Britian’s Chief Rabbi has defended Pope Benedict’s intervention on the UK Government’s Equality Bill.
His statement came as the Government indicated that it would respect the vote of the House of Lords last week, which preserved protections for religious denominations.
The Minister responsible for the Bill, Harriet Harman, gave the indication after Pope Benedict attacked the legislation, which would require churches and other religious bodies to employ homosexuals against their beliefs. The Pope’s comments were attacked by the National Secular Society and homosexual rights activist Peter Tatchell.
In a guest column yesterday in the London Times, Lord Jonathan Sacks said that the philosophy behind the Equality Bill represented a tradition of rights which had become “ a political ideology, relentlessly trampling down everything in their path”
For this reason, he said “the Pope’s protest against the Equality Bill, whether we agree with it or not, should be taken seriously”.
He added that he believed that homosexuals had rights that need defending and that “religious beliefs have no privileged status in a democratic society”.
Religions, Lord Sacks said, “should have influence, not power”.
“I do not believe that the religious convictions of some should be imposed on all by force of law. In a free society, the religious voice should persuade, not compel,” he continued.
Indeed, he argued that the core of human rights “is a religious proposition: that we are all, regardless of colour, creed or culture, in the image of God”.
This religious vision burned brightly in the minds of those such as John Locke, who first formulated the idea of rights in the 17th century, he said.
For this reason, Lord Sacks argued, using the ideology of human rights to assault religion risked “undermining the very foundation of human rights themselves”.
“When a Christian airport worker is banned from wearing a cross, when a nurse is sacked after a role-play exercise in which he suggested that patients pray, when Roman Catholic adoption agencies are forced to close because they do not place children for adoption with same-sex couples and when a Jewish school is told that its religious admissions policy is, not in intent but in effect, racist, we are in dangerous territory indeed,” he warned.
Instead of what he described as the “gradual, evolutionary, mindful of history and respectful of tradition” ethos which characterised the British tradition of rights, what was now being imposed was “perfectionist, philosophical, even messianic in a secular way”.
In the latter version of rights, liberty was to be achieved “by a vast extension of the powers of the State,” he said.
Rather than regarding the Pope’s remarks on the Equality Bill as an inappropriate intervention, Lord Sacks said “we should use them to launch an honest debate on where to draw the line between our freedom as individuals and our freedom as members of communities of faith”.
Meanwhile, prominent homosexual writer, Andrew Pierce, writing in the Daily Mail, said he agreed with much of what the Pope had to say about the Equality Bill.
By forcing Catholic adoption agencies to close down, Pierce says, Labour’s drive for equality “could hurt some of the most vulnerable members of our society – those whom I thought ministers had a duty to protect”.
