The freedom to be wrong

You can believe what you like if you do not act to harm others

Conservative religious believers, of whom there are perhaps 4 billion in the world today, mostly Christians and Muslims, still suppose that homosexuality is sinful. Sometimes their belief is an expression of genuine hatred; sometimes it is an unconsidered expression of belonging in a prejudiced society.

In countries where this is a generally accepted prejudice, they probably don’t think about it much. In countries where gay people are accepted and affirmed as equals, fundamentalists have to think more carefully. Some retain their beliefs but place them in a context where homosexuality becomes merely one sin among many others — most of which the believer shares — and nothing to get worked up about. Others turn homophobia into a central point of doctrine, and fight against

equality for gay people.

In Britain, Christian Concern is a pressure group that has brought numerous lawsuits in an attempt to establish a right for its members to discriminate against gay people. Almost all of these have been lost.

Last week, though, it won a partial victory in an important case at the court of appeal, even though the judgment dismissed most of the argument that the organization had brought. The case concerned a trainee social worker originally from Cameroon, Felix Ngole, who was thrown off his course by Sheffield University in 2017 after some posts he had made in an argument in the comment section of an American news site two years before were drawn anonymously to the university’s attention.

There is no suggestion that Mr. Ngole had discriminated against gay people in practice, but the university took the view that “any expression of disapproval of same- sex relations ( however mildly expressed) on a public social media or other platform which could be traced back to the person making it, was a breach of the professional guidelines” as the court summarized it.

The judges pointed out that this position went some way beyond the professional guidelines that are meant to regulate social workers’ use of social media. It would in fact bar almost all conservative Christians and Muslims from any caring profession. At the same time, they rejected Mr. Ngole’s claim “that the university had no business in interfering with his freedom of expression.” This also has to be right. Religious convictions cannot provide — and do not in law provide — a license to ignore laws which the believer rejects. The case has now been remitted to a second disciplinary panel with the hope that both sides will attempt to find a mutually respectful standpoint.

The distinction between speech and action is fundamental to a liberal society. Freedom of speech means nothing if it is not also the freedom to be egregiously wrong. This distinction becomes especially important in an age of social media when everything that anyone has said online can be dredged up and examined, not just by the state but by almost any private enemy before being used as grounds for denunciation. The law can compel behavior, but it shouldn’t compel thought and should not often compel the expression of thought.

Not all disagreement is hatred. This may seem a trivial point when violent persecution of gay and trans people is on the rise. But persecution is not a zero sum game. Sexual minorities are persecuted round the world, but so, in many countries, are Christians and Muslims. Active persecution starts with intolerance and intolerance starts with a lack of empathy and of the imagination required to see the other as human, even when the other is a fundamentalist Christian.