There is a more challenging interpretation than the one I put forward in yesterday’s blog for Christian calls for the right of churches, Christian organisations and individual believers to deny the provision of particular kinds of ‘service’ to gay individuals or couples – based on a moral judgement about their lifestyle – to be given legal protection in the Equality Bill due to be passed into UK law in April of this year. This is that the churches are concerned to ensure that they can still legally refer to active gay sexuality as being morally wrong in itself, and that this judgement can then provide sufficient justification in legal terms for services such as the provision of a double bed in a guesthouse or the processing of applications to become adoptive parents to be denied to gay couples. In other words, it might in fact be that the need to justify such a denial of service to gay couples on the basis that they are gay – rather than, merely, that they are not married – is an intrinsic requirement on the part of the churches, rather than just a tactic to ensure that services of this sort could still be denied to gay couples if gay marriage were introduced.
In short, the churches wish to protect their right to express and act upon a belief that there is something specially and uniquely immoral about gay sexual acts on top of the fact that they are a form of unmarried sex: that gay sex is more immoral than extra-marital straight sex. This would in part account for the fact that, in the examples of dilemmas of conscience that might arise under the new legislation, only the denial of a hotel room or adoption services to gay couples was emphasised, not the fact that on principle the same services ought to be withheld (and, in the case of Catholic adoption agencies, are withheld) from unmarried straight couples.
The Bill is about equality, and the judgement that gay sex is a graver sin than unmarried straight sex could be interpreted as an example of inequality: of unfair discrimination in moral judgements. The churches are essentially demanding the right to continue to condemn gay sex in stronger terms than unmarried straight sex but do not consider this to be a case of inequality but of truth. In other words, they are resisting a possible effect of the Bill: not just that sexually active gay persons have equal legal rights to straight persons, but that gay sex itself is more or less explicitly and officially acknowledged as morally equivalent to straight sex / marriage, i.e. no better and certainly no worse than straight sexual relationships – equal.
The churches should be more upfront about these implicit assumptions underlying their position. Are they in fact taking the view that gay sex is more immoral than straight sex in almost all its forms, apart from adultery and child abuse, for instance? There is little doubt that the Catholic Church’s official doctrine is that gay sex is a more serious deviation than extra-marital straight sex from what it considers to be the only legitimate form of sexual expression: unprotected genital sex within (straight) marriage. The Church of England’s position is more ambiguous, both doctrinally and in practice owing to the large number of more or less openly active gay clerics in its ranks.
This latter fact suggests a possible test that could be implemented in law to assess whether the refusal to provide a particular service to a gay couple was made on the basis of a genuine conviction that it would be morally wrong to do so, and therefore could merit the award of an exemption. The sincerity of the organisation’s moral stance could be measured by the degree of consistency with which it applied the same criteria to its own ‘personnel-selection’ procedures. In the case of the Catholic Church, it would be evident that being a sexually active gay man would pretty much disqualify you from applying to become a priest, unless of course you succeeded in keeping that part of your life under cover. Therefore, the unwillingness of Catholic adoption agencies to process applications from gay couples could be deemed to be a genuine expression of the Church’s moral convictions, applied to itself as much as to others. Whereas, in the case of the Church of England, it could be argued that it would be inconsistent for an agency to make out a case that their refusal of service was genuinely based on the Church’s teachings if in fact those teachings were not upheld systematically within the organisation of the Church to which that agency was affiliated.
If this is indeed the basis for the churches’ concerns about the Bill, then they should have the courage and honesty to admit and articulate it openly, i.e. that they believe gay sex to be morally wrong and that this conviction on occasions requires straight and gay people to be treated differently: discrimination on the grounds not of sexuality but of morality.
But there is clearly a danger for the churches in being more open about this. Firstly, they run the risk of alienating what is perhaps now the majority in our society that does not share the view that gay sex is any more immoral than straight sex. And this would also involve alienating many in the churches’ own ranks – gay or straight – who are more accepting of homosexuality.
The more serious risk is that this moral position would appear to be discriminatory in the other sense: that the doctrine could be seen as being intrinsically unfair, and could also be seen as being applied inconsistently in a manner that reveals homophobic prejudice. For example, it could legitimately be asked why the Church believes any kind of sexually active gay relationship is always worse than straight sexual practices. For instance, isn’t a loving, committed gay partnership (one that could provide a secure family for an adopted child, in some cases) morally better than a loveless, promiscuous straight sexual lifestyle? The Church had better have some logically (and organisationally) consistent and compassionate answers to such questions if their position is to have any credibility.
Furthermore, it would need to be made clear that the churches’ teachings are that it’s the behaviour and lifestyle of gay individuals and couples (active sexuality) that it rejects on moral terms (leading to the denial of adoption services, for instance) not the fact of those individuals being gay. This is both because that is what the official doctrine states but also because this differentiates actions taken on the basis of that conviction from discrimination. Discrimination involves denying rights to a person based on some aspect of their identity, i.e. in this case, because they are gay. Refusing to accept someone as a candidate to become an adoptive parent cannot therefore be for this reason, which is discriminatory in fact not just in law under the proposed new legislation. Therefore, the denial of service can only be because of a person’s or couple’s behaviour and relationship situation (that they’re sexually active), not because they are gay. Those church organisations or individual believers who do take a moral stand and risk prosecution under the new law had better be sure that their actions are motivated by rejection of the sin not of the sinner: based on moral condemnation of gay sex and not prejudice towards gay persons in themselves.
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