Senior bishops call on Lords to retain gay employment exemptions UK News

A statement from three senior bishops calls on peers today to retain and even widen religious exemptions on employing gay people.

The statement, issued on behalf of the Bishop of Winchester Michael Scott-Joynt, the Bishop of Exeter Michael Langrish and the Bishop of Chester Peter Forster, said that churches had to be able to "appoint and employ people consistently with their guiding doctrine and ethos".
Currently, churches may discriminate when hiring gay people.
Provisions in the Equality Bill, which is passing through the House of Lords, will require that churches may only discriminate in terms of sexual orientation when hiring those who will teach doctrine or lead worship.

The changes will mean that staff such as youth workers, janitors and administrative workers cannot be refused employment due to their sexuality.
The statement warned that religions would be more likely to be sued if restrictions were placed on their ability to select staff and called on peers to support three amendments tabled by Tory peer Baroness O'Cathain, one of which would remove the stipulation that exemptions would apply only to senior staff.

The National Secular Society attacked the statement to failing to mention the fact that the govenment may be subject to legal action if it does not change the law on religious employment.

The government has already been warned twice by the European Commission to bring the law into line with an equality directive.

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: “If the government accedes to the bishops’ demands it is likely that it will be prosecuted by the European Court of Justice.

“The Church is so obsessed with homosexuality it will stop at nothing to pressurise the government. Contrary to the bishop’s claims, the current regulations give religious bodies carte blanche to discriminate and do not make any explicit limitations at all.

"The bishops say that the government has produced no 'convincing case for change', but [they] conveniently ignore the impending threat of prosecution from the European Court of Justice."

Baroness O'Cathain's amendments will be debated today in the Lords, along with one from out gay Labour peer Lord Waheed Alli, which proposes removing entirely the right of religious to stipulate any employee's sexual orientation.
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RACISM AND SCHOOL EXCLUSION

As the telephone interrupts us for the umpteenth time, Gerry German says he had planned to keep busy in old age, but not like this. Luckily, after years of ill health, he has a fair spring in his step for a man of 82. No time to slow down, he says, laughing as the phone goes again. A cluttered boxroom in east London – but for him, the eye of the storm. One wonders how such an amiable, softly spoken figure, a white man with a ready smile and a soft Welsh lilt, can excite such strong emotions, but the electricity is generated by the work. Schools – reeling, they say, from disruptive pupils – take the nuclear option and jettison their "trouble- makers" with permanant exclusions. In step German and the Communities Empowerment Network to champion those discarded pupils against the system and, in quite a few cases, get them back in. He's king of the appeals. It doesn't make him popular. "I've quite a few informants in the schools and they tell me stuff. My favourite was the head who would theatrically throw himself to the floor on learning we had taken on a case. We took that as quite a compliment."


There are no winners in this – think 8,000 permanent exclusions a year in England; 380,000 fixed-term exclusions. And there is, says German, a cultural ­dimension. White, working-class pupils have serious problems in terms of ­underachievement, but black pupils ­remain three times more likely to be ­excluded than white, he says, and face stiffer sanctions. These cases bring him 90% of his workload: 60 referrals a month, through word of mouth. "For the most part, I think the problem is race," German tells me. "Unwitting racism: a combination of negative ­prejudice, destructive stereo-typing and low expectations. We go shoulder-to-shoulder with the parents. Generally, they are single mothers." An incongruous sight they are – the mothers, the ­children, and their genial elderly representative, who says he is rescuing the ­discarded from the scrapheap. "I always ask them if they will permit me to act on their behalf," German says. "I never presume. That's crucial. I say we are the only ones left to fight for you. From where we sit, it's the truth."

The Guardian