Why Welcome the Church Exemption?
Beacuse freedom of religion is an important human right
16th July 2003
Since last friday’s publication of the draft Gender Recognition Bill, I have received several letters expressing surprise that Press For Change had actually welcomed the clause allowing clergymen to refuse to conduct a marriage in their church for trans people.
Some people assumed that this must be a mistake: a mistyped phrase on our part, or a misunderstanding by a journalist reporting my comment.
Not so: the vice-presidents of Press For Change had no hesitation in deciding to welcome that clause, without reservation. I’d like to explain why.
The quick explanation is that freedom of religion is an important human right — and that includes the freedom to believe weird and daft things, such as the belief that trans people are somehow flawed in the eyes of God. If a minister in a church wants to believe that, that’s their privelige … and it is our privelige to find another church or go to a registry office. It would be no more appropriate for trans people to try to use the law to dictate what people believe in their churches than it is for the churches to try to use the law to tell us how to live our lives.
In any case, most churches are already free to choose who they will accept for marriage: this “conscience clause” merely extends the same freedom to the Church of England.
The most important thing to remember about PFC is that we are NOT just a transsexual rights campaign — we are a HUMAN rights campaign, working for the rights of transsexual people. That may seem like two ways of saying the same thing, but isn’t: it is our way of stressing that we are not looking for special priveliges for transsexual people, and that we are not blind to the needs of others in our diverse society.
That’s why use the slogan that we are just looking for “the same rights as others take for granted” — to make the point that this is about basic human rights for everyone.
It’s why PFC’s Code of Conduct stresses that in “improving the rights of one group, we don’t damage those of another”, and that “we never attack other minority groups to make ourselves look better or more mainstream”.
That’s obviously important when it comes to issues say as rights for gay and lesbian people. Sometimes our separate campaigns get confused, sometimes it can be unhelpful when they appear to overlap too much … but even when we remind people of how the issues are separate, we also stress that we do support the right of gay and lesbian people to be protected from discrimination and to have legal recognition for their families. Even if it may appear politically incovenient or difficult, we stand by the principle of human rights for all.
The same goes too for people who some of us don’t like: Human Rights are universal. Just as we have a right to a full place in society even if some folks don’t like us, others have the right to a full place in society even if we don’t like them.
One group who clearly don’t like us hangs out in the churches. Personally, I reckon those zealots have completely misunderstood the bible, and that it’s stretching the word a long way to accept their self-chosen label of christian. Some of you reckon that all religion is rubbish, and that its mostly nasty too. But our views are beside the point: whatever anyone’s religion (or lack of it), they have a right to their beliefs, as long as they don’t impose them on others … and as human rights campaigners, we support that right.
Now, back to the specifics.
The Church of England is the “established church”. Its head is the Queen, its bishops are appointed by the Queen on the advice of the government, and its running is controlled by law. It is the “official” state church. (The Church of Scotland is the established Church in Scotland, with similar controls by the state).
All the other churches in this country are voluntary bodies. They may be new or old, they may be part of a long-established tradition or they may represent a new group … but they exist because their members want them to exist, not because the law says anything in particular about them. Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Congregationalists, Pentecostalists … there are lots of such churches.
The established churches have a duty in law to marry anyone in the parish who is legally eligible to marry. In other words, if you live in the Parish of St Stephens in Ambridge, and you are old enough and not already married, the vicar cannot refuse to marry you. He can’t say “no” because you’ve never been to church before, or because you wear a t-shirt saying “God is dead” … if you’re in the parish, you’re okay for the church wedding. (The exception is if you are divorced, in which case you can be refused).
The non-established churches, however, have no such constraints. They can refuse without giving a reason: no wedding beacuse you are not a full member of their church, or because they are jealous of your good looks. It’s a free society: the church makes the rules, and if the minister breaks them it is purely a matter for church discipline, not for the law.
Without the “conscience clause”, the draft Gender Recognition Bill would have required an Anglican minister (but not any other sort of Church minister) to marry a trans person even if they believed it was deeply wrong to do so. If they refused, they could be prosecuted.
That isn’t religious freedom: that would be the state telling people what to believe. In a free society, that would be be a weird anomaly: three of the churches in my village would be free to refuse me, and one wouldn’t. Not fair: that would be an unacceptable situation to anyone who cares about human rights.
That’s the moral reason why welcomed the provision in the draft bill to avoid such a situation.
And in practice, it isn’t likely to make much difference to most of us. A wedding is important: who wants that once-in-a-lifetime ceremony to be conducted by some clown who believes that we are somehow bad people just because we are trans? Is that really someone who any of us would choose to be master of ceremonies on our special day? If it was my wedding, I wouldn’t even invite someone like that to attend, never mind pay good money to put them in charge.
There are lots of churches in every part of this country: plenty of them really do go out of their way to make people welcome. Even if it was right to use the law to help us force our way into a church, there’s no need to do so.
This business of freedom is a two-way street. We seek our rights, and we respect the rights of others to do things differently … but not to impose their values on us.
As you all know, some of the churches have made a pretty bad job of living on their side of that two-way street. The likes of the Evangelical Alliance want to be free to follow their consciences, and at the same time they want the state to restrict our freedom as much as possible — even to the point of trying to persuade the state to ban all medical treatment for us.
That all-out attack on trans people’s freedoms appears to have the suppport of some of the Anglican hierarchy. The Bishop of Winchester, who is is the chair of the CoE’s Board of Social Responsibility, endorsed the EA’s comically-nasty booklet on trans issues, and there are reasons to believe that he still follows a similar approach.
Morally, these religious zealots are following a rather ugly path. It’s a take-take-take approach: they want freedom for them, but they use the law to require everyone else to follow their beliefs. There is no sign of any of the two-way respect which underpins a free society.
We don’t follow that selfish, grabbing approach: we work to higher ethical standards, and we do what’s right because it’s right, not because others are keeping their part of the bargain, or because it is politically covenient to do so. We don’t bargain away the rights of any of our community, and nor are we going to make anyone else’s rights part of a sleazy deal.
But anyone watching the latest antics of homophobic zealots in the Anglican church can see that the tide of public opinion is turning heavily against them. According to some counts, there are more gay people in England than there are Anglican churchgoers. Anglicans are now a small minority, and the efforts of a minority within that minority to impose their prejudices on the rest of society are starting to backfire politically.
If they turn their fire on us as the Gender Recognition Bill makes its way through parliament, we are now in a very strong position to turn the tables. You’ve got your conscience clause, Bishop: now it’s time for you to respect the consciences of others. Watch this space!