Christian magistrate ‘was right to resign’

When individuals cannot allow their religious loyalties to be trumped by their public responsibilities, they should resign; the alternative is for the public domain to be invaded and disrupted by a Babel of claimed individual religious sensitivities, or even worse, by various religious organisations whose prejudices, taboos, anxieties and antipathies distort the overall public endeavour for a decent and equitable social order which is as inclusive as possible.

That’s the opinion of AC Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London – and secularists throughout the UK are echoing his sentiments, if the comments that followed his piece in the Guardian yesterday are anything to go by.

Grayling was commenting on the case of Andrew McClintock, a Christian magistrate who says he was forced to quit the bench because he does not agree with adoption by gay couples.

Earlier this year McClintock, of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, said civil partnership laws clashed with his religious beliefs. He told a tribunal he did not want to have to remove a child from its natural family into the care of a gay couple.

Mr McClintock, 63, said the decision meant children would escape “one kind of harm only to face another hazard”. He told the employment tribunal in Sheffield, which started in January, his request to avoid such cases had been refused.

Mr McClintock, a member of the Christian People’s Alliance Council, said new rules on same-sex couples contradicted both his personal religious beliefs and his duty as a magistrate to put the child’s welfare first.

Speaking after he heard his claim had failed, father-of-four Mr McClintock said: “There will be more children now who the courts remove from one kind of harm only to face another hazard.

This ruling is going to make it harder for many conscientious people – whether they are JPs in the family court, or otherwise involved with children, or maybe with different matters of conscience. Anyone who holds seriously to the traditional morals and family values of Jews, Christians or Muslims will think twice before taking on such a job.

This week McClintock appealed against the tribunal’s decision, and is awaiting the result of his appeal.

Lawyers for the Department of Constitutional Affairs, which oversees magistrates’ courts, told the tribunal panel at the earlier hearing that no judge or magistrate could select which parts of the law they wished to apply.

A spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall said: “We are not surprised at the outcome and the tribunal’s decision made it clear that people in public service cannot pick and choose which laws they comply with.

While not disrespecting anyone’s private religious views, all public figures have to work within the legislation and in these cases in the best interests of the children involved.

Grayling, in his Guardian piece yesterday, said McClintock:

Wished to be allowed to keep his job and his prejudices simultaneously, and to be allowed not to comply with the law of the land, because the sexual morality of shepherds 3,000 years ago, keen on the increase of their flocks, made it taboo for sex ever to be about anything other than reproduction. This principle resulted in the murder of Onan by God, and the Catholic Church’s long-time view that rape is less bad than masturbation because it can result in pregnancy. It also resulted in the millennia-long oppression and persecution of gays, who were put to death by the devotees of gentle Jesus meek and mild, an oppression and persecution that Mr McClintock wishes to keep alive.

Well: Mr McClintock did exactly the right thing by resigning. If his prejudices interfere with his responsibility to serve the law as one of its officers, he is evidently much better employed elsewhere.