Celia Hannon
Senior Researcher
Celia Hannon joined Demos as a researcher in 2005. Her research interests include gender, childhood, new media and public space.
at 2:02pm on Wednesday, 24th January 2007
'The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well meaning'. So said the two Archbishops of the Church of England last night. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that we were all subject to the same legislation as everyone else in society - whatever our conscience tells us. Apparently it's acceptable to discriminate against gay people if your conscience told you to. So if you really hate gay people (and you've thought about it a lot) you should be provided with a get out clause.
The argument about the new legislation on discrimination in goods and services has presented the government with the opportunity to send out a strong message on equality. Instead they are allowing themselves to be blackmailed by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's threat to close Catholic adoption agencies. (Let's not forget, he also sacked an aide for being openly gay.) If an exemption for Catholics is included, the purpose of this legislation will be undermined. Rather than writing our legislation to reflect prevailing attitudes, it's more often the case that laws need to be passed before attitudes change.
The argument about the new legislation on discrimination in goods and services has presented the government with the opportunity to send out a strong message on equality. Instead they are allowing themselves to be blackmailed by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's threat to close Catholic adoption agencies. (Let's not forget, he also sacked an aide for being openly gay.) If an exemption for Catholics is included, the purpose of this legislation will be undermined. Rather than writing our legislation to reflect prevailing attitudes, it's more often the case that laws need to be passed before attitudes change.
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I agree - what if your conscience/religion says that it's ok to be racist, for example? Is that ok? Stonewall make an important point on this: being gay is best understood not as something you do, but as part of who you are – so where’s the difference?
1) You seem to be suggesting that legislation should take exclusive precedence over our moral framework or conscience. I agree legislation should apply to all. However I hope you would also agree that our democracies are stronger because there have been valuable exceptions. The phrase 'conscientious objector' stares us in the face from your title and it does seem right that people of peace should not be made to fight as they are in many places today. Another case in point would seem to be Mahatma Gandhi who resisted tyranny through civil disobedience.
2) I am not sure what the full context is of what the two archbishops said as you did not supply a reference. However I would be very surprised if the clergy you refer to were speaking out of hatred although that may be implied in what you wrote. When I read the bible I find that faith in Jesus is more to do with the strong love of giving forgiveness than the opposite.
I really do appreciate what you have written purely and simply as I said above because you have clearly written with such passion. I disagree with the grounds from which you have argued and I haven't addressed the point of the argument because the supporting reference is missing. I am blissfully ignorant as they say.
I teach ICT at a special school and as such I share responsibility for the moral guidance of my pupils. On these matters of morality and legislation what I suggest to my pupils is that thankfully the law is mostly necessary only when our conscience has let us down in some respect. This is a common sense approach that seems also to make sense to my pupils. It has echoes in the teaching of the bible and strangely some find a coherent moral framework within its covers and in the lives of those who live by it.
I have found the text of the letter from the Archbishops of York and Canterbury to Tony Blair. It is up on this website. Hope that is of interest.
Having read it myself, I have two points. Firstly, that the writers seem to lament that the debate has opened up beyond the closed doors of what is referred to as 'reasoned discussion'. The claim that 'proper negotiation' is to be had following such a private set of deliberations is peculiar, but perhaps not hugely surprising from figures whose job it is to be the learned scholars of a school of moral thought.
Secondly, I'm not convinced that I find any particularly compelling or substantive arguments in the letter that would make me agree that some form of exemption of consicence is a good idea.
The point about civil disobedience is interesting. It tends to be disobendience of a societal norm or piece legislation. It is a valuable and interesting form of engagement in civil society. But I'm not sure about using it as an example of why we should embed an exemption in law that covers a particular slant of conscience.
I am not sure I was arguing before to 'embed exemption in law'; rather I was pointing out the illogicality of another point of view which seemed to be saying both that legislation should apply to all and also that it has some superlative standing as a moral framework. My point is legislation should indeed apply to all; but it
is different to our conscience or moral framework; the exceptions I refered to prove my point; and finally I offered an alternative framework for those who judge (rightly in my view) that legislation provides an inadequate moral framework for everyday life. I hope the clarification is helpful.
That said, I am interested in the wider issue you talk about and as I said above I hope to find time to read the letter you refer to perhaps over the weekend. If I feel I have anything helpful to contribute to your discussion I hope that might be welcome at that time.
I don't want to get into a debate about what laws are there for, but suffice to say they are sometimes there to make sure things that 'we' feel are undesirable don't happen. So this little discussion we are having now is an example of people deciding what those things are - for example, and to simplify a little, in the provision of services, should someone be able to deny that service to another because of what their conscience tells them about the other's life?
I would argue not; I actually think its also a pretty good example of where 'our' consience would be letting us down. I think we might agree to disagree on this one. But I think there is a point that is more important than my opinion on this particular topic.
It seems that the way we can handle these different opinions is pretty interesting. Not only have we been faced by the standard contemporary policy challenge of adequately representing such a diverse and cacophonous set of viewpoints and lifestyles in setting a law - with the problem of how good the parliament model we have is at tackling certain issues. This debate also sits right at the intersection of ideas about individual freedom, representative democracy, different ideas about how we should all live and what we should do etc.
So it is a great example of the problems caused by what some people have said is the paradox of our liberal democracies - that we at one and the same time champion and protect our rights to do what we want, but simultaneously argue that the best way to organise ourselves is to have a system to represent collective interests. That's why I put 'us' and 'our' inside problem marks. We tend to think of this in terms of what we should and shouldn't be made to do, think or say; and about the rights of others to be prescriptive about those things. With lots and lots of people thinking lots of different things, there are also less 'vehicles' - organisations or parties or institutions - that we feel comfortable calling fully representative of us as individuals and of our thoughts and opinions. Added to that is the great idea that there are principles etc that matter so much that we should be, in some way, prescriptive.
I think if we're not going to sulk about the future we have to be optimistic about resolving these ideas in some way! That's why I think this is such an interesting debate.
I'm not sure i've got any further towards answering anything. But I think this is adjacent to a description of why I think the process is so difficult. I'm basically doing a very very bad job (it is a Saturday afternoon!) of describing the arguments implicit in a lot of what Demos does.
1. that the role of legislation is to create a conformity to preferred behaviour or relationship that isn't otherwise happening. Long history of social, political and economic progress using that democratic tool, right?
2. the moral certainty of religious belief doesn't trump debate. Religious orthodoxy by definition is a partial framework. I don't think it is very relevant to the issue of adoption by gay couples. If someone thinks such a practice would be wrong then they need to say why and not just point to their religious faith by way of explanation. I can see different sides to this debate but I can't see a legitimate religious corner to it and I certainly don't see why the Catholic Church is demanding to be treated differently because of its particular opinion about the way the world works.
3. To Jack, religion is indeed useful to many as providing the valuable bonds of community and kinship that are sorely missing in our atomised and fragmented world and many of my friends are members of many different churches and faiths all with their own belief systems, traditions and norms. The richness and vitality of different religious communities adds much to the necessary diversity and vitality of our society (as do lots of other minority views, opinions and lifestyles). Destructive and deliberate discrimination against such minority views is against the rules. These are the very same rules that are now ensuring that we do not discriminate against the gay community in matters of adoption.
4. becoming a member of a religious community with attendant rules and norms is a choice made by autonomous individuals for a range of reasons.
5. being gay isn't someone making a similar type of choice, it is who some people are (as Duncan and Stonewall said earlier). To my mind therefore the need to protect and support the rights of the gay community therefore trump the individual choices of members of religious minorities.
6.When Glen Hoddle tried to explain his religious prejudice against disabled people he was roundly criticised and lost his authority (and his job). Being disabled isn't a choice and we rightly seek to protect the disabled against societal discrimination. There is no place for religious norms in calibrating the rights of the disabled community. Religious groups should extend the same principal to the gay community or explain clearly why they cannot.