Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Protect us from moral people!

This newspaper article contains another example of the madness that seems to have seized our society. It's beginning to make my brain hurt.


NOTTINGHAM, England

Christian Concerns, a public interest legal group in England, reported on a disturbing Court ruling in an article entitled "High Court Judgment Suggests Christian beliefs Harmful to Children". A Protestant Pentecostal couple has been disqualified from being foster parents, in effect, because they are Christians. The Catholic News Agency in an article entitled "British court says Christian couple can't adopt due to beliefs." offered this summary of what occurred: "Eunice and Owen Johns, aged 62 and 65, are Pentecostal Christians from the city of Derby and have cared for 15 foster children in the past. Following the ruling, Eunice Johns said she and her husband were "extremely distressed" at the ruling handed down in Nottingham Crown Court. "All we wanted to do was to offer a loving home to a child in need," Eunice Johns said. "We have a good track record as foster parents, but because we are Christians with mainstream views on sexual ethics, we are apparently unsuitable as foster parents. The judges have suggested that our views might harm children. We have been told by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that our moral views may 'infect' a child. We do not believe that this is so."

The ruling is part of a trend in England since the passage in 2007 of the "Equality Act Sexual Orientation Regulations."
The Court ruled that if children were placed with people like Eunice and Owen Johns who hold classical Christian views on morality "there may well be a conflict with the local authority's duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of looked-after children." They gave lip service to religious freedom but held that in foster care "sexual orientation should take precedence." They also insisted that a foster family exhibit "positive attitudes towards homosexuality." Finally, they held that the "Article 9 [of the European Human Rights Act] only provides a 'qualified' right to manifest religious belief and ... this will be particularly so where a person in whose care a child is placed wishes to manifest a belief that is inimical to the interests of children." The Court in essence ruled that classical morality is "inimical to the interests of children."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's another take on the same story

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/christian-foster-couple-forced-to-accept-god%27s-will-201103013585/

Jake Allsop said...

It's witty, but the point I was trying to make was the increasing tendency to restrict human activity on spurious grounds of "equality". Children in need of fostering or adoption are often the victims of rules that have little to do with the child's welfare, but a lot to do with the prevailing ethos, of which "political correctness" is a prime ingredient.

Unknown said...

I dislike intensely the notion of 'polical correctness'. I much prefer to do my own thinking.