Eunice Johns greets me, a total stranger, with an embrace. “I like to hug,” she says. A minute later, when I am looking for a tissue to blow my nose, she hands me half her packet. These are the actions of a true Christian. And that’s the problem. Eunice lives according to the instruction she finds in the Bible – and one of those instructions is that sex should be confined to marriage. For that reason, she and her equally beaming, gentle husband, Owen, have not been allowed to foster children.
Yesterday, two High Court judges upheld the decision of Derby City Council not to approve the Johns family as carers. There were no objections to them saying grace before meals or taking foster children to church on Sunday. The sticking point was their answer to the question: “Would you tell a child it was OK to be homosexual?” The Johns replied that they would not. They would love a child regardless, but not endorse that lifestyle.
Both Eunice, 62 and Owen, 65, are born-again Christians. They came to Britain from Jamaica in their teens and found their “vibrant” form of worship – clapping and gospel singing – out of kilter with the Church of England. They joined The Church of the God of Prophesy, based in Tennessee; Eunice teaches at Sunday school.
In the Eighties, when the last of their own four children was soon to leave home, the couple took up fostering in their four-bedroom house. “We love children and we wanted to give something back to society,” says Eunice, a retired nurse. Over the course of a decade or so, while Owen worked at Rolls-Royce, they had dozens of children to stay with them for three- or four-week spells, providing respite for their regular carers.
After a gap of a decade, during which they ran a catering business, they decided to return to fostering in 2007, offering respite care for five- to eight-year-olds. Their motive was not financial – “We didn’t even find out how much the money was,” says Eunice, even though foster carers can earn £250 per child per week. But this time, after several interviews, they were not put on a training course. Instead, to their surprise, they received a letter thanking them for withdrawing their application.
The problem? Their views, they learnt, had disbarred them from caring for other people’s children under the 2007 Equalities and Sexual Orientation regulations. As interpreted by Derbyshire social workers, and now the law courts, this means that they have to endorse homosexuality. “I worked with homosexuals as a nurse and it was never a problem,” says Eunice. “The issue never arose with any of the children who came to stay with us. If it were to, I would ask social services for a professional to deal with it.”
She might have done better to fudge the issue when asked a direct question. “But,” she protests, “our Christianity isn’t something we can just take on and off. It is our lifestyle.” Her husband adds that this ruling represents “the first stage of persecution”.
In the courtroom battle, Christianity has lost to equality rights. But the real losers here, say Eunice and Owen, are the children who won’t have loving homes, because people like themselves will be put off from coming forward. Many Christians with strong Biblical objections to homosexuality are of Afro-Caribbean origin – the very social group most in demand for fostering and adoption.
Several other members of their Pentecostal congregation are foster carers. The difference between them and the Johns is that they weren’t scrutinised during the last three years. In other local authorities, Christians with similar views have been approved because the ruling has not been uniformly applied. This week’s judgment comes at a time when demand has never been greater: since the death of Baby P in 2007, ever more children have been taken into care.
Social services like to match parents’ and children’s ethnic backgrounds. But, says Eunice, “can’t they match us with children from similar religious backgrounds? Only this week Derbyshire social services were advertising for more black foster carers. Many people were waiting for this ruling to decide whether to apply.” Now they may not offer to share their homes.
A good thing, too, says Cathy Ashley, chief executive of the Family Rights Group. “It is unfortunate that this case is being portrayed as religion pitched against liberal human rights,” she insists. “But the state has to provide children with homes that are not just loving but supportive. Even if the children the Johns want to foster are too young to be concerned about their own sexuality, they might have a homosexual brother and this could be a problem.
“There is a danger of saying that anything is good enough because there is a shortage of carers, but these children have often been through hell. Instead, we need to encourage more people to come forward as potential carers, to look more carefully at aunts and uncles who could be carers, and to question whether so many children need to be taken into care at all.”
The new ruling has also met with approval from many Christians who don’t share the Johns’s views. “Christ himself said nothing about gay people,” says Michael Arditti, a gay Christian and author of Lourdes, a novel that debates Christian versus secular values. “The only aspect of personal relationships that Christ consistently condemned was divorce. People who propagate hatred are directly responsible for the huge number of homophobic attacks which continue to blight the lives of ordinary people. We cannot stop such people injecting their poison in their own children, but we can stop them from doing so to other people’s.”
Eunice and Owen, however, don’t appear militant except when they quote the Bible. Indeed, they would never have taken their case through two lower courts to the High Court had Eunice not been watching the Revelation Channel three weeks after Derby turned them down. There, she heard about the case of Vince and Pauline Matherick, whose 11-year-old foster child was removed from their care by Somerset social services after they, too, refused to endorse homosexuality.
The Mathericks’ case was fought by the Christian Legal Centre, which succeeded in getting them reinstated. Andrea Williams, director of the CLC, says she has 50 cases on her books, all concerned with the rights of Christians to live according to their consciences. “We aren’t focused on the homosexual issue,” she says, “but it’s the issue of our times.”
In some instances, the line between private belief and human rights is clearer. If a child were being cared for by Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not believe in blood transfusions, the state would intervene. “The rights of the child have to come first,” agrees Eunice, who is using the CLC’s central London offices as a base.
But many of the test cases taken up by the CLC deal with the fuzzy area between personal conscience and public office: registrars sacked for not wishing to conduct same-sex civil ceremonies, B&B owners who don’t want to take unmarried couples, a nurse suspended for offering to pray for a patient. She feels that Christians are given less respect for their views than other religions. The peculiar thing, she claims, is that such battles are not seen elsewhere in Europe, except for Sweden. “In Italy and Germany, the Johns would not have this trouble. When the Italians were told that they couldn’t have crosses on classroom walls, they simply ignored it. In America, Christians would invoke the first amendment on the freedom to worship. This country is in the vanguard of legislation – for better or worse, depending on your point of view.”
The case may now go to appeal. Ideally, Williams would like a commission of inquiry to investigate whether the new equality and sexual orientation legislation infringes other rights. In the meantime, the Johns have an empty spare bedroom.
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