Journal of the Plague Years

Material has been added (Mid-July).

LILLIAN LADELE

These items appear elsewhere on the site, but are gathered together here in support of Ms. LADELE in her dispute with Islington Council.

The authorities in Islington have a regrettable history of dictating to people what they should think, whichever administration (Lab or Lib-Dem) might from time to time be in place there; they are also much given to sanctimonious judgements against those who do not share their moral vision. (Evidence for these assertions appear occasionally on this site.)

Googling Ms. Ladele's case in January revealed that opinion was overwhelmingly against her. Stonewall, once a proud movement for liberty but now a bullying bulwark of a certain sort of establishment, was in the forefront. Judging by the weighting of last night's news reports (19 May), the BBC clearly still is against her.

I do not believe that I share Ms. Ladele's view of the world on most issues, including homosexuality. However, I haven't seen any evidence that she's tried to impose her opinions on the rest of us (unlike Islington Council), despite reiterated suggestions to the contrary; and it has to be said that, culturally, her opinions are respectable

In chronological (not blogological) order...

A Case Of Conscience.

14 January 2008 .

Lillian Ladele, a registrar in North London for more than 10 years, has come into conflict with Islington council (which took her supervision over from the Registrar General on 1st December last). This is because she is being asked to officiate at same-sex civil partnership ceremonies; she is claiming 'discrimination or victimisation on grounds of religion or belief'. All sorts of folk have weighed in on both sides of the argument, including many of the usual suspects. Personally, I'm with Ann Widdecombe on this one (and I'm savouring it - it doesn't happen very often): Ms Ladele has had her terms of engagement changed unilaterally, and there should be a right to conscientious objection.

It's not a health and safety issue, nor one of imposition on third parties, so compromise should be possible (unlike, say, a teacher objecting to being barred from beating kids, where once the decision that corporal punishment is wrong has been reached by society, you can't have individual teachers demurring). There must presumably be plenty of registrars willing to officiate for homosexuals.

But my main issue is with some of those usual suspects, specifically the gay rights group Stonewall - who have won most of their battles and now sometimes seem to be becoming a bit strident and rather a pain. They said that Ms. Ladele's opposition to civil partnerships, which were given legal recognition in 2005, were unjustified. A spokesman said, "All public servants are paid to uphold the law of the land. Doubtless there were those 40 years ago who claimed a moral objection to mixed marriages between people of different ethnic origin. Discrimination on any basis is equally unacceptable." There are so many smug complacencies within those sentences that it's hard to know what to say.

• Public servants were required to jail 'practising' gay men for years, only just over 40 years ago. Stonewall would have gone along with that? As I recall, Stonewall were the first to fight against the police on that issue - sometimes with sticks and stones. More recently, the law barred teachers (public servants) from expressing certain favourable opinions regarding gays to their students (Section 28), and Stonewall was happy enough to support teachers who opposed that law. There is something quite repellent about somebody who insists on support for the law once it says what they want it to say.

• As for mixed marriages: Consider a person who sees them as morally objectionable: you and I may regard such a person as primitive or bigoted but, so long as he or she doesn't impose that view on anyone else (???such as their own children???), it is their right to have that moral opinion. Ms. Ladele is not trying to stop any gay partnerships: she simply doesn't want to be made to officiate. (And why would a gay couple want to be joined by someone who doesn't support them 100% anyway?)

• Active male homosexuality was a criminal offence within the adult lifetime of people who haven't even reached retirement age yet. No matter how repugnant that law may seem to us to have been, it is not reasonable to expect everybody to switch from seeing homosexuality as a crime to embracing it as the equal to marriage ('a sacred estate') in every respect in a single generation. And for people who have found the change hard, it must be particularly galling to be lectured at by those whom they still feel to be immoral.

• My personal protest is rather at aspects of our society than simply at Stonewall: specifically the growing habit of dictating to us what it is right and wrong to think - to the extent that what you think and your supposed frame of mind have become employment and even criminal matters in their own right.

It is only proper that if Ms. Ladele expresses opinions which I don't like, I (or Stonewall) should be able to tell her that we disagree and why; it is not proper for anyone to pronounce that she is wrong. It only becomes proper to go further than disagreeing if someone's opinions are impinging on another person's rights or liberties. Ms. Ladele is not impinging in any such way.

It is not one of my rights that I should never hear opinions I dislike, not even if I happen to be gay. The other side of the same coin is that I should be free to express my views - to the same limits allowed to Ms. Ladele. (Of course, I do hope that some Ms. Ladele's more evangelical co-religionists will bear this message in mind.)

And while I don't for a moment imagine that Ms. Ladele would be cowed by Stonewall, let's remember we have become a society in which it is far, far more difficult to express some opinions than it was a generation ago - a society in which a lot of people are cowed.

Actually, we have become quite revoltingly prim - what my old mum used to call 'pi'.

-/-

Somehow it just would be Islington council.

From Classified - The Thought Police

Government As The Arbiter Of Morality.

15 January 2008 .

The Roman Church has jibbed at giving children for adoption to gay couples. Ms. Ladele has jibbed at officiating at gay partnership ceremonies. A number of doctors have refused to abet abortions. Some pharmacists are troubled at giving contraceptives and morning-after pills to under-aged girls.

Homosexuality was illegal a generation ago; under-aged sex still is - although you might wonder, sometimes.

A few years ago a teacher could lose his/her job for 'promoting' homosexual relationships; now the same teacher adhering to that same Section 28 could be fired for homophobia; evidence, like other such quoted elsewhere, which goes to show that the government's 'morality' is often actually a matter of politics. Even so, both sides in this instance will claim the moral high ground.

I have referred before to the government's increasing tendency to control every aspect, not only of our lives but of our consciences. I quote myself in part: "We, your betters, will tell you how to live your lives and do your jobs; whatever your professional judgment, whatever you think, you will obey." (Education And Skills Bill. 15 January 2008 Classified - Education)

The issues I mention above are fundamental; they affect some of our most basic morality: notwithstanding that, the government instructs us. And yet... it bears repeating that these are issues of morality; there is no objective judgment that the government can call on to say that it is right. It is convinced that it is right, but that is not at all the same thing.

The joke is that if there is an objective morality, it comes from God: the evidence thus far is that God may not be too keen on, for example, abortion. Since the Roman Church and the bible may have a better claim to speak for God than the British government does, presumably He may not favour homosexuality, either. [I emphasise that I'm not trying to speak theology here, but simply to demonstrate that the government is not on firm ground when it instructs us with regard to morality. They're the same good folks, remember, who think it's fine and dandy to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for democracy.]

It's interesting that while Ms. Ladele is going to find herself in court because of the requirement on her to officiate at gay unions, even this government has not yet insisted that the Roman church should do accept them.

And there's no need for all this. Allow everybody their freedom of conscience (with the requirement that if a professional cannot in conscience perform some function that they do not interfere with people's rights, i.e. that there are systems in place so that those in need of those functions are efficaciously passed to another professional).

There are presumably plenty of adoption agencies, registrars, doctors and pharmacists willing to perform the required functions without duress. Of course, if there are not, maybe the government really is moving too fast.

• I should like to point out that I'm not opposing the government's desire to extend these rights we're talking about (with the exception of the under-aged sex bit, which I think is complete madness). It's the way it is so convinced of its moral rectitude, and its desire to direct and control, that I find so repellent.

• I should also like to acknowledge the role of government in sometimes leading public opinion; the abolition of child labour or capital punishment - against the wishes of a sizeable and strident part of the population - are cases in point, as indeed are laws banning quotidian homophobic discrimination. It's precisely because of the government's responsibility in such fundamental matters that it is so important that they don't get above themselves on issues which are not morally so clear-cut.

From Classified - Control

Further to Lillian Ladele and 'A Case Of Conscience'.

19 May 2008 .

It's reported tonight that Ms. Ladele, a registrar in Islington who does not wish to preside at 'gay weddings' for reasons of conscience, is finally to meet the council in court.

The whole news item (BBC) was skewed (biased, actually) towards the suggestion that Ms. Ladele is 'obstructing' gay unions: she isn't, and never was - there are plenty of registrars in Islington happy to oblige. I note that the BBC's selection of interviews-in-the-street made it very clear which side they support; Reith would turn in his grave.

I write this item simply to express my wholehearted support for Ms. Ladele's stand, even though I suspect we would fundamentally disagree on almost any topic we might ever find to talk about.

Added 23 May: Littlejohn, in the Mail, with whom I normally disgree even more, might almost have been reading my blogs: he reprises many of the same arguments as those I've written here (How come only MPs are allowed consciences? today).

I disagree with the style (and much of the implied message) of the question on which he ended his article: What makes thirty years of woolly-minded 'liberalism' superior to 2,000 years of Christianity? I have to admit that there is a very serious seed there, however, since the liberals are given to taking it for granted that they have ownership of 'the truth' and of the high moral ground - and have failed to grasp that it's not a foregone conclusion.


The rights of the individual vs. the demands of the pressure group.

11 July 2008 .

Lillian Ladele has won her case against Islington council (10 July). The unanimous finding of the employment tribunal was that the council was so keen on promoting its vision of rights for gays that they ignored Ms. Ladele's rights and unlawfully discriminated against her. This site (despite having opinions differing from hers in almost all spheres) takes a degree of pride in having supported Ms. Ladele; but notes that if there were any other liberal/secular websites that did so, they were few and far between.

The absence of strong secular support has allowed some folk to portray the episode as a battle between a backward-looking, conservative religious bigot and the modern enlightenment of Islington council. The reality is rather different, and lies in the willingness of Islington council to treat with contempt and abuse a loyal employee who's done her job competently, correctly, and without complaints against her so far as I know for the best part of two decades: to bully and harass her and to accuse her of gross professional misconduct and 'homophobia'* because she didn't fit into their political vision. The evidence seems to be that their concept of 'compromise' consisted of telling her to toe their particular line or get out. There is no evidence that, as they imposed on her, they made the remotest attempt to find any real compromise with a loyal employee who, after all, was simply asking to be excused from undertaking a duty which had never previously been in her job description, which she and many others regard as immoral or even sinful, and which wouldn't be placed on her throughout most of the world.

*The accusations of racism and homophobia have been weapons of first use in Islington for at least a generation: they're the kiss of ostracism rather on a par with the accusation of 'incorrect thinking' in Mao's China. The problem is that on the whole they're only too effective in silencing most people. Not Ms. Ladele however, all power to her.

The council's reaction to losing - by a unanimous finding of the tribunal, remember - was graceless: we were right, we can't have people imposing their minority (???) moralities on us, the thin end of the wedge... we are considering our appeal (at my expense, as a council tax payer, I may say...), etc. But having lived and worked in that borough for most of my adult live, I wouldn't expect anything different.

Frankly; if you want to learn where New Labour learned much of its crassness, look no further than Islington.

[There was a time 20 years when I was so repelled by the The Forward-Looking Shock-Workers of the New Labour Cadre who ran The People's Republic of Islington (under the leadership of the odious 'millionaire socialist' Margaret Hodge {q.v.}) that I canvassed for the Lib-Dems. Then I made the mistake of attending a couple of the Lib-Dem's party meetings - to discover what I should have known all the time, that the one party was simply more of the other and that it was impossible to tell who were the pigs and who were the farmers... as subsequently became manifest when the Lib-Dems took power in the council... and business went on as usual.]

Having admitted elsewhere on this site that I underwent some rather distasteful experiences as a child, I will now admit that thereafter I retained a prejudice against homosexuals, whether or not such a connection is strictly fair. This prejudice remitted when, as a teacher in London, I worked with gay men: I may just have been lucky in those I met, but such as I got to know were just decent, ordinary guys (well, extraordinary, actually, but that's another matter). But, one of the characters interviewed by TV after the tribunal findings were published was so pushy, so self-satisfied in his disdain for Ms. Ladele, so queer (in a most definitely pejorative sense) that I could feel my old prejudice stirring - and I suspect that such prejudice probably stirred even more strongly in other breasts. It's a pity that, when groups who have been oppressed finally reach the sunny uplands of security, some of their members are so quick to take up the mantle of bully in their turn; one might say, whether it's on the West Bank or in Islington. This guy was one of those, as he ranted self-righteously about Ms. Ladele's legal and moral duties.

I think I can justify my use of the word 'bully'. I assume that two gays wanting a union would prefer not to have Ms. Ladele officiate, in view of her feelings. The compromise which seems obvious to me - that the person who doesn't like civil unions should be allowed to avoid officiating at those at where she wouldn't be wanted anyway - was rejected by the loudest gay lobby in this affair, Stonewall (for whom I believe my smug friend was a spokesman). What, then, did they want? Since they wouldn't want her at their weddings (sic), the only reason for pursuing her had to be to force her out of her job (the rules of which were being changed for their benefit). What is that if it isn't vindictive bullying? And now, far from accepting independent arbitration, they'll spend money, including mine, to drag the matter out through appeals.

The pity of this episode for me is this: I became so comfortable with homosexuality (or at least unthreatened by the idea) that Heaven, in Charing Cross, became my favourite spot for clubbing, along with Turnmills later in the evening. (Helped by the discovery that gay clubs beat straight clubs hands down when it came to atmosphere, music and the absence of tension and violence.) No longer so true if those clubs are going to be full of Islington Stonewall. Or if that smug git goes there.


A breath of reason...

12 July 2008 .

A refreshing letter in today's Independent, about Lillian Ladele, from Russell Pearce of Hayward's Heath ("The truth is out: 'civil partnership' really means 'gay marriage'"). I hope he won't mind if I quote it in large part.

"The gay community should be very happy at the decision (in Ms. Ladele vs Islington)... In finding for the applicant, the tribunal has found that she believes civil partnerships are actually marriages (which the government has been at pains to deny). If a civil partnership is not a marriage... then the applicant cannot succeed... since her beliefs are not violated.

"It seems that Lillian Ladele agrees with everyone else (that a civil partnership is a marriage) and the tribunal does too (which it shows by upholding her claim).

"I really am married - yippee!"

This is more like the gay guys I know. A bit more of this blend of humour and argument and a bit less Stonewall fascism hand in hand with Islington Correct Thinking and the matter would have been resolved long ago. And I wouldn't have got all aerated under the collar. A sincere thank-you to Mr. Pearce.


...But the arguments will go on.

12 July 2008 .

Most of Deborah Orr's column in the same paper is also about the Ladele case ("If this registrar had 'Christian views', why did she ever take on the job?").

She focuses firstly on the contradictions in Ms. Ladele's stand - which I've felt uneasy about but resolutely avoided examining too closely. Ladele describes herself as holding 'orthodox' Christian beliefs - she's clearly a practising, conservative member of the church. Orr asks why, if she believes that marriage is ordained by God, Ladele has been officiating at secular marriages for fifteen years; and, more to the point, how she reconciles her beliefs with (for example) joining people who have previously been divorced. Why did she only advance her beliefs when gay unions came into the mix?

The other concern of the column is the damage which Ms. Orr feels that the tribunal's finding will have done to the balance between (a) the rights, or exceptions, which assertive religion is trying to claim and (b) the tenets and needs of our secular society.

I think that how you see the outcome of the case depends on the way you choose to view what's going on. I accept Ms. Ladele at face value, as an individual who felt she was suddenly asked to go a step further than she could. There's no evidence that she disapproves of civil, secular marriages between men and women - Ms. Orr is speculating when she assumes that Ladele must have had reservations which ought to have prevented her becoming a registrar a decade and a half ago; I see no contradiction in an orthodox Christian happy to see men and women married, even if it isn't in church, even if they're divorced; maybe she felt that a Christian presence at a secular ceremony sanctified it in her eyes; maybe she prayed in the evenings that despite their disbelief they would find happiness in their marriage; maybe she accepts that not everyone marries in a church but she's happy to see them marry where they choose. Maybe, of course, she was just a scheming little fifth columnist from the off. The point is we just don't know her thinking on any of the matters other than the issue of gay marriages - so she is most likely just what says she is, protesting against the one thing she can't accept... and neither Orr nor anyone else has the right to impute motives to her.

On the second issue: it's quite clear that some of Ms. Ladele's Christian support is deliberating fighting that battle which the secularists find so dangerous. However, I choose to see the whole business as being a matter of the individual defining her rights against an arrogant element of the state - it was her rights, not religion's rights, which won the day. Her victory was, overwhelmingly, simply the victory of the individual in an individual case. If those concerned about the balance between religion and state feel they've lost a battle, well, tough, it's not the end of the world - there'll be plenty more battles to fight, either way; but, ultimately, this is all about individuals, and in this case Ms. Ladele comes first.

Ms. Orr writes about people having whatever views they wish, however abhorrent to her or the rest of us, so long as they don't harm others or break the law. Ms. Ladele is not harming anyone by asking that other registrars take responsibility for civil unions; and the tribunal has found, for the time being at least, she has not been breaking the law. [In fact, the people who rather consistently broke the law, until the law was changed, were the gays; does Orr think they should not have done so? Or does she simply think that Ladele doesn't have the same right to test the law. I really do think that on this occasion Orr is guilty of double standards...]

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