Whatever we make of the substance of Judge Andrew Rutherford's ruling in the Cornish private hotel case, his citation of a striking and controversial opinion by Lord Justice Laws – delivered in another religious freedom case in 2010 – is worth pausing over. The owners of the Chymorvah hotel were found to have discriminated against a gay couple by refusing them a double-bedded room. They had appealed to their right to manifest their religious belief by running their hotel according to Christian moral standards. Given the drift of recent legal judgments in cases where equality rights are thought to clash with religious freedom rights, it is no surprise that the gay couple won their case.
But quite apart from the merits of the case, judges should be warned off any future reliance on the ill-considered opinions about law and religion ventured last year by Lord Justice Laws. Laws rightly asserted that no law can justify itself purely on the basis of the authority of any religion or belief system: "The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other."
Read Full Article »