It is not for a judge to weigh one religion against another. The court recognises no religious distinctions and generally speaking passes no judgment on religious beliefs or on the tenets, doctrines or rules of any particular section of society. All are entitled to equal respect. And the civil courts are not concerned to adjudicate on purely religious issues, whether religious controversies within a religious community or between different religious communities.

The Christian Insitute and similar bodies have mounted a series of court cases over the alleged persecution of Christians in the last five years. Almost all have been based around the claim that Christians are entitled to discriminate against gay people. Each one has ended in defeat.

From the cross worn by Nadia Eweida to the attempts to allow religious exemption to the registrants of civil marriage, or the owners of B&Bs, the cases have been pitched as matters of high principle, and the judges have responded with increasing asperity.

None, I think, has been so brutal as Lord Justice Munby in his judgment on the case of Owen and Eunice Johns, a couple of Sheffield pentecostalists who were turned down as foster carers because they would not accept homosexuality.

“I cannot lie and I cannot hate, but I cannot tell a child that it is ok to be homosexual”, as Mrs Johns explained her position.

Now it is arguable that this is a case that could, and should, have been settled much more quietly. I believe that if you really “can’t lie and can’t hate”, or even if you have ordinary human difficulties with a policy of full-on lying and hating, then you must come to the view that for some people it is perfectly OK to be homosexual. But either way it isn’t really an urgent problem.

The Johnses were applying to foster children between the ages of five and ten, not teens troubled about their sexuality. It’s absurd to make their views on homosexuality a shibboleth.

But the Johnses themselves, no doubt egged on by rich backers, decided to turn the case into a matter of principle. They wrote to the council “We take these statements and others to mean that it is either your policy, or your understanding of the law, that Christians and other faith groups who hold the view that any sexual union outside a marriage between a man and a woman is morally reprehensible are persons who are unfit to foster. In short you seem to be suggesting that Christians (such as us) can only adopt if we compromise our beliefs regarding sexual ethics”

This is the view that Lord Justice Munby has described as a “travesty of reality”. He goes on to say that

“We are simply not here concerned with the grant or denial of State ‘benefits’ to the claimants. No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not ‘fit and proper’ persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. No one is seeking to force Christians or adherents of other faiths into the closet. No one is asserting that the claimants are bigots. No one is seeking to give Christians, Jews or Muslims or, indeed, peoples of any faith, a second class status. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law, to our polity and to our way of life, that everyone is equal: equal before the law and equal as a human being endowed with reason and entitled to dignity and respect.”

And it is the statements he goes on to make about “what ought to be, but seemingly are not, well understood principles regulating the relationship of religion and law in our society.” I am going to quote what follows at length, because it is a really clear statement of the status of establishment, and wholly in line with what has been said in other, similar recent cases where Paul Diamond made similar arguments:

Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2011/feb/28/christianity-gay-rights-english-law