Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007

My Lords, I speak without a prepared speech but with a heavy heart. As a Christian woman, I find this an extraordinarily difficult and distressing debate. It is distressing because we are not really prepared to face the fundamental issue. I have listened to speeches in which noble Lords have said, ““We respect gay people, but…””. The issue is not about rights; if it were, we would not be having this debate. It is about whether noble Lords accept gay people as equal human beings. Two hundred years ago, William Wilberforce made a speech in Parliament that freed black people to be equal human beings. I hope that this evening your Lordships will vote for these regulations. I have some quarrel with the way in which the regulations have been brought forward, but I hope that noble Lords will vote to underline that gay people are equal human beings with others. I say this as a Christian woman. I have listened to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, and I listened to the Catholic archbishop on the radio this morning, a very dear and wonderful man. He was struggling because he was trying hard not to appear prejudiced, but he was saying two things. Those noble Lords who are this evening saying two things are breaking their principles. If a Catholic organisation says, ““Our principles do not allow us to place a child with a homosexual couple, but we are prepared to send it somewhere else for someone else to do it””, where is the underlying principle? Why will that organisation not do it but allow someone else to if it believes that that child will not have an appropriate home? I have spent most of my life working in social care, a good deal of it worrying about the protection of children. In adoption, there is one principle and one principle only—the needs of the child are paramount. Whatever the family, whatever their colour, creed or sexual orientation, they have no right to the child. The child has the right to the home. Any good adoption agency will spend its time making that assessment. However, an adoption agency may decide that it will not place some children because it does not like the placement that it has found. For example, I know two male nurses in Scotland who are both gay. They were working with a youngster in a wheelchair who is extraordinarily disabled and extraordinarily difficult. Had they not given that child a home, he would have spent his life in an institution. That is true of many of the children to whom gay couples give homes. These are not easy children. We are not talking about handing babies to a couple of gay men—not that I think that there is anything wrong with that. I know gay male couples who have given extraordinarily good homes to children. But any adoption agency is likely to place a child with a family where there is a mother and a father. If there is not such a family and there is a good homosexual couple available who can give the child a home—the alternative being an institution—I would hope that the agency would place the child with them. For many years, I was the chief executive of Childline. During the time of Section 28, notbecause I had any interest in it, I looked at some of the issues around bullying. We talked to teachers about homophobic bullying. Since the removal of Section 28, I have found no problems of schools being told that they have to give education about gay rights. My experience was of teachers terrified of intervening on behalf of children who were being seriously bullied for being gay, because they thought that Section 28 meant that they would be in deep trouble. The converse is true: removing these kinds of statutes helps children. I do not for a moment think that governors—never mind the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and his department—will allow the curriculum to be changed in order to accommodate issues that most are very careful about. I am talking about the whole spectrum of sexual education, which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, knows so well. As a Christian, I am deeply concerned. Christ told the story of the good Samaritan, who was an outcast; many gay people feel outcast. Returning to the beginning of my speech—which, I suppose, is not a speech—I say that this issue is about believing that homosexual people are equal. They are not remote sinners doing something that you may find difficult to face, but real people, who are prepared to contribute to society, to give good homes to children, to teach in our school and to live, on the whole, discreetly and kindly, and who deserve access to goods and services. Of course, children are not goods, but we are talking, in legislation, about access to services. Gay people deserve that as much as any of us, just as Wilberforce said that every black person deserved equal treatment. I commend the regulations to the House.