The perils of legislating tolerance.

United Kingdom

Everyone agrees that discrimination is a bad thing, said Robert Whelan in the London Daily Telegraph. When the government tries to legislate it out of existence, though, we all run into trouble. Just look at the Labor government’s new Sexual Orientation Regulations, which, when they take effect in April, will make it “illegal to discriminate against anyone on grounds of sexual orientation for any reason.” It sounds fine at first. Yet this ill-wrought, E.U.-inspired law overtly discriminates against religious conservatives of all faiths. As Labor interprets it, the law would deny religious adoption agencies the option of turning away gay couples. A horrified Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Britain’s senior Catholic cleric, has written to every Cabinet minister warning that he would close all 12 Catholic adoption agencies rather than comply. The Catholics, he says, aren’t trying to outlaw homosexual adoption. They merely want the right to run their own adoption services according to their beliefs.

Which is more important—the church’s beliefs, or the children in their care? asked Joan Smith in the London Independent on Sunday. Evidently, church officials would rather see a child grow up in an orphanage than a home headed by loving, same-sex parents. Such a position is obscene. Even worse than the cardinal’s blackmail, however, is that Labor might give in to it. The priests have a sympathetic listener in Ruth Kelly, a devout Catholic who is—“and this is not a joke”—the minister responsible for equality. She actually proposed creating an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies. Fortunately, she lost that fight, said Magnus Linklater in the London Times. The rest of the Cabinet was fiercely opposed to the loophole advocated by the Catholic element, as well they should be. It’s not only an affront to a law that forbids discrimination, but it’s also against the interests of children. Studies show that gay adoptive parents have a better record than straights in rearing hard-to-place kids.

We could take a lesson from America, said Terry Philpot in The Tablet. A year ago, Catholic Charities of Boston closed down its adoption services rather than comply with a Massachusetts state law barring discrimination against gays. But the nearby city of Worcester sidestepped the problem by quietly referring any gay applicants to a “more appropriate” agency.

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Madeleine Bunting

London Guardian