Lord Mackay of Clashfern served as Lord Chancellor under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1987 and 1997. He is also a former Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
Concerns about the Equality Bill - amendments to which the House of Lords has begun to consider this week - have been growing in recent months and culminated on Monday in the publication of a timely book to which I have written the foreword, A Little Bit Against Discrimination? The publication draws attention to a series of failings in the Equality Bill but particularly those pertaining to the freedom of religious bodies to employ people living their faith.
The Bill proposes that churches and other faith bodies should only be able to appoint people practising the faith with respect to sexual ethics if the role in question is wholly or mainly concerned with liturgy or ritual or promoting or explaining doctrine. Legal opinions confirm that this won’t cover priests or pastors, let alone anyone assisting them, because church leaders don’t actually spend most of their time leading liturgy and ritual and explaining and promoting doctrine. These activities tend to be very focused on Sunday services which only occupy a few hours.
During the week, however, church leaders are very much engaged with pastoral and other responsibilities. Mindful of this, it is not clear how, if the Bill became law, many churches would be able to appoint pastors, ministers or priests, practising their particular faith tradition and thus it is not clear how they could continue to operate. Similarly, given that no positions in Church welfare projects are concerned wholly or mainly with liturgy, ritual, explaining and promoting doctrine, many bodies, especially those from the Evangelical and Catholic traditions, could not be confident of being able to appoint staff properly practising the faith to any position and thus, again, it is not clear how they could continue to operate. This change in employment law constitutes a very grave and worrying attack on religious freedom in this country. How have we arrived at such an unfortunate place?
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