Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
CALLS FOR RELIGIOUS PRIVILEGES TO BE AXED AFTER CENSUS RESULT
There are only two countries in the world that automatically give places in their parliaments to clerics.
One is Iran, that bastion of religious brutality, the other is the United Kingdom, where 26 bishops are guaranteed seats in the House of Lords.
This is just one of the anachronisms that the Government should be spurred into reforming by the census data released this week.
For the first time, fewer than half of those answering described themselves as Christian: 46.2%, hugely down from 59.3% in the 2011 census.
The number of people saying they had no religion was up by eight million people to just over 37%.
If ever there was any justification for one religion having automatic votes in our democracy, there isn’t any more, just as there’s no justification for the hold that religion has over our schools.
Exemptions to the Equality Act allow faith schools to use religion to discriminate over which pupils they admit, who they employ and what they teach.
Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, says it is time for religion’s privileges to be scrapped. “The law has failed to keep up with the pace of change, and as a result, the enormous non-religious population in England and Wales face everyday discrimination – from getting local school places to receiving appropriate emotional support in hospitals,” he said.
“This census result should be a wake-up call which prompts fresh reconsiderations of the role of religion in society.”