« A message to city councils | Main | Social work victim sues »
New employment legislation will institutionalise discrimination against lesbians and gay men according to, well, everyone except Tony Blair. The 2003 Employment Equality Regulations are riddled with exemptions which allow discrimination on superstitious grounds.
Other major changes to the original draft, allowing discrimination against atheists or others who do not share the religious beliefs of their employer, were made following strong lobbying from evangelical groups. One of the biggest loopholes allows an employer to dismiss or fail to hire an individual if he isnot satisfiedthat they fit his ownethos based on religion or belief.
Critics claim that this would allow firms such as Stagecoach, run by Scottish evangelist Brian Souter, or Vardy, the North-east car dealership owned by millionaire Christian Peter Vardy, to discriminate freely.
No news on whether it allows gay employers the right to sack their employees if they are religious. Still, such regulations should make it easier to dismiss any employees who use this to cause trouble.
Blair gives religious employers the right to sack gay workers—Independent on Sunday, 11th May 2003.
Posted in
Church and State
and Pooves and closet cases
at 12:18. Last modified on October 14 2007 at 13:21.
Permalink to this entry | View blog reactions
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
This is not a contacts site. If you are looking for help regarding a particular path, I suggest The Witches' Voice, which does operate a contacts service.
Allowed HTML:
a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, things will work better if you use the XHTML entities for those letters. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.