No opinions, please. We’re British.
Picture this: You’re a believing Christian, and you work for a Christian charity that is under the patronage of your country’s major Christian organization. One of your colleagues, in a private conversation, asks for yours views about your faith. You say that you’re opposed as a doctrinal matter, but that you don’t personally have a problem with gays. That should be the end of it, but it’s not.
In a reminder, yet again, that Britain, and especially the Anglican church, espouses only PC group think, the next thing that happens is that you’re fired:
A charity worker has been suspended after telling a colleague that as a Christian he was opposed to equal rights for homosexuals.
David Booker, 44, who works at a Christian hostel in Southampton, was asked about his faith by a colleague, Fiona Vardy, at work last month.
He told her that he was opposed to same-sex marriages and to homosexual clergy but denied being homophobic and said that he had homosexual friends.
The next evening, Mr Booker was suspended from his £19,000-a-year post as a hostel support worker with the Society of St James, whose patron is the Archbishop of Canterbury. The hostel, where he has worked for the past four years, told him the action was taken for “events that happened last night”.
A few days later he was told he had seriously breached the charity’s code of conduct “by promoting your religious views which contained discriminatory comments regarding a person’s sexual orientation”. The action had been taken to safeguard residents and staff, he was advised.
Mr Booker, an evangelical Christian from Southampton, who is being advised by the Christian Legal Centre, now faces an inquiry and a disciplinary hearing.
It comes a few weeks after a Christian nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for the recovery of a patient was reinstated. North Somerset NHS Trust suspended Caroline Petrie for failing to show a commitment to equality and diversity after she offered to pray for the recovery of an elderly patient. The patient did not complain.
Andrea Minichiello Williams, a barrister and the director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “This case shows that in today’s politically correct, increasingly secularised society, even consenting reasonable discussion on religion between two employees is being twisted by employers to discriminate and silence the Christian voice and freedom of expression.”
In addition to reminding Brits of the fired nurse, it should remind all of you of the suspended students. Once again, we see the secular state mandate, not just that the state cannot impose religion (which is fine), but that people are not allowed to have religious views (which is totally un-fine). The only exception, of course, is for Islam, because those people, you know, might kill you if you tried to treat them as you treat the Christians and Jews under your political aegis. Thinking about it, at least the Muslims are willing to stand up for their faith.
