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A little bit of religious bigotry is tolerable in a healthy society
The new secular orthodoxy comes laden with threats to traditional religious beliefs and freedoms
Henry Porter
Sunday 2 May 2010
The Observer
The first thing you want to ask about Gary McFarlane, the man who lost
his case against unfair dismissal from Relate because he refused to
counsel gay couples, is whether a fundamentalist Christian heterosexual
with strongly held views about homosexuality was necessarily the best
person to give advice on gay sex. The second is why it didn't occur to
McFarlane before he signed up with Relate, which advertises courses on
counselling gays, lesbians and bisexuals, that his religious beliefs
might prove an obstacle.
These questions drifted through my mind as I listened to the judgment
on the BBC's midnight news. Greece was going down, the Gulf of Mexico
is polluted for an eternity and the election rages but here were the
courts engaged on an issue that seemed heroically beside the point. The
BBC reporter mentioned that Lord Justice Laws, the judge in the
McFarlane case, assessed religious conviction as no higher than
"opinion", but before I'd had time to compute that another item came
along: the Belgian parliament had voted to ban Muslim women from
wearing the veil.
Both stories may give hope to many that at least some things are going
right. Homophobia is being ruled out of order; Muslim women in Belgium
– and probably soon in France too – will no longer wear the signs of
their oppression. We can cheer two more victories in the campaign to
secularise everything in Europe except its temples and churches, which
are, in any case, either neglected or swamped by tourists blind to
their mysteries.
Yet these two stories left me feeling oddly uncomfortable. In the
McFarlane case, I regret that a man lost his right not simply to
express but also to live by his religious conscience, however loopy and
offensive the majority believes it to be. Lord Justice Laws's judgment
said: "In a free constitution such as ours, there is an important
distinction to be drawn between the law's protection of the right to
hold and express a belief and the law's protection of the belief's
substance." Well, yes, of course there's a difference between allowing
someone to believe something and believing it to be a fact yourself,
but that doesn't prove his point that religious beliefs are simply
another "subjective opinion".
Even an atheist like me understands that religious conviction is as
vitally important to some people as sexual orientation is to most of
us. McFarlane simply has no choice in the matter: the meteor showers of
reason and disdain from Hitchens, Dawkins and others will have no
impact on his beliefs any more than it will change the colour of his
skin.
Is this really such a terrible thing, given that he would almost
certainly be lousy at advising gay couples? Of course, if he was to go
around whipping up hatred against gays, that would be different, but he
simply said he would prefer not to do something and I cannot see that
he is causing any harm by quietly making that choice. We should allow
for these prejudices if they don't affect the lives of others for the
good reason that court cases and the sort of legislation against speech
crimes proposed by the last government will not make them go away. I
wonder why Relate didn't work round his views but perhaps a rather prim
correctness suggested that he was not the person to be doing
counselling of any kind, which is why his case ended up with the
activist judge.
For Christians who feel persecuted by the enforcement of secular
values, this case was important but when the former archbishop of
Canterbury, Lord Carey, wrote a letter supporting McFarlane and
suggesting the appointment of a special tribunal of judges sensitive to
issues of religious rights he was going too far. Such a court would
establish the same exceptionalism that sharia argues for, which is
completely against the traditions of English law, as well as being
against the interests of a cohesive society in which everyone is
treated the same in the eyes of the law.
What I am arguing for are attitudes that allow for more negotiation and
that accept that religious conviction should not be treated as simply
opinion or the inconvenient relic of a superstitious age. We abhor
homophobia and any kind of discrimination and deplore the veil and all
that it signifies, but a law that fines or imprisons a person for the
outward manifestation of their religious convictions seems as wrong as
any blasphemy ruling. A belly laugh rose when I read this sentence in
the New York Times about the Belgian decision: "Belgium's
French-speaking liberals, who proposed the veil law, argued that an
inability to identify people who have hidden their faces presents a
security risk and that the veil was a 'walking prison' for women."
They may be Belgian, they may be French-speaking, but they are no more
liberal than Monsieur Jacques Straw. The ingenious idea of banning the
veil on the grounds that it addresses both equality and security is a
sly hypocrisy, for the truth is that the instinct to legislate in this
area and to police Christians' objections to homosexuals belong on the
same spectrum of intolerance as the one that authorises the stoning of
women for adultery and the execution of gay men.
Voltaire would have grimly noted the irony that people who imagine
themselves to be his liberal and tolerant heirs have become the
opposite because of their enforcement of, you guessed it, the very
ideas of toleration and liberal secularity that he stood for.
These issues would not be so fraught if we understood that it is to be
expected that two rights occasionally clash and that our job is to make
sure that neither one wins completely. The rights of gay people to
receive counselling and to be treated equally under the law are now
thankfully assured, but they should not always trump the rights of
Christians to decline and demur because of their beliefs.
The Europe-wide tendency to enforce secularism is not only misguided
but also impractical and, when it comes to Muslims, inflammatory. We
dislike the veil for what it does to women, as well as the direct
challenge to liberal society that it consciously presents, but a
general ban cannot work, because it will achieve nothing but
resentment. It is wrong that nurse Shirley Chaplin and the BA worker
Nadia Eweida lost their jobs because they refused to stop wearing
crucifixes. The veil and the crucifix are matters of people's personal
choice and we have to live with that, just as we have to tolerate Gary
McFarlane acting on his religious convictions – his right to resist the
new secular orthodoxy.
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