Can Christians use their conscience in secular jobs?

For some public commentators on religion, the moral to the recent court judgment that went against ex-magistrate Richard Page is that taking religious zeal into one’s secular occupation does no favours for the Christian cause.

At the Court of Appeal, Richard Page’s legal team failed to overturn the Employment Appeal Tribunal judgment that upheld his sacking for forthrightly contradicting the assertion in the social worker’s report for a same-sex adoption case that same-sex couples make better adoptive parents than straight couples.

In line with his Christian faith, he contradicted this by stating that: ‘it was in the best interests of a child to be brought up by a mother and father.’

The media ‘shell game’ has been to focus narrowly on Page’s position, which the chairman of the panel of magistrates called ‘an incident of extreme and overt prejudice’. Yet this was merely Page’s counter to the social worker’s assertion that same-sex couples make better adoptive parents than straight couples.

The social worker’s assertion may well align with some studies, such as the one conducted by Cambridge University’s Centre for Family Research (https://www.cam.ac.uk/ research/news/ive-got-two-dads-and-they-adopted-me) which researched 130 adoptive families. However, all such studies have been hampered by unrepresentatively small sample sizes: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/ 10.1080/01494929.2015.1033317.

This relegates the social worker’s assertion about the superiority of same-sex adoptive parents to just another philosophical belief (i.e. ideology) alongside Richard Page’s own philosophical belief.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised that some religious commentators on this case have paid so little attention to the flaws in studies of lesbian and gay parenting, which undermine the social worker’s bold assertion

One wonders if their reluctance to support Page publicly is motivated by belief that to do otherwise would land them on the ‘wrong side of history’.

Certainly, there has been a long line of unsuccessful legal appeals on grounds of religious freedom. These include McFarlane v Relate Avon Ltd (declining to counsel same-sex couples on sexual matters), Ladele v Islington Council (declining to officiate at civil partnership registrations), Chaplin v Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust (wearing a cross), Kuteh v Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust (offering prayer).

Page’s case is different in that the original tribunal did not consider his publicly expressed belief to be religious, but to fall ‘within the definition of philosophical belief for the purposes of EqA, s10’. This was because it did not pass the ‘sufficiently close and direct nexus’ test for religious belief.

Concerning ‘best interests of the child’, the legal doctrine evolved from the parens patriae (parent of the country) role of the monarch and, by extension, feudal lords and courts: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100845/1/ Parental_Decision_Making_AUCKLAND_ and_GOOLD.pdf

In the UK, the case of Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust v Wyatt (2005) comprehensively settled the law on ‘best interests’. Contrary to popular notions, ‘best interests’ doctrine, as laid down in that case, does not preclude conscience, intuition or hunches:

‘Where a clinician concluded that a requested treatment was inimical to the best interests of the patient, and his professional conscience, intuition or hunch, confirmed that view, he might refuse to act and could not be compelled to do so, though he should not prevent another from so acting, should another clinician feel able to do so.’

For a lay magistrate, who is not required to be legally qualified, but (as laid down by the Lord Chancellor in 1998) is to ‘bring a broad experience of life to the bench’, then that must include scope for applying personal conscience and moral intuition to decide what’s in the ‘best interests’ of children.

The insistence that Page made a solemn oath that his ‘actions as a magistrate will be free from any political, racial, sexual or other bias’ is notwithstanding the settled law in Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust v Wyatt that ‘best interests’ decisions can engage the ‘conscience, intuition or hunch’ ‘albeit honed by experience’.

If it is right for Richard Page to be sacked for his contradictory stance that ‘it is in the best interests of a child to be brought up by a mother and father’, then it is also right for social workers to be removed for expressing the unsubstantiated pro-LGBT ideology that ‘same-sex couples make better adoptive parents than straight couples’.

It’s sheer hypocrisy to condemn the former, while conniving at the latter.