Get ready to be sued, Minister tells Christians
By Simon Caldwell

18 December 2009

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said that he would not qualify as a priest under the terms of the Equality Bill (PA Photo)

A government Minister has predicted that the Equality Bill will create a torrent of hostile legal actions against the Church.

Michael Foster, the Minister for Equalities, admitted that the legislation would open the floodgates to a tide of sexual and religious discrimination cases. He advised the Church to start preparing to defend itself in the court from such people as ideological secularists who seek to squeeze religion from the public sphere.

“Both sides [the Church and the secularists] need to be lining up [their lawyers] by now,” he told journalists. “Government is used to the fact that its legislation should be challenged. People feel very strongly about these issues. We can’t do anything about this and we wouldn’t want to.”

He added: “I would like to see the churches being more bold. I would like to see the faith groups stand up and be counted for what they think and to challenge secularism, if that’s what they want to challenge. The secularists should have the right to challenge the Church and if the Church’s argument is good enough – which I believe it is – then the Church should win through.”

Mr Foster, the MP for Hastings and Rye, suggested that if Christians expended the same energy in defending themselves as their enemies did in attacking the Church they might be in a stronger position. He declined to offer a solution to how conflicting rights of religious freedom of employers and sexual expression of employees, for instance, could be resolved.

Nor did he deny claims made by the Catholic bishops that the Bill would allow non-Christians who work in church premises to sue for victimisation if they were offended by crucifixes on walls. Instead, he said he thought such a scenario “unlikely”, even though an atheist last month successfully sued the Italian government over its policy of having crucifixes in schools.

The Bill has the ostensible aim of consolidating earlier equality legislation into a single law. The churches, however, have argued that it narrows provisions allowing them control over who they employ, an accusation Mr Foster denies as “wrong”.

The bishops have said they would be open to prosecution if they rejected as candidates for the priesthood women, married men, gay people in civil partnerships and transsexuals.

They warned peers ahead of a Second Reading debate in the House of Lords last week that they would also be unable to stop priests from having sex-change operations or engaging in any other activities seen as a legitimate form of sexual expression.

The bishops could not only be sued for sexual discrimination but, in the worst-case scenario, they could also face imprisonment, unlimited fines and have Church assets sequestrated, lawyers say.

The Bill says that only those people who lead worship or teach doctrine can be expected to lead lives consistent with the moral teachings of the Christian faith – but they must spend the majority of their time engaged in such activities.

The bishops argue that this definition is unrealistic – and say it was arrived at without consultation – because most priests spend more time involved pastoral work, private prayer and study, administration and building maintenance, for example.

If priests cannot fulfil the Government’s definition, the bishops would be left open to legal action from anyone who wanted to be a priest but was turned down because of either their gender or sexual lifestyle.

The Anglican Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, told the Lords during the debate that not even he would qualify for an exemption under the Government’s definition of a priest. “The movers of the Bill may be of the view that archbishops and other clergy work only on Sundays, but if one looks at my diary, you will find that most of my days and evenings are not filled with preaching or taking services,” said Dr Sentamu. “The same would go for most clergy and ministers and, I am sure, for leaders within other religious communities as well. The exemption is flawed.”

Tory peer Baroness O’Cathain, an Evangelical, said that “for Christian freedom” the Equality Bill was the “single most damaging Bill to come before the House in my 18 years as a Member”.

Former Tory Minister Baroness Cumberlege, a Catholic, said that in practice the Bill would mean, for instance, that if “a man employed as a Catholic diocesan Marriage Care co-ordinator abandoned his family and his wife in a well-publicised and scandalous divorce case to remarry in a civil ceremony a woman with a similar history ... any action the diocese took against him as a result would be unlawful”.

She also questioned why the Bill was being pushed through the Lords in four days when the Government’s own whips had recommended at least eight days to scrutinise and debate its provisions.

The Bill represents a low point between the churches and the Government and its debate in the Lords came just days after Anglican leader Dr Rowan Williams accused Ministers of treating religion as a “problem”, an  eccentricity practised by “oddities, foreigners and minorities”.

Neil Addison, a barrister and expert in religious discrimination law, said it was “completely misleading and untrue” for the Government to claim that the Bill simply consolidates existing law.

“It is not, it is changing it,” he said. “The trouble is that the Government is passing vague legislation and then saying ‘well, the courts will sort it out’,” he added.

“But the law should be as certain as possible. Courts should not become the arena in which these issues are fought out. The Government and Parliament should make policy instead of fudging it, waiting for the courts to make the decision and then saying ‘it has nothing to do with us’, which is what is happening.

“The Equality Bill is a very dangerous piece of legislation because it is unclear.”