Employment Law Advocates » Blog Archive » Religion and the law

The Court of Appeal has refused permission to appeal in McFarlane v Relate Avon. The reasons were straightforward, as the case cannot be distinguished from Ladele, which was decided a few months ago. However, the judgment is noteworthy for a bizarre intervention by Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, which led Lord Justice Laws to make some general comments about the relationship between religion and the law. His remarks are strongly worded and it is worth quoting a substantial passage: “The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. 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.”