Britannia Radio

March 7, 2011

Judges playing politics with core moral values

Daily Mail, 7 March 2011

One of the great bulwarks of a democracy is an independent judiciary, which acts as the ultimate defender of liberty because the judges are free from political control.

In Britain and Europe, however, something very alarming has taken place. The judges are increasingly becoming a positive threat to liberty because they have usurped the political process.

As a result, they are straying — no, actually marching with banners flying and drums beating — into territory which should lie well beyond their remit.

In recent days, there have been two such outrageous court rulings. The European Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the European Union, ruled that insurance companies may no longer differentiate between men and women when calculating the rates offered on annuities which are used to convert pension pots into an annual income.

Until now, men have received higher rates because their average life span is shorter than that of women. But because the ruling will force firms to treat both sexes equally, men stand to lose hundreds of pounds of retirement income per year.

The reasoning, however, is utterly specious. The judges have interpreted anti-discrimination law in the most bone-headed way by saying that any gender difference in these rates is discriminatory.

But there is a very good reason for this difference, in that women live longer than men.

Discrimination surely occurs only when people in the same circumstances are treated differently. Which is patently not the case with pensions, where the different rates aim to ensure men don’t lose out.

The ruling will therefore impose unfairness upon the pension system. And to put the tin lid on it, this is being forced upon us by a foreign court.

What in heaven’s name entitles a bunch of judges who represent no one and are not even part of our society to supersede our own democratic decision-making and dictate to us our own pension arrangements? In any sane universe, nothing at all.

The second case was in many ways very much worse. This was a ruling handed down in the High Court, which effectively upheld the ban on a black Christian couple, Eunice and Owen Johns, from fostering children because they refused to undertake to tell a child that homosexuality was acceptable.

In just about every respect the Johns are ideal foster parents — decent, solid, loving and with years of experience. Given the chronic shortage of foster parents and the large number of black children in care, one might have thought the Johns would be as valuable as gold dust.

Yet Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson justified the ban by ruling that the couple’s attitude to homosexuality was a legitimate reason to withhold official approval from them. Such people are therefore effectively being punished for having the wrong attitudes. This is the kind of behaviour associated with totalitarian societies, not liberal Britain.

More jaw-dropping still, the children whose ‘right’ to be told that homosexuality is acceptable is supposedly infringed by the Johns’ Christian beliefs would all be under ten years of age.

So the Johns are being punished for wanting to protect children from inappropriate talk which would surely be an abuse of their childhood.

And despite the judges’ insistence that they are not taking an anti-Christian position, that is precisely what their ruling does. For it effectively holds that traditional Christian beliefs harm children.

Indeed, the judges went much further and said there was no place in law for Christian beliefs, since ‘the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity’.

But Britain has an established Church, the monarch undertakes to be ‘Defender of the faith’, the country’s literature, history, institutions and attitudes are steeped in Christianity, and most people still identify themselves as Christian.

In short, the judges’ assertion is simply idiotic. But these judges are not idiots; they are clever men.

Their assertion must be seen instead as an attempt — at some level at least in their minds — to exclude Christianity from the public sphere.

For although they claim that they seek to uphold the equal rights of all creeds in a diverse society, they are actually denying the rights of Christians — and, by implication, pious Muslims and Jews, too — to live in accordance with one of the most fundamental doctrines of their faith.

In this, they were explicitly echoing last year’s controversial ruling by Lord Justice Laws against a Christian registrar who refused to officiate at civil partnership ceremonies.

In that ruling, the judge said it was wrong for the law to give preference to the Judeo-Christian tradition — which merely amounted to ‘subjective opinion’.

Well, so much for the Bible, then. And as if the opinion of these judges was anything other than wholly subjective! Their key error is to assume that secular — or atheistic — attitudes form a neutral middle ground, whereas traditional Christian beliefs amount to a kind of fringe sect.

But secularism is not neutral. It is directly and aggressively hostile to the Christian and Biblical morality which underpins western civilisation.

The judges think it is wise and humane to assert that there is no hierarchy of values, and that all creeds are equal.

But this is both absurd and nihilistic. Some values will always trump others. The only question is which ones will do so. And what these judges are doing is de-coupling the laws of this country from the western civilisation which underpins it.

Because ‘human rights’ and anti- discrimination laws claim to be universal, they inevitably serve as a secular weapon against Christian or other particular religious beliefs.

Since different rights compete with each other, judges are inescapably required to arbitrate between them.

But this means that — on issues which are among the most divisive in our society — the judges are given the power effectively to dictate the rules of moral behaviour on the basis of nothing more than their own prejudices.

Thus in the Johns’ case, they ruled that the equality provisions concerning sexual orientation should take precedence over religious rights.

But on what authority do they issue such a momentous cultural pronouncement? Only their own secular prejudices.

In similar vein, the judges of the European Court of Justice are imposing the deeply oppressive and unjust ideology of equality of outcomes.

This court has long been infamous for having a highly politicised view of its role, promoting a federal state by extending the reach of the EU deep into the internal affairs of member nations.

But it must be acknowledged that the only reason judges in Britain and Europe have got too big for their wigs in this way is because politicians have enabled them to do so.

It was the government which took Britain into the EU, thus placing us under the increasingly oppressive and anti- democratic meddling of the European Court of Justice.

And it was successive governments which signed us up to the European Convention on Human Rights and then saddled us with the ruinous Human Rights Act.

The fact that the judges are playing politics like this can only be undone by the political class. So come on, Mr Cameron — stop equivocating.

Take all this head on — the destruction of this country’s core moral values, the ‘human rights’ inquisition and the loss of democratic control to both the EU and the British judiciary — and you will walk on water ever after.