Equality Bill [HL]

Some Members of your Lordships’ House do not at all approve of the Civil Partnership Act or of the Gender Recognition Act. Indeed, that was made clear again and again during the passage of those important pieces of legislation. They were designed—as was the change in adoption law—to give effect to basic human rights, equality and personal privacy anchored in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act while at the same time respecting religious freedom. Religious freedom was respected in the Civil Partnership Act by making it quite clear that this was a matter of civil partnership—as the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, has just said—a status secured by statute which did not in any way affect the refusal of any Church to treat the civil partnership as tantamount to marriage. It was made absolutely clear that it was a special status with many of the advantages but also obligations of marriage, but that it was not marriage and did not in any way trespass upon the relationship between Church and state. I refer to a doctor bound by a professional code of conduct. In relation to carrying out an abortion there is quite rightly a conscience clause because in that context it is vital that a doctor or a nurse should not be obliged to act against their conscience. That is an entirely different context from that of a public officer, a registrar, who is there to carry out the law of the land as enacted by the sovereign Parliament. To take an extreme example, let us imagine a registrar with a conscientious objection to registering a marriage between a black woman and a white man, who believed that miscegenation was against the law of nature as laid down in the Bible. There have been such creatures in the American south and in South Africa who had deeply held but bigoted convictions. In this country one could not possibly contemplate a registrar, however deeply held his or her beliefs, being permitted by a conscience clause not to carry out the law of the land. Exactly the same applies to civil partnership. We as a Parliament have decided—rightly or wrongly, but it is the law of the land—that homosexual same-sex couples who can never marry should be encouraged and allowed to enter into permanent relationships with all the rights and obligations of those relationships. We cannot have a homophobic registrar with deeply held and sincere religious convictions saying to the two men or the two women who come in front of him or her, ““I will not register your relationship because I think you are sinning and I regard what you are doing as evil according to my faith, and here is the Bible to prove it””. The same applies to gender recognition. We passed the Gender Recognition Act because the European Court of Human Rights made it quite clear that we could no longer go on denying recognition to that very small group of people—I believe that there are about 8,000 in the country at large—who go through the horrible experience of a series of painful operations to secure their true gender identity. Let us imagine a woman such as Mrs Bellinger—my client at the moment in Strasbourg—who had gender reassignment 30 years ago arriving with her prospective husband and being told by the registrar, ““You were born a man. I have a conscientious objection to recognising your change. Whatever Parliament says, I will not allow you to marry””. That would be quite intolerable. Therefore, I am afraid that I have to say to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, for whom I have great respect, and whose faith and deeply held convictions I respect, that public officers cannot be permitted to defy the law of the land, albeit in the name of religion or conscience.