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Britain's' Equality Act of 2006 is a piece of legislation pushed into being under EU pressure. Its laudable aim is to outlaw discrimination towards people on grounds of - listed in this order - age, disability, gender, sex-change, race, religion, belief or sexual orientation. (The order is interesting. Is there an implied hierarchy that values my aged transgenderism over your one-legged voodoo?).
On a general level, there is nothing much controversial about the bill, which was passed with ease. But, as always, the devil is in the detail.
The devil in this case is the issue of child-adoption by gays: the law as it stands makes it illegal to refuse to hand a child over for adoption if the sole reason is that the prospective parents are gay. The Catholic church, which handles a third of Britain's thousands of adoptions, has, in a rare bout of courage, denounced this part of the legislation, and said that in the absence of a derogation, it will close down its adoption agencies rather than comply. The Church of England quickly followed suit, as did a few Muslim leaders. They all make the point that, to them, homosexual practices are sinful and provide an unsuitable backdrop for bringing up children. Even many atheists, for whom the concept of sin does not exist, might however agree with the second part.
The Cabinet, with the exception of the prime minister whose wife is a Catholic and the doughty Opus Dei diehard Ruth Kelly, have all declared - including even the Catholic heavyweight John Reid - that the churches will get no exemption.
When I was small, the longest word I knew (but couldn't spell or understand) was antidisestablishmentarianism, which I eventually learnt meant wanting the state to remain wedded to the Church (of England); a desire for some continued theocracy you might say. Well, other than the Head of State being also the chief of the Church and not being allowed to marry a Catholic, that's clearly a lost cause in the UK - for the moment anyway. If you ever doubted the separation of Church and State, the Cabinet's determination to stampede the Christian churches is the definitive statement.
But will it prevail; can it win a confrontation?
This depends on whether the churches - particularly the Catholics - will continue to be strong on the issue. That means that when, for example, a Catholic adoption agency is first confronted with the possibility of having to assign a child to gays, it must either dissolve itself, as Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Catholics' boss in England and Wales, has threatened, or else deliberately ignore and flout the law as Archbishop Mario Conti in Scotland has threatened.
This will lead to a classic confrontation of values and discrimination hierarchies. Will the British government be willing enough
to assume responsibility for countless would-be adoptees thrown onto the street by dissolved agencies, or
to mount a criminal prosecution against the Catholic church?
The church will argue it is acting in accordance with its own sincerely-held beliefs and teachings, and claim that to prevent it from doing so is to discriminate against it and its members on purely religious grounds, itself a breach of the 2006 Equality Act. And note that the Act places religion ahead of sexual orientation in the list of things that are discrimination-worthy.
This would be a hugely polarising issue, which regardless of the eventual outcome, could not fail to make the government look foolish. Yet simply to succumb to the church's defiance will make it look pretty stupid also. It really cannot win, but the longer the controversy goes on the worse it will look. (Mr Blair's deferral of full implementation of the Equality Act by the churches until 2009 is merely kicking the issue into touch until after he leaves office.)
That's why Mr Blair's cabinet should take a leaf out of Bertie Ahern's book, and without delay grant the churches the derogation they are seeking.
"If I were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal...The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.."
Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, "Growing up with a single parent: What hurts, what helps."
