The BBC's story on this is on their news front page, probably because it combines a Christian, gay sex, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury (who submitted a witness statement warning of "future civil unrest" if judges did not rule in favour of Christian belief).

What it misses out is made clear in the actual judgement: the therapist signed up to a non-discrimination policy which explicitly included sexual orientation on starting the job in 2003 and only announced that he would not "endorse" "sinful" same sex sexual activity in 2007.

The judges' polite 'fuck off' to the former Archbishop and his call for, effectively, a religious court ("a specialist Panel of Judges designated to hear cases engaging religious rights") is particularly good:

The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.

This entry was originally posted at http://lovingboth.dreamwidth.org/389560.html, because despite having a permanent account, I have had enough of LJ's current owners trying to be evil. Please comment there using OpenID - if you have an LJ account, you can use it for your OpenID account. Or just join Dreamwidth! It only took a couple of minutes to copy all my entries here to there.