Lambeth town hall in Brixton: Two registrars are being investigated after allegedly refusing to conduct same-sex gay partnership ceremonies due to their religious beliefs.
Here we go again.
Two registrars are being investigated after allegedly refusing to conduct same-sex partnership ceremonies because they went against their religious beliefs.
It is claimed they swapped their shifts at a register office informally to avoid the civil unions.
Both work at Lambeth town hall in Brixton, south London, where ceremonies for same-sex couples have been offered since 2005. The allegations were made by another registrar at an equality seminar in May.
A member of the Labour council’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender forum was at the seminar and complained to the borough’s chief executive, who ordered an investigation.
Brian Palmer, a Lambeth councillor who is homosexual, asked at a full council meeting what measures were being taken to prevent a similar situation happening again. “Such actions will be grossly offensive to many members of the borough’s large LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community including myself,” he said.
Steve Reed, the council’s leader, replied: “The council must and will comply with all legislation and our own equalities codes in this regard. Any failure on the part of officers to comply will be dealt with appropriately.”
He said the chief executive would ensure that all staff were aware they were obliged to provide services equally to all residents, adding: “This council does not tolerate bigotry for any reason.”
Obviously I don’t know if these religious beliefs are Christian although I suspect this will be the case and if it is, I’m sure we will shortly be hearing from one of the Christian legal groups.
On the face of it, it would seem that these registrars simply informally swapped shifts to avoid conducting same-sex civil unions, which didn’t impinge on the registrars’ service in administering civil partnerships.
However, given that this has now progressed to the “investigation” stage and bearing in mind recent failures of similar legal cases, this doesn’t bode well for these registrars.
August 17th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
This is all getting so tiresome. Presumably the CLC will shortly step in, unless the registrars are Muslims, which of course they could be for all we know.
I agree with two comments on the Daily Mail site (though I’m not generally a fan of the Mail)
The first wrote: “Civil partnerships are NOT weddings, therefore religion does NOT enter into the question. At the moment there is no such thing as a gay marriage in the UK.. The registrars perform strictly a civil ceremony, so there can be NO religious objection.”
The second: “I am a Christian also a Police Officer and happily serve the whole community regardless of their gender, sexuality, religious or political beliefs. It’s about time some Christians stopped being precious and recognised that some roles in life exist to and rightly serve the entire community. If they can’t reconcile that then they should find another way of earning their living.”
There appear to be certain extremist Christian groups whose members deliberately come into conflict with their employers, ostensibly on religious grounds. Gary McFarlane, the Relate counsellor, and Olive Jones, the home tutor, both attended the same church in the Bristol area. I’d be surprised if Lilian Adele, the Brixton registrar whose case we discussed here recently didn’t attend the same Brixton church as Duke Amachree. As for the current whiff of “religious persecution”? Time will tell.
August 17th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Yes it would add an interesting dimension if it transpired that they were Muslim…