Lillian Ladele
Posted on 07/10/2008 5:46:58 PM PDT by rawhide
A Christian registrar who refused to carry out gay 'weddings' won a landmark legal battle yesterday.
Lillian Ladele, 47, was threatened with the sack, bullied and 'thrown before the lions' after asking to be excused from conducting civil partnerships for same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs.
But yesterday a tribunal agreed that her faith had been ridden roughshod over by equalities-obsessed Islington Council, which had sought to 'trump one set of rights with another'.
The groundbreaking decision could lead to firms facing 'conscience claims' from staff who say their own beliefs prevent them carrying out part of their job.
Yesterday's ruling found that Liberal Democrat-run Islington Council in North London cared too much about the 'rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual' community.
It also found that the council – which gave Miss Ladele an ultimatum to choose between her beliefs and her £31,000-a-year job – showed no respect for her rights as a Christian.
Speaking afterwards, Miss Ladele said: 'It is a victory for religious liberty, not just for myself but for others in a similar position to mine.
'Gay rights should not be used as an excuse to bully or harass people over their religious beliefs.'
'The tribunal accepts that it would be wrong for one set of rights to trump another.
'The evidence before the tribunal was that Islington Council rightly considered the importance of the right of the gay community not to be discriminated against but did not consider the right of Miss Ladele as a member of a religious group.
'Islington Council decided that the service it provided was secular and that the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual community must be protected.
'In acting, it took no notice of the rights of Miss Ladele by virtue of her orthodox Christian beliefs.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Lillian Ladele
Lillian Ladele, you are my hero.
She’s class inside and out! Oh to have more women conservative as she!
While I admit, I do admire her spunk, what would we all say about a registrar who refused to marry people because they are genetically inferior (according to the registrar’s understanding of such) and would produce defective offspring?
BRAVO!!! good on her...
Has anyone wondered what they’d do if they had a Muslim working for them who refused to marry a same-sex couple.
God love her. A wonderful child of God.
Stayed the course, good for her(and us).
So, if my ethical beliefs say that people with genetic diseases should not reproduce, and as a registrar I would refuse to marry them, it should be accorded less value than someone’s religious beliefs?
To find the answer to your question you, or someone else, will have to endure the same type of persecution this lady did.
I suspect you will lose, as personal opinion won’t carry near the weight religious beliefs carry.
“Has anyone wondered what they’d do if they had a Muslim working for them who refused to marry a same-sex couple.”
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The Muzzie Iman would be set off his bomb during the ceremony.
I’m sorry, but if this had been a 60-year old white woman, she would have been sacked.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.
While I admit, I do admire her spunk, what would we all say about a registrar who refused to marry people because they are genetically inferior (according to the registrar’s understanding of such) and would produce defective offspring?Are you equating the death-embrace of eugeneics with Chritianity? Is that your belief?
I suspect that you are right, at least as far as folks here are concerned; the interpretation of words from an ancient book are more valid than one's own moral code developed independently of such dusty old books...
You can all go back to your regularly scheduled programming, and lionization of this woman because her beliefs coincide with your own, and no other practical reason.
I just attempted to demonstrate that a personal belief that people with defective genomes are entitled to more protection among conservatives than are people who would engage in a sterile relationship would be, when it comes to giving officials the right to discriminate when performing official duties of office. The belief that heterosexuality, no matter what arises from it, is way more important than homosexuality, no matter that no offspring inherently come from it, seems to be paramount here.
Your description of my fictional registrar-who-refuses-to-marry the genetically damaged as "eugenics" (really, somebody else could marry them, just as in the case of this woman who refuses to perform homosexual marriage) shows me where you stand on my question.
In other words, some reasons to refuse to perform your job are more equal than others, as George Orwell might have put it.
You need to develope critical thinking and stop being defensive.
There are a lot of rational reasons her beliefs carry far more weight than yours do. For one, her beliefs can be traced back in an unbroken chain for more than 2,000 years, maybe as far back as 5,000 years. yours maybe 20 years or so.
In plain english, what is YOUR opinion?
Good. May God continue to bless her.
Of course some reasons to refuse to perform your job are more equal than others. Moral reasons are “more equal” than, say, financial reasons, for example.
The whole idea of a government that is neutral on matters of religious belief is absurd; it flies in the face of everything we know of human history and behavior. No such thing as a secular society has ever existed, nor can such a thing ever exist. Human beings cannot live together in peace unless they consider themselves “brothers” — members of a nation, a “family” defined by a common culture. A culture in turn cannot exist without a cult — a shared system of thought and values based upon religious beliefs — at its base. Once a given society loses its culture, the members of that society no longer consider themselves brothers, but competitors; the society then degenerates into a mass of competing nations, each defined by its own culture. A war of all against all follows, until one nation gains enough power to impose its culture on the others by force. No matter what kind of secular constitution a given society might have, culture will out; in the end, someone’s God is going to be the basis of society.
Our society is not exempt. The so-called Reformation removed the Catholic Church as the cultural root of the West; from the wreckage of Christendom came the wars of the nation-states, each with its own culture. Every man was now free to be his own pope — to define Christianity to suit himself (each acting always under the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit”, of course). Next came the cult of individual Liberty, which stripped the nation-states of their sacramental hierarchies and replaced them with the cult of the Common Man, aka Democracy. Every man was now both his own pope and his own king. Then, came the rise of Baconian materialism, which denied the substantial and supernatural basis of existence itself; reality was now defined strictly as “that which can be poked with a stick”. By redefining the Universe (and Man himself) as mere material, Western man arrogated to himself the role of Creator as well. Each man was now his own pope, king, and God.
Yet the West hung on, protected from the worst excesses of self-deification by the lingering remnants of what once was called “Christian decency”. Despite the elimination of God as creator (by Darwin) and Christ as Savior (by Marx) in the minds of Western man, there remained a sort of genetic resistance to taking Liberty, Reason, and Materialism to their ultimate philosophical ends; there were some things that civilized, European people just didn’t do. As late as the 1890s, for example, the idea of deliberately targeting noncombatant civilians in time of war was unthinkable by Western military men. Any British, French, or German ship captain found to have deliberately sunk an unarmed ocean liner would have been court-martialed and shot by his own side as a traitor and war criminal.
And so Western civilization tottered along, ever more liberal, ever more secular, protected from its own worst excesses by “Christian decency”. Then came the 20th Century, the two World Wars, and the spread of the secular idea to the ends of the earth.
As a political entity, the United States is de jure a secular state; as a nation, however, it has survived and prospered as a de facto European Judeo-Christian nation, united by the remants of the shared European Judeo-Christian culture of the majority population. As have the other nations of the West, we have slowly secularized, living off the cultural capital of pre-Enlightement Christendom while gradually becoming more and more liberal, more and more individualist, more and more materialist. In the past, this cultural legacy was strong enough to protect us from ourselves; now, however, the tattered strands of European Judeo-Christian culture are too thin to support us any longer. The collapse is upon us.
And it will come, sooner or later. Our pretty little pretend castle of individual Liberty, materialist Reason, and idolatrous Self-Deification will collapse like the house of cards it always was. Civil war will follow. And, in time, one of the surviving cultural groups will impose itself on those who live through the years of chaos. For the sake of our descendants, I hope that European Judeo-Christian culture triumphs to serve as the pillar of Christendom reborn.
As I said earlier, I admire her spunk. I also think that each registrar should have the right to refuse to perform anything that is against their conscience, as long as there is someone generally available to perform any legal ceremony. If a Catholic registrar wanted to refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for divorced people, I'd honor that, presuming the staff had someone who was willing to do for previously married people.
If a muzzie cab driver at the airport declines to take my suitcases full of wine and beer from my next trip to the Northwest, I'm perfectly fine with that, I'll just take the next cab. In fact, I'd rather take the next cab!
Now there is someone to admire for her courage, principals and intellect.
Nice twisted view of Christianity you have there to compare it to something akin to "master race" believing Nazis.
Great post at #23!!!
Thanks, but you will find that very few people here at FR agree with it. Dear old FR is a classically liberal community; real conservatism isn't popular here.
Sadly true.
The national holiday (which is also my birthday) earlier this month brought in my mind an interesting question. Can someone who espouses this "real" conservatism celebrate Independence Day?
What brought up the question was when someone I know said on his Facebook status that he "wasn't anyone a happy Masonic Republic Day."
But look at the countries in Europe where an official church exists-places like Sweden or the UK. In those places, religion has ended up stifled by government. Also, look at the example of pre-revolution Russia, where the Orthodox Church was heavily corrupted by its close relationship with the monarch.
One of the wisest things the Founding Fathers did was to free religion from the corrupting influences of government. American religious life flourished, and continues to flourish, because government has been forbidden from muscling into religion and politicians cannot use the church as a way to advance their political powers.
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