Archbishop Warns of “Civil Unrest” in Wake of UK Court Ruling against Christian Counselor

From LifeSiteNews
By Peter J. Smith

The clash between Christians and the state has intensified, with a UK court now having upheld the dismissal of a Christian psychologist who refused to give advice on sexual intimacy to homosexual couples - a decision the former Canterbury Archbishop Lord Carey has denounced as a prelude to “civil unrest” between Christians and the secular government.

Gary McFarlane, 48, a Bristol solicitor, father of two, and evangelical Christian, had worked part-time as a psychological counselor with Relate for five years, during which time he even gave advice to homosexual couples working out basic relationship problems. However, he was sacked from his job in 2008 when he qualified as a psychosexual counselor, because he said he could not give advice in homosexual intimacy as this violated his conscience and beliefs.

McFarlane tried without success to challenge Relate’s decision to fire him at an employment tribunal, arguing that they should have accommodated his religious views. He then appealed to the UK Court of Appeal for permission to challenge the tribunal’s ruling.

However, Lord Justice John Laws denied McFarlane’s request in a strident ruling that argued the law had no responsibility to protect the individual’s expression of conscience or religious belief.

Laws made clear that the court did not view legislation protecting individual conscience as justifiable, calling it an irrational position that “is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary."

"The conferment of any legal protection of preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however long its culture, is deeply unprincipled," said Laws in his ruling.

"In a free constitution such as ours there is an important distinction to be drawn between the law's protection of the right to hold and express a belief and the law's protection of that belief's substance or content," ruled the Lord Justice. Laws said that if the law created special exemptions for adherents of one belief, then it would lead to a disenfranchisement of the rest of the members in society, and would lead to “theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.”

"The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments,” wrote Laws. “The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law, but the state, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself."

Gary McFarlane lamented the ruling saying, "I have the ability to provide counseling services to same-sex couples.

"There should be allowances taken into account whereby individuals like me can actually avoid having to contradict their very strongly-held Christian principles."

Lord Carey struck out at Law, saying the fact that leaders of the Church of England and other faiths have felt compelled to intervene in court cases involving discrimination against Christians and their viewpoints is “illuminative of future civil unrest” coming to the United Kingdom.

"It is, of course, but a short step from the dismissal of a sincere Christian from employment to a religious bar to any employment by Christians," said Carey.

Carey denounced the judgment, saying it "continues a trend on the part of the courts to downgrade the right of religious believers to manifest their faith in what has become a deeply unedifying collision of human rights."

"The description of religious faith in relation to sexual ethics as 'discriminatory' is crude and illuminates a lack of sensitivity to religious belief,” he continued.

"The comparison of a Christian, in effect, with a 'bigot' (i.e., a person with an irrational dislike to homosexuals) begs further questions. It is further evidence of a disparaging attitude to the Christian faith and its values."

Yet the archbishop also said that Laws’ ruling suppressed British pluralism rather than encouraged it, because the state was enforcing secular values rather than embracing a neutral stance that would allow all individuals of all faiths to live out their beliefs freely.

"It heralded a 'secular' state rather than a 'neutral' one. And while with one hand the ruling seeks to protect the right of religious believers to hold and express their faith, with the other it takes away those same rights. It says that the sacking of religious believers in recent cases was not a denial of their rights even though religious belief cannot be divided from its expression in every area of the believer's life.

"Oddly the judge doesn't address the argument that rights have to be held in balance and he is apparently indifferent to the fact that religious believers are adversely affected by this judgment and others."

The disenfranchisement of Christians in the United Kingdom continues apace under the anti-discrimination laws introduced by Labour. In the past several years numerous reports of Christians losing their jobs or even being arrested simply for expressing their Christian moral views have surfaced – events that appear shocking in light of the 70th anniversary this year of Winston Churchill’s famous “Finest Hour” speech from the Second World War.

The famed British Prime Minister had rallied the British people on the eve of the Battle of Britain in June 1940 saying, “upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.” He warned that if they failed, “all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”