Thursday 17 September 2020

English tribunal rules the belief that “male and female created he them” is "incompatible with human dignity"

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Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale's axiom in Rex v. Taylor (1676) that "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England" was taken as a binding precedent by later judges, but was declared by the House of Lords in 1917 to be 'mere rhetoric'. 

Lord Hale's dictum was the very opposite of the view of an employment tribunal sitting in Birmingham, which late last year ruled against a Christian doctor called David Mackereth, who had lost his job after "he refused to call a transgender woman 'she'".

This was reported at the time but the News Letter, the leading newspaper in Northern Ireland, accidentally came across and published on Tuesday a striking sentence from the judgment.

Paragraph 197 of the ruling handed down by judge David Alan Perry states that
“... belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.”
Genesis 1.27 says (KJV): 
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Of course the rulings of an employment tribunal are not an important precedent, but it is very revealing. 

The News Letter found Protestant clergymen to criticise the paragraph, but the Catholic authorities made no comment. This does not surprise me.

Mrs. Amanda Spielman, the head of the English school inspectorate OFSTED and my contemporary at university, recently said religion could not be used to justify "bigotry" when it came to allowing parents to remove their children (some as young as 6) from classes teaching about homosexuality.  

The British conservative press largely approved her stand, and disapproved of the many Muslim parents who took the other view. No doubt Mrs. Spielman, who I think was brought up a Catholic, will end up in the House of Lords.

I am obliged to Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher's biographer and former editor of the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph for this story.

Just before Christmas, another employment tribunal – this time in London – found against Maya Forstater, a consultant for the Centre for Global Development think-tank. She had tweeted against government plans to allow people to self-identify as being of a different gender from their sex at birth. For this, she was dismissed.

She complained that her dismissal infringed her rights to philosophical beliefs. No, said the judge, James Tayler: her view of sex and gender was of an “absolutist nature” and “incompatible with human dignity and the fundamental rights of others”.

Judge Tayler is apparently a “Diversity and Community Relations Judge” (who knew they existed?) 

Charles Moore also reported a story that I cannot find on the net in which a judge issued a rebuke to a party on the subject of gender and added sneeringly "or, as you would say, 'sex' ".

The world is being ruled by the progressives I remember from university. Many of them are conservatives.

8 comments:

  1. The war on Christianity is just starting to warm up.

    How will Christians respond? That very much depends on how many actual Christians there are out there. I don't mean people who identify as Christian in surveys, I mean actual practising Christians who would be prepared to pay a significant price for the sake of their faith.

    I suspect that there are very few. In the West outside the U.S., probably a tiny handful.

    The U.S. is interesting. Even in their heyday in the 80s it's remarkable how little the Religious Right achieved. They're much weaker today and the only issue that American Evangelicals (the only Christian group not rapidly declining) seem to really care about is Israel.

    I'm very sceptical about the idea of Christians offering any effective resistance on moral issues. In Bri

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    1. Part of my comment go lost in the digital void. The last sentence was supposed to say that the only organised resistance on moral issues in Britain is going to come from Muslims.

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    2. I agree. I once hoped (in 1990) that Muslims, Christians and conservatives would be allies against liberalism. But no-one gave very much thought to Muslims or Islam in those days.

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  2. The world is being ruled by the progressives who so irritated me at university. Many of them are conservatives.

    It's significant that the cultural revolution in the U.S. has accelerated to an extraordinary degree under the Trump presidency.

    It's also significant that the cultural revolution in Britain seems to have really gathered momentum since the Tories took power.

    From the point of view of SJW/Woke cultural revolutionaries it seems to be a big advantage to have a right-wing government in office.

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    1. You might well think so, but the record does not really bear this out. The mid-1960s were the last period when the extreme left were as powerful as now. Then, Harold Wilson and LBJ's centre-left politics incensed the hard and extreme left.

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    2. You might well think so, but the record does not really bear this out. The mid-1960s were the last period when the extreme left were as powerful as now.

      What's significant is that right-wing parties (the Tories, the Republicans, the LNP in Australia) have done nothing to roll back the cultural revolution. So from the point of view of the SJWs/Wokeists right-wing governments are no obstacle. And having a right-wing government energises the SJWs/Wokeists. You can't deny that the cultural revolution has accelerated to an extraordinary degree under Trump.

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    3. It was in full swing before him but has got worse, yes. I agree that the way people like Boris and his ministers and the whole British establishment kowtowed to the BLM agitators, protesters and rioters is deeply shocking. Similar story in the USA.

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