Gay couple wins suit against Christian hotel owners

Devout Christian hotel owners who refused to allow a gay couple to share a double room acted unlawfully, a judge at Bristol county court ruled today. Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, who are civil partners, won their landmark claim for discrimination in a case funded and supported by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The ruling, one of the first made under the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007, is likely to provide those in partnerships with greater protection from discrimination. The owners of the Chymorvah private hotel in Cornwall, Peter and Hazel Bull, do not allow couples who are not married to share double rooms because they do not believe in sex before marriage. The Bulls asserted that their refusal to accommodate civil partners in a double room was not to do with sexual orientation but "everything to do with sex".

Well, let’s not COMPLETELY ignore the facts here.
As a poster for the campaign against the homosexual agenda, this one’s not the best. In fact, it’s a bit like using Mr Magoo to advertise good marksmanship.

And it all started so well, too.

As this couple’s own website ably demonstrates, Christian hoteliers are entirely able to express their religious beliefs to prospective customers BEFORE they make a booking.

Look, they’re doing it right now, on their booking form:

(www.chymorvah.co.uk)

“Here at Chymorvah we have few rules, but please note that as Christians we have a deep regard for marriage(being the union of one man to one woman for life to the exclusion of all others). Therefore, although we extend to all a warm welcome to our home, our double bedded accommodation is not available to unmarried couples – Thank you.”

That’s the key thing. If you have rules which would require you to turn someone away even if they’ve booked, you make sure that people know what those rules are before booking.

The hotel’s booking policy (cited above, verbatim) STILL does not indicate that they will (or will not) accept a booking from a same sex couple in a civil partnership for a double bedroom. Some people think that a couple in a CP are “married”, some don’t.

Bearing in mind that we have to have “Caution may be hot” on hot coffee cups to avoid any confusion it’s a bit surprising that they’re still leaving their policy open to interpretation.

It’s already been shown that those hoteliers already have taken one booking from a same sex couple, for a double room, in good faith. They U-turned when the couple actually showed up but that doesn’t prove they’d tell Elton John to sling his hook if he showed up with David Furnish.

If they had a policy against civil partnerships why didn’t they allude to it in the same way that they did for premarital sex? They could’ve done.

As much as I sympathise with their PRIVATE views (which I share), for as long as I can remember the law over here’s been consistent on three specific points:

1. Hotels and B&Bs are business premises.

2. On Business premises, different rules apply to those of a private dwelling.

3. If a business operates “entry criteria” or any other explicit policy against a particular LAWFUL activity or status, then it has to make that policy explicitly known.

To take a very simple example, you can smoke in your own home or ban smoking if you like - and you don’t need to put signs up. But if your house is also your business premises, it has to have a No Smoking policy and it has to have signs.

As the judge intimated, there’s no law against hoteliers turning away paying guests on the basis of a lack of common sense or a sense of proportion, so had they proved their policy was indeed as intransigent as to turn away paying customers soaked to the skin with nowhere else to sleep from sharing a bed on the basis of being unmarried (the examples given by the judge were brothers, and backpackers) and therefore not entitled to the double room, they’d have proved they were being consistent, and would’ve won the case.

Since they were unable to do that, they should’ve had the good grace to concede that the policy didn’t actually say that people in civil partnerships are “unmarried” in the context of their religious convictions and it was an unfortunate oversight, open to misinterpretation.

Instead they chose to fight their ground.

Under normal circumstances I’d be cheering them on, but unfortunately they did shoot themselves in the foot here.

It’s one thing to let two shirt-lifters book a double bed for their own use, over the telephone, and U-turn when they mince on up to the check-in desk looking like Right Said Fred.

It’s quite another, to employ a defense strategy that is worthy of Vicky Pollard.

“Yeah, but no but yeah but no but see we lost all the signs and the posters and the dog ate it off the website and by the way he never said he woz a chutney ferret when he booked, but we’ve always had a ‘no bummers in the double bedrooms’ policy M’lud!”

For clarity: It appears the bit in parentheses within their website statement - "please note that as Christians we have a deep regard for marriage (being the union of one man to one woman for life to the exclusion of all others)..." wasn't actually there originally. So initially, the website advice would've read as, "we have a deep regard for marriage... our double bedded accomodation is not available to unmarried couples". Although civil partnerships aren't marriages, English law doesn't police the terminology. It doesn't need to, for the simple reason that even if homosexuals say "we're married!" then everyone knows they meant to say, "we're in a civil partnership". Mrs Bull took a call from two guys, Martyn and Steven (clue's in the names, they're both guys) for a double bed in a room which is set aside for married people. In any world but the Bulls, that would've been interpreted by ANY observer as an assertion that civil partnership is a valid form of marriage. If Mrs Bull had posted on Free Republic and said, in effect, "I had two gay men book the bridal suite and ask if they could bring their dog, and I didn't realise they were both men, both gay, and weren't married to each other!" I'd expect that the response from most Freepers would be, utter incredulity. Really: put yourselves in her situation and see if you can find a way of explaining how that booking even got made that sounds remotely plausible and DOESN'T make her look like a total idiot.

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