Criticised for defending Christian rights
The informative Sunday Programme on Radio 4 dedicated a good deal of its space last week to giving a fair wind to a report about Christians living out their faith in the UK, in the light of growing complaints about a deepening chill factor from the state. This report is entitled ‘Clearing the Ground: preliminary report into freedom of Christians in the UK’. It was issued by the ‘Christians in Parliament Group’, described as ‘an official all-party Parliamentary group’. The committee conducting this inquiry comprised five MPs including its chairman Gary Streeter, and three Peers, and ‘it was administered and sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance for Christians in Parliament.’ Dave Landrum of the EA is thanked at the start for his guidance.
And Mr Landrum was on the programme advocating the report’s conclusion, basically that Christians in the UK are fine, that there is no culture war under way, that they should not make a song and dance about things. And the slant here was to attack Christian Concern, whose legal help had supported three of the Christians who had taken their cases of discrimination to the EHCR, one successfully but the other three more significant cases (backed by Christian Concern) not so. The EHCR held that employers had a right to sack employees whose traditional Christianity prevented them obeying instructions to act against their faith. Lillian Ladele asked to be excused from officiating as registrar for homosexual civil partnerships, Gary McFarlane from issuing guidance, as a relationship counsellor, on gay sex, although it would have been easy for employers to have arranged rosters as a ‘reasonable adjustment’. Shirley Chaplin’s refusal to remove her tiny metal crucifix led to her dismissal, although as all NHS patients now know Muslim nurses regularly wear their chosen headscarves, far larger symbols of their faith, without facing the sack.
The successful litigant was Coptic Christian Nadia Eweida, who was sacked for wearing her cross but won her case as the employer subsequently changed its policy. Overall, a bad day for UK traditional Christians. The EHCR based their rulings on the claim that religious rights don’t trump rights of others unless there is a very good reason, a balance had to be struck and the Christians’ rights were not sufficient to gain reasonable adjustments.
Christian Concern has been attacked for helping the Christians involved, even suggesting it was a bad thing to support them. The attack was developed by reference to High Court judges opining that the claim of unfairness to Christians was ‘a travesty of the realities’, but it is simply obvious that some religions are encouraged to have public visibility, with halal meat, head scarves, prayer rooms in police stations as prime examples, while others are frozen out. Four legs good, two legs bad. Some 1,000 Roman Catholic Priests recently wrote to The Times to say they feared growing persecution. They are right.