Anti-Gay Couple Loses Foster Care Case | Court Rules Britain Is Not A Theocracy

Court rules against Owen and Eunice Johns who refused to tell children a ‘homosexual lifestyle’ was acceptable. Photograph: Ellen Branagh/PARedTracker| A British High Court court has ruled against a Derby couple who sought to be foster parents but refused to tell a child that being homosexual is acceptable.

The Guardian writes that the couple insisted on their right to tell young foster children that homosexuality is morally wrong.

“We are prepared to love and accept any child. All we were not willing to do was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing. We feel excluded and that there is no place for us in society.”

The couple’s lawyer Andrea Minichiello Williams a member of the Christian Legal Centre, lashed out saying:

“How can judges get away with this? The law has been increasingly interpreted by judges in a way which favours homosexual rights over freedom of conscience. Britain is now leading Europe in intolerance to religious belief.”

The case makes us wonder about adoption and foster care laws in America. Do we have such protections for young children or does religious conscience trump human rights?

This is not the first case lost by conservative evangelicals over their supporters’ rights to disciminate specifically against gay people. All cases have been lost in court.

In what court watchers called a “sharpley worded judgment”, Lord Justice Munby and Justice Beatson dismissed the case as “a travesty of reality”, writing

“We are, however, entitled, to take judicial notice of the fact that, whereas the sharia is still understood in many places as making homosexuality a capital offence, the Church of England permits its clergy, so long as they remain celibate, to enter into civil partnerships. We live in this country in a democratic and pluralistic society, in a secular state not a theocracy.”