Case shows it is time to face our prejudices

The case of a transgender parent who wasn’t allowed direct contact with his Strictly Orthodox children is the latest in which the courts are intervening in religion.

When the UK Supreme Court came into being in 2009, its very first case was one which the Jewish community will never forget. The court ruled that JFS’s admissions policy, based on fundamental tents of Orthodox Jewish law, was unlawful racial discrimination.

The JFS case made one thing very clear. The rise of equality and human rights laws meant courts would be stepping into areas of religious observance as they hadn’t previously.

And so it proved. In the years since, the UK’s judges have been regularly involved in cases involving religion.

In a series of cases, the courts have found that religious Christians cannot discriminate against homosexuals. And earlier this month a Jewish nursery was found to have discriminated against a teacher who was sacked for “living in sin” with her boyfriend.

Then came this week’s important judgment from the Court of Appeal, overturning a High Court ruling that five children in the Strictly Orthodox Manchester Jewish community would have no contact with their transgender father.

Mr Justice Peter Jackson had ruled that the children would be so ostracised by the community if they had even minimal direct contact with their father that it was too much of a risk to their wellbeing.The Court of Appeal said the courts should stand up to transphobic bullying, whether it has a secular or religious grounding.

The appeal court said that Mr Justice Jackson “gave up too easily”; that he should have considered confronting the mother and even the community itself “which professes to be law abiding, with the fact that its behaviour is or may be unlawfully discriminatory”.

These are strong words. They also highlight a wider lesson. Religious communities are themselves protected by equality and human rights laws. But there are exceptions in cases involving conflicts of rights, where religious beliefs cause discrimination against other protected groups, most commonly the LGBT community and women.

In those cases, the courts will continue to step in, not because they want to interfere but because Parliament has told them to do so by passing antidiscrimination laws. Perhaps it is time to confront intolerance in our own community.