to inner moral revolution.

Eventually, however, a more stable solution must be found. Surely, in a society as plural as ours has lately become, legal space must be created to allow both parties to be able to live and work in mutual toleration and respect, despite their manifestly incompatible creeds and life-styles.

Clearly, part of the problem that we as a society currently face is that we are in a transitional period in which devout believers may have taken up employment without fully knowing what changes in the law might subsequently call upon them to do in a professional capacity in the name of equality.

Perhaps, the immediate way forward is for judges involved in hearing such cases to appreciate better and make due allowances for this historically unprecedented situation.

After all, given how long it was in the making, not even the most gung-ho secular judge could reasonably expect for Rome to be un-built in a day.