Earlier this week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that a Christian couple, Peter and Hazelmary Bull running a bed and breakfast were not entitled to deny a gay couple the use of a double room because such an action amounted to discrimination.

In this blog, British barrister, Jon Holbrook argues that the ruling is draconian and disturbingly intolerant.

In particular, he expresses some scepticism about an attempt made by one of the judges, Lady Hale, to link the Bulls’ actions to some sort of legacy of repression:

Referring to the “harm principle” invoked by philosopher John Stuart Mill, Holbrook says “‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’”

Holbrook continues: “As if to satisfy Mill’s harm principle, the Supreme Court went in search of Preddy and Hall’s ‘harm’. What they found was that when the Bulls’ house rules were explained to Preddy and Hall, they found it ‘upsetting’ and ‘very hurtful’. Even in the touchy-feely twenty-first century, where self-esteem is seen as so important and so fragile, this is pretty lame.

“The Supreme Court judge, Lady Hale, may have been aware that this ‘affront to their dignity’, as she put it, was not the sort of harm, in the Mill sense, that should justify the state’s coercive power.

“She bolstered her argument by linking Preddy and Hall’s hurt feelings to a bigger historical picture. ‘We should not underestimate’, she said, ‘the continuing legacy of those centuries of discrimination, persecution even, which is still going on in many parts of the world’. Colourful images come to mind of great struggles for equal rights fought by many a brave soul in the past and around the world today.

“But the brave souls who Lady Hale alludes to did not complain about hurt feelings and they endured a little more hardship than having to walk up the road to get a double bed.

“Neither did they do battle with an eccentric couple acting out of conscience who signed off the offending message with ‘thank you’.

“The fight against ‘discrimination, persecution even’ has, in the course of human history, been a fight against something a little more threatening than one couple’s old-fashioned view of gay sex.”