UK Roundup 29/4/2010

More good news from the UK – it’s great to have such a positive start to the year. Coming hard on the heels of the collapse of the British Chiropractic Association’s libel case against science writer Simon Singh is more proof that the courts are passing down some important judgements. Today judges turned down a marriage guidance counsellors bid to overturn his sacking. He had been dismissed because he refused to give counselling to gay couples because it was against his religion, Christianity. For some reason he thought it was fine to discriminate against gays but not OK for his work to discriminate against him when he refused to do his job.

The case amazingly prompted former Archbishop of Canterbury to call for a special tribunal to be set up in cases such as this which would comprise judges who had “proven sensitivity and understanding of religious issues”. In other words a panel especially for Christians loaded with judges who would rule in their favour – completely throwing out any vestiges of equal treatment for all. Nice work Archbishop. Fortunately the judge in this case treated the suggestion with the contempt it deserved and, while quoting from Carey’s initial plea threw the case out leaving no-one in any doubt as to what he thought of the Archbishop’s suggestion stating “We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. 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. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.” Sensible thinking indeed.

In other news showman and all round mentalist Derren Brown has a chance to redeem himself after last years dreadful televised ‘Events’. In his new series he goes after people who claim to have paranormal powers and debunks them. Brown has proved himself to be more than capable of taking on various loons in the past so this could be a good series and hopefully will show in NZ sometime in the future.