I shall speak to Amendments 7 and 8, which stand in my name in this grouping. I ask noble Lords to consider the words which case law has held to be paramount in this, that beliefs must be,
“worthy of respect in a democratic society and not incompatible with human dignity”.
They are words protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, and they cover both religious and philosophical beliefs. There are a clutch of cases which I could quote here, but I will refer briefly to only two of them.
The first is Grainger plc & Others v Nicholson in 2009. The court held that strong philosophical belief about climate change, for example, affected how the claimant lived. It went beyond mere opinion. It was setting out that opinion is one thing, which is not protected by the law, but that serious beliefs which stand above that should be so protected. That case really became the bedrock of this particular set of cases. In a 2005 case in the House of Lords, Regina v Secretary of State for Education and Employment and others ex parte Williamson, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, said that:
“A free and plural society must expect to tolerate all sorts of views which many, even most, find completely unacceptable”.
Agreeing with that judgment, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker, in accepting pacifism, vegetarianism, and teetotalism as beliefs, went on to say that they are not just religious beliefs,
“but equally … may be based on ethical convictions which are not religious but humanist”.
I galloped through that just to say that the words,
“worthy of respect in a democratic society”,
have a solid bedrock in both European law and the law of this country.
The reason for tabling these two amendments is to focus on the fact that the Government have repeatedly insisted that this legislation before us will not penalise those who believe that marriage is only between a man and a woman. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, has already said, the obvious case to cite at that juncture is that of Adrian Smith and the housing trust. That has been mentioned several times in previous debates on this subject. I will not go into it again but that case, and others, indicate the fragility of the position of those who seek to express a firmly held view, without any intent of causing any disruption beyond—