British Judge: Christian Beliefs Have No Legal Standing
Offline Found this on Huffington Post...
LONDON (RNS) A top British judge has ruled that Christian beliefs have no standing under secular law because they lack evidence and cannot be proven.
Lord Justice John Grant McKenzie Laws made the declaration on Thursday (April 29) in throwing out a defamation suit by Christian relationship counselor who refused to offer sex therapy to gay couples.
Gary McFarlane protested that he was fired because offering sex therapy to same-gender couples violates his Christian principles.
But Laws said "religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence." He added that to use the law to protect "a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified."
No religious belief, said the judge, can be protected under the law "however long its tradition, however rich its culture."
Laws also dismissed as "misplaced" and "mistaken" former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey's warning that a wave of discrimination against Christians threatens "civil war" in Britain.
Story continues belowCarey described the High Court ruling as "deeply worrying," heralding "a 'secular state' rather than a 'neutral' one."
Former Anglican bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali wrote in The Daily Telegraph newspaper in London that Laws' ruling had "driven a coach and horses" through the ages-old ties between Christianity and British law.
But Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society in Britain, applauded the judgment as a defeat for "fundamentalism," adding that "the law must be clear, that anti-discrimination laws exist to protect people, not beliefs."
By Al Webb
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/british-judge-christian-b_n_559244.html
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GG, if you want to be a doctor, treat people, if you want to be a mechanic, works on cars, if you want to be a sex therapist, do sex therapy. You can't pick and choose this shit. He should have hired out to the catholic church..oh wait nevermind.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
OK, I did some digging to see what details the link left out. It seems that the company that he worked for is a private company that actually hired him for a lesser job that did not require this type of counseling. After a few years, he upgraded his professional credentials ago obtained certification for sexual counseling.
So right there, there is an issue. If he wanted the promotion, he should have told his employer what his deal was. Then it would have been up to the company whether they would have offered him the new job. If that had happened and the company was willing to handle possible referrals so that this never became an issue, then he could have taken the job and nobody would be in a bad situation.
Apparently, he got the job first and then told his employer that he would only take certain assignments. As a psychiatric social worker myself, I see a large issue with the way that he handled the matter.
Past that, the private employer is also the largest recipient of government funding for that type of work. They are required to provide all of their services at prices that are adjustable based on ability to pay. So they are certainly subject to a number of rules for how they conduct business. That is another potential issue. It could also have been avoided if he had told his employer what his deal was before taking a job with specific expectations.
I will not claim that I know how such matters are handled in England but in Connecticut, he could have been fired for willful misconduct or knowingly taking a job that he was not able to perform.
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Wow, nice job on researching deeper in to the story.
I agree. If I were going to be counseling people I would definitely want to know who I was working for, who I would be counseling and if I had any problem with gay people. I am sure I would have stayed away from a company which had a government contract to provide services like this to the general public.