Daniel McArthur (C) general manager of Ashers bakery involved in a “gay cake” legal dispute speaks to the media outside Laganside court in Belfast. March 26, 2015. Ashers refused to make a cake bearing a pro-gay marriage slogan on it which was to be given to Andrew Muir, Northern Ireland’s first openly gay mayor. The bakers refused to make the cake on the grounds that it contradicted their religious beliefs according to local media.
A new report on the erosion of religious liberties, such as those seen in several high-profile court cases concerning Christians in the U.K., warns that anti-discrimination laws are being used as a “weapon,” and could end up suppressing the freedoms of many people in society.
James Orr, a McDonald post-doctoral fellow in theology, ethics and public life at Christ Church, University of Oxford, told The Christian Post in a phone interview that his report, titled “Beyond Belief: Defending religious liberty through the British Bill of Rights,” seeks to balance the expression of religious beliefs with the interests of other groups.
“Beyond Belief,” which was published last week by independent think tank ResPublica, analyzes how laws, such as the Equality Act 2010, which are meant to strengthen anti-discrimination laws and the rights of minorities, have instead led to an erosion of religious liberties.
What is more, the report claims, they have fueled an “atmosphere of deep mutual distrust” between groups, and have “suffocated,” rather than stimulated, public debate in society about equality and difference.
The report takes a look at a number of cases, many of them concerning conservative Christians seeking to defend their religious freedom rights, which have ended up in court.
Some of the most famous cases include Ashers Bakery in which a Christian couple from Northern Ireland was found by the Court of Appeal to have discriminated against a gay couple because they turned down a request to bake a cake that displayed a pro-gay marriage slogan.
In another case, a Christian woman by the name of Nadia Eweida had to go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights to defend her right to wear a silver cross necklace at work, after her employer, British Airways, sent her home without pay for refusing to either remove or conceal the cross.
Orr told CP that legislation such as the Equality Act 2010 has turned human rights into “weapons,” which “pit certain minorities in society against other minorities.”
“The problem is there is such a diversity of ideas about human flourishing and human nature, and the social good that it’s very difficult to get the kind of agreement that human rights conventions and regimes require,” he added.
Orr accused the Equality Act of “generating inequality between different minority communities within Britain.”
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SOURCE: The Christian Post
Stoyan Zaimov
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