Judge not . . .

THE British magistrate who, to his credit, resigned on principle rather than preside over same-sex adoption has lost his appeal over his claim that he was subjected to anti-Christian discrimination.

Andrew McClintock has said he’ll continue to fight. Some Christians welcome the decision, saying that the Gospel message actually opposes the discrimination he favours. But other Christians are backing him, and are critical of what they see as the gay-rights agenda.

“Mr McClintock told an employment appeal tribunal earlier in October 2007 that he felt he had suffered discrimination because the courts refused to allow him to opt out of cases involving gay adoptions,” says the ever-helpful Christian website Ekklesia.

Bizarrely, Mr McClintock sees the placement of kids with same-sex parents as a social experiment and it is against the children’s best interests.

But the Department for Constitutional Affairs says judges and magistrates can’t pick and choose which cases they sit on.

Sixty-three-year-old Mr McClintock, from Sheffield, said he needed a means of recusal – a get-out – from cases because of his Christian homophobia.

Sorry, Your Worship, it doesn’t work like that. When you sign up to do a job, you’re expected to do it. You know what you’re letting yourself in for, and you did at least resign after that Act had come into force. However, you probably had no choice, because the authorities would not have allowed you to cherry-pick your cases.

You could have done worse, of course: you might have decided to sit on all the same-sex-adoption cases and try to turn down each one.

The situation echoes those of pharmacy assistants and supermarket checkout staff who won’t handle the morning-after pill or booze (depending on their choice of superstition) but expect to keep their jobs (see “Checkout chumps and Hippocratic oafs“).

In their case they do know what will be expected of them, and quite simply should not be given the job if it is going to come into conflict with their superstitions. This would not be unfair on the part of employers – just the opposite, because they would know exactly where they stand and would not be faced with awkward decisions because they wouldn’t be in jobs that would confront them with such choices.

More importantly, customers and users would not be pissed about by those who want to let their own beliefs affect the lives of others.