Usefully Employed

I’ve been woefully late in adding my ten cents about the case of the Christian magistrate who doesn’t want to place children with same sex parents. On being refused permission to excuse himself from cases where that might happen, he felt he had no option but to resign. This has been put forward in some quarters of the press as some new horrible blight of political correctness, but it actually comes down to very old rules of how judges and lawyers behave. Whilst judges often refuse to sit in a particular case if it would give the appearance of bias - two famous examples are here and here - they are not allowed to pick and choose which cases they rule on due to their feelings about the law. The judicial oath requires a judge to uphold all laws, not the ones they particularly agree with. What laws we have should be up to Parliament, who we vote for, instead of judges, who we don’t. The only apparent exception in our past has been Mr Justice Christmas Humphreys who, despite his name, was a buddhist and was excused from sitting on cases where the law might require the death penalty.

As for my view: a reading of the case shows that this magistrate’s views weren’t so much informed by his religion as his beliefs that same-sex adoption was an ill-judged ’social experiment’. In a democracy it simply isn’t up to judges to make this kind of call. A judge either supports all the laws or none of them.