Christian registrar in Islington takes her case to appeal

[marshlander]

Lilian Ladele was taking her case to the Court of Appeal yesterday.

Here's an interesting debate on the case so far

[marshlander]

Guardian report

Part of her case rests on the equality of opportunity for lesbians and gays to marry being against her sincerely held Christian belief. Part of her argument is that doctors may be excused from performing terminations on pregnant women on the grounds of religious belief. Surely the two examples are completely different? Two adults who love each other and wish to make a public commitment and receive the benefits that the law allows under such a union affect no one's quality of life but their own. No one is a victim; there is no wronged party. No one is demanding that Ms Ladele enter a civil partnership against her will, which would certainly undermine her Christian "values". A doctor performing an abortion will have to take into consideration where he or she stands on the life of a third party, i.e. a foetus, when carrying out their work. The two examples being mentioned together makes a mockery of her position. She is much more like a teacher who decides not to teach a child or group of children because of their sexual orientation or ethnic origin. Were such a situation to arise there would rightly be an outcry.

Her homophobic bigotry has been sustained by the law during most of her sixteen years in the job. If she cannot cope when the law finally plays fair she is indeed surplus to the requirements of Islington Borough Council's service. It is within living memory that she too would have been denied marriage to a partner of her own choice had he been of another ethnic group in many so-called civilised parts of the world.

[fredv3b]

I am afraid I am going to be rather controversial, I actually have some sympathy for Ms Ladele's position from a legal point of view. She
became a Registrar before Civil Partnerships, she has deeply held religious beliefs, albeit bigoted ones, and Islington Council is, she claims, able to make reasonable changes in the way that it uses their Registrars so that Civil Partnerships can be performed by her colleagues. As far as I am a aware Islington Council have not disputed that last claim.

Where someone's job changes is a manner that contravenes their religious beliefs I think an employer is under an obligation to undertake any reasonable and practicable steps to protect the employee from those changes. I think Marshy's, example, of a teacher who refused to teach children of a certain sexual orientation or ethnic origin fails for two reasons. First, because it would be unreasonable for the school to have to divide up its kids into classes according to sexual orientation or race and second, because teachers know when they apply for the job they are expected to teach children of all sexual orientations and ethnic origins.

[marshlander]

Nicely fielded, Fred

Some pretty major changes have been imposed on teachers over the years. When I was a teacher (a long time ago) I certainly did not sign up to teaching a nationally imposed curriculum, being expected to prepare written lesson plans as though I were still on teaching practice, teaching children with learning difficulties or having to submit to the inhumanity of the OFSTED process. Many teachers in the generation before me did not expect to have to learn to teach mixed-ability classes. Changes have become a way of life in education, unfortunately, and teachers just have to get on with them. Few employees in any job are immune from having the rug pulled out from under their feet from time to time.

Any one of those changes could have violated a tenet of someone's religious belief. The prejudice would have been just as arbitrary. It just so happens that a noisy minority of Christians have decided that civil partnerships are a reasonable target for their grievances.

While it is unfortunate that people in Ms Ladele's situation are struggling with change I still don't see any merit in allowing the superstitions of desert-dwellers of millennia ago to continue to have precedence over present-day notions of fairness and equality. Some people have to be brought kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century it seems ... on the subject of which, how did we get to this situation? I don't know how Ms Ladele initially discussed her concerns with her employer, but from down here she looks like she's now sitting on a pretty high horse. Whether she climbed up there herself or it took someone like the irksome Stephen Green to give her a leg-up I don't know.

[fredv3b]

Certainly change in jobs is par for the course and that may be contrary to someones religious beliefs. The fact that employees have such beliefs should not stop changes being made, however if they are made and reasonable and practicable can be made to protect religious employees then, I think, the employer should be under a general duty to do so. Having decided on the changes in your teaching examples, I do not see what reasonable steps the employer could have taken.

From what I read things began when some gay colleagues formally complained about her not performing civil partnerships.

Fred

[marshlander]

Sorry, I'm a bit slow in drawing attention to this outcome, of which most of you will undoubtedly already be aware. Lilian Ladele was told by the Appeal Court that Islington Borough Council did not abuse religious liberty when it dismissed her for refusing to carry out civil partnership ceremonies. The Court declared on 15 December 2009 that there was no evidence of discrimination against her.

Andrew Copson from the British Humanist Association summed it up thus:

"As the judgment made clear, in a modern liberal democracy, there can be no 'opt out' for those who say they are unable to do their jobs because they wish to discriminate, even when that desire to discriminate derives from a religious belief. This judgment is extremely welcome."

Despite of my own feelings about religion, I thought it worth pointing that I do realise that not all Christians are rabidly anti-gay. It's a pity that people like Symon Hill make the news less often than people like Ms. Ladele. He writes:

The Court of Appeal has given Christians a reason to celebrate. They have turned down an appeal by a registrar who refused to officiate at civil partnerships and have rejected her claim that she was discriminated against because of her Christian faith. This is good news for all those Christians who are fed up of seeing Christianity used as an excuse for homophobia ...

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