The Law Is Eroding Our Right To A Set Of Beliefs

Published by The Telegraph UK on 18 January 2011.

Telegraph View: The right to act in keeping with one's religious faith is being set against the right not to be offended – and is losing.

The owners of a Cornish hotel who refused to allow two homosexual men to take a double room were judged at Bristol county court yesterday to have acted unlawfully. Peter and Hazelmary Bull argued that, as Christians, they did not believe unmarried couples, whatever their sexual orientation, should share a room at their hotel. They said it was a policy they had operated since opening their doors for business 25 years ago. Indeed, their hotel website describes their hotel as "family-run for families" – which prompts us to ask why the couple, Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, should have wanted to stay there in the first place. They had an absolute legal right to do so, of course, and no one could possibly condone a refusal to give them a room on the grounds of their sexuality. The Bulls said they based their refusal on their "married couples only" rule, a fine point given that the two men are civil partners.

Judge Andrew Rutherford, awarding Mr Hall and Mr Preddy £3,600 damages, told the Bulls that their views were out of date and added: "It is inevitable that laws will, from time to time, cut across the deeply held beliefs of individuals and sections of society." It should surprise no one that the Bulls received such short shrift from the courts and that their strongly held religious convictions should count for so little. Last year, Gary McFarlane, a Christian sex therapist, was sacked by Relate, the relationship charity, because he refused to counsel a homosexual couple. His case was taken up by Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said Christians are being persecuted because a strongly held conviction that homosexuality is wrong is being superseded by laws outlawing discrimination on grounds of sexual discrimination. The McFarlane case went to the Appeal Court, which found against him. In a similar case, a registrar who refused to conduct civil partnerships because they were against her religious beliefs was sacked. In both cases, the aggrieved parties could have gone elsewhere to be counselled or married, just as Messrs Hall and Preddy could have found a different hotel.

The right to hold religious beliefs, and to act in keeping with one's faith, is being set against the right not to be offended – and is losing. This is a dispiriting trend in a free society. The views of the Bulls will seem to many to be old-fashioned, even distasteful – but they have every right to hold them. A pervasive climate of political correctness, however, is driving such beliefs to the margins; the law is out of kilter. It no longer protects the freedom of the believer in the way that it defends the interests of those who consider themselves discriminated against. As we have argued before, this is an unhealthy imbalance that needs to be redressed – if not by the courts, then by Parliament.