UK Equality legislation latest

[marshlander]

Although I feel like I've read this before somewhere, the UK government is under pressure from the EU to make sure that the Equality Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, conforms to European directives. The government has tried to please everyone by including an opt-out clause for religious organisations to discriminate against employees and potential employees on the grounds of sexual orientation.

You can attempt to read a report here if you can cope with the misleading spelling.

[fredv3b]

The Guardian has this report. Essentially the European Commission says that Parliament mis-applied an EU directive into UK law, allowing religious organisations overly broad exemption from laws protecting homosexual employees from discrimination. Currently, UK law allows religious organisations to refuse employment to a homosexual 'so as to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion's followers'. The Government is proposing changing UK law so the exemption only applie ' if their job involves actively promoting or practising a religion'.

[marshlander]

Thanks, Fred.

[marshlander]

Rather than start a new thread I thought I'd post this news item from the National Secular Society's weekly newsletter. Extraordinary. Continued vigilance, people!

State-funded Catholic school teaching likely to lead to homophobia
A Catholic school in Wales is teaching its pupils that gay people's sexuality is invalid and that sex is meant only for procreation – anything else is merely "selfish gratification" and wrong. The revision notes being used in St Joseph's Catholic School in Newport have the title What is the Catholic Church's attitude to homosexuality? and say that: genital acts between people of the same gender are wrong; homosexual acts are 'morally wrong'; and sex is seen in the Bible as a way of a man and a woman to become 'one flesh' to be fruitful and multiply.

Pupils are taught that 'Homosexual sex can never be open to the potential of new life and so sex simply becomes a selfish way of gratifying a person.'

Cain Otley, who runs the Gay Business Network in South Wales, said: "The information contained in the booklet could incite homophobic bullying and homophobia in general. I can't imagine what any LGBT pupil thinks having to go through being taught this filth."

A spokesman for St Joseph's said the information was designed to help the youngsters learn what is required by the examination specifications produced by the Welsh Joint Education Committee. "In a Roman Catholic school the church's teaching on sexuality has to be presented clearly and in lessons this is done in a sensitive way," she said. "The information is purely factual as these are the points that students need to know for the examination."