There have been dramatic changes in acceptable sexual mores over the past hundred years or so. The 20th century began with strong public rejection of sex outside marriage, and with moral and religious distaste for contraception, yet ended with the increasing acceptability of same-sex unions, backed by new laws based on marriage legislation. For many faith groups, sexuality is a major area of ethical regulation and prohibition. However mainstream society, particularly in Europe, increasingly shuns the sexual rules of religious groups, labelling them restrictive and primitive. The description ‘traditional’ has become a term of abuse in this context, with religious groups who comment negatively on changing sexual mores being cast as anti-human rights.
Two main issues for evangelicals in this regard, as well as for other religious groups, relate to the increasing relaxation of the legal regulation of homosexuality and legislation in relation to gender reassignment. Both of these areas are highly problematic to most evangelicals and religious groups. The advent of the Civil Partnerships Act throughout the UK, which legalises same-sex relationships, has been greeted with dismay by many Christians, and is resulting in major stresses within the Church of England as well as the suspension or dismissal of Christian registrars who are unable to carry out same-sex ceremonies on conscience grounds. Religious groups not only have difficulties because they feel unable to condone such practices, but also because such groups may, in keeping with their ethos and beliefs, wish to keep those who practise homosexuality, or have engaged in gender reassignment or undergone sex-change surgery, out of active participation as unpaid or paid leaders and/or employees of local churches and religious organisations. Such groups usually do not bar such people from attending religious meetings but may bar them from membership. In the face of the law’s enforcement of the right of people not to be excluded, religious groups increasingly find that their convictions are being ignored by the law, or forced to feel exclusionist by requiring special conscience let-out clauses in legislation. The privileging of human rights seems to suggest that the corporate rights of religious people whose convictions define such behaviour as unacceptable are seen as secondary, if not inadmissible, compared to those individual rights apparently accepted by the majority of society. The right to equal treatment in practice seems to mean the right to treatment according to the norms of the majority who tend to favour individual choice and therefore the claims of vocal minorities. This can frequently result in overriding the wishes of other minorities who could thereby be said to lose their rights.
The Gender Recognition Act offers a good example of the issues raised here inasmuch as it creates a new criminal offence to ensure that the true biological identity of a person who has obtained a new gender certificate is not disclosed to a third party (apart from some limited exceptions). Insofar as the legislation utilises a standard legal mechanism – to create at law the fiction of a biological man (or woman) becoming a ‘legal’ woman (or man) – it elevates secrecy, misrepresentation and deception to a level of acceptability. The exceptions for certain ministers of religion are unclear and it is envisaged that evangelicals may be placed in difficult situations when they know the true biological identity of a person. If they remain silent their convictions could be undermined and the actions of another compromised. If they speak, they break the law.
There is therefore a most unwelcome potential under the Act for the criminalisation of law-abiding people who do not accept that gender can be self-determined, that legal fictions such a ‘legal women’ can be created, and who believe that it is not bigoted or wrong to hold that marriage is uniquely between a biological man and a biological woman.
The Evangelical Alliance has been especially concerned that religious bodies should not be potentially criminalised where their freedom to regulate their own procedures in accordance with their ethos and beliefs, or to disclose privileged pastoral information where appropriate, may be threatened. Such cases have already occurred in UK courts. The Alliance also wishes to protect the rights of religious bodies to continue to be free to be selective in the area of training and ordination, and to employ committed Christians in significant functions within their organisations. But equally vital are the rights of individual Christians who work in various roles within society to a right of conscientious objection to requirements imposed upon them by the state. For example, the fact that Christian registrars may now have to resign in order to avoid conducting so-called ‘marriages’ or partnerships between people of the same sex, or that Christian social workers may likewise have to resign if they wish to avoid placing babies for adoption with homosexual or lesbian couples, indicates how far Parliament has gone in eroding a right to conscientious objection hitherto frequently granted to public servants, and indeed to others fulfilling state requirements – for example, medical staff in relation to abortion.
