IT'S MORAL NOT POLITICAL
On Tuesday night, 2nd March, the House of Lords voted in favour of an amendment to the Equality Bill which would permit civil partnerships to be registered in religious premises. Whilst on the surface this seems only to affect churches which wish to allow civil partnership registrations, the Christian Institute thinks there could be scope for legal cases against those ministers and churches which refuse any application.
There were two unusual aspects to this decision. In the first place all the parties allowed their Peers a free vote, and this involved a significant change of attitude. Then in a rare break with normal procedure it was announced only the day before that all the parties had agreed to sit late into the night to allow the Bill to receive its entire Report Stage in one day. Many Peers were not prepared for this change of procedure. Again the Christian Institute suggests that this probably means that the Equality Bill will now complete all its parliamentary stages before the General Election.
The Equality Bill is a parliamentary process to implement the “Equalities and Diversity Agenda” which increasingly dominates the public discourse and practice in our country. The aim of this legislation is to remove discrimination in employment, access to services and facilities, and the structures of public services. It is also designed to provide equality of opportunity to everyone. In addition it seeks to unify a number of pieces of separate legislation. It addresses five specific areas of discrimination – race, gender, disability, sexual orientation and religion and belief.
It will be clear that there is confusion of thinking here. How can you treat race, gender and disability as being of the same order as sexual orientation and religion and faith? There are a number of different arguments to be made about personal freedom in regard to employment and access to services in respect of every citizen, but at least these matters are in a general area where parliament has a duty to act to avoid serious injustice and prejudice. Those issues affect race, gender and disability, and they are in a functional sense political. They also affect people of differing sexual orientations and religion and belief systems in terms of their function within society. As Christians we would base an argument for equality on the grounds that all men are made in the image of God and are in that sense equal. The American Declaration of Independence was surely correct when it said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But when you come to sexual orientation and religion and belief in terms of public discourse and understanding you move from the functional to the moral. These are about thought and lifestyle. They are not issues that you can legislate about. They are concerned with goodness and badness of human character and behaviour. They are in the domain of what is right and wrong in an absolute sense. There may, of course, be crimes involved with them when other people’s well-being and safety is threatened by overt actions. We must understand that these are not political because there is a large degree of unanimity across the parties and, more importantly, because they are of a distinctive order. They are about people’s right to think and develop values.
A person’s belief system goes to the very heart of what that person is in himself. Religion and belief deal with our relationship with God. It should not be argued that they are a private matter because every person should be able to speak publicly about his beliefs and engage in debate and dispute with those who differ from him. It is even legitimate in this area to offend others when strongly challenging their beliefs. There is, of course, no place for the use of violence or intimidation or harassment (they are crimes and should be punished). But open discussion about beliefs should be allowed with a wide degree of latitude. There is alongside this the unavoidable issue that what a person believes ought to be allowed to show in what he does, provided no crime is committed, and on that basis religion and belief is a public matter. I know some will want to have blasphemy laws to protect Christianity (for instance), but once those laws are introduced free discussion is denied and any argument against subsequent suppression of Christianity (when the political regime changes for example) is rendered utterly hypocritical.
Sexual orientation is about how you live in response to God’s Law. It is a moral issue. To insist on equality of views here is immediately to render the religious convictions of others invalid. As human beings, people who are homosexual should be treated with full dignity and respect and should be given equal rights alongside other citizens. But to prohibit the right to denounce the lifestyle and to be accused of homophobia if you consider homosexuality is a perversion is to put that lifestyle on a pedestal above everyone else. It is becoming the case that adultery (which is a heterosexual act) may be condemned but homosexuality may not be.
The areas where Christians are being specifically adversely affected and threatened at this time therefore are on these moral questions. It is about being free to express your view and to conduct your life in respect of that view. That means there are three areas where we need to think and act very carefully: