Munchausen loses Court Case

Having penned a little piece in the Guardian about the Johns Case, reactions have ranged from nutter denunciations to thanks for saying what everybody felt but hadn’t got round to saying. Actually, the realities of this case were extraordinarily simple, summarized thus by the judge:

the views that Mr Diamond seeks to impute to others have no part in the thinking of either the defendant or the court. No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not 'fit and proper' persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. No one is seeking to force Christians or adherents of other faiths into the closet. No one is asserting that the claimants are bigots. No one is seeking to give Christians, Jews or Muslims or, indeed, peoples of any faith, a second class status. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law, to our polity and to our way of life, that everyone is equal: equal before the law and equal as a human being endowed with reason and entitled to dignity and respect.

So...

You may think everybody is out to persecute your religion, but you can only get a court to stop them, if there is any evidence that could give substance to your fears. It is perfectly lawful in the UK to suffer real fear about religious discrimination. It does actually happen and may indeed happen to you. What you cannot expect is the blanket protection of a court against a specific instance of it without evidence that it has happened or is likely to happen to you.

Premature burial is a dreadful thing. Before a Court will injunct a local authority against doing this to you they will require some evidence that it is likely to, or indeed that you are dead in the first place. Since nobody brought any evidence in this case, the result can hardly surprise anybody.

What have we learnt?

1. Courts don't make law, parliament does. Well, wasn’t that a surpise?
   
   
2. If you require protection against an imaginary threat, go to an imaginary court. Using real courts as grandstands, an essential part of the lexicon of US Culture warriors of the Right, is still, understandably, frowned upon by English judges, who are busy bunnies.
   
   
3. The conflation of a moral view held by a particular section of Christians into a banket phenomenon called “Christianity” that is then adjudged to be under threat doesn’t wash. It’s rubbish. Some Christians, for example, are profoundly sincere pacifists. In stark contrast to anti-gay campaigners, Christian pacifists could claim some sanction for their view from the teaching of Jesus. That doesn’t, however, make pacifism integral to Christianity, such that any court that refused to order the Grenadier Guards to lay down their arms could be held to be attacking Christianity.
   

Ah, but you may say, there are people out there who don’t like Christianity. There are, and there always were. Some English Christians seem hell bent on behaving like a persecuted minority, and who am I to try and stop them? They’ve obviously never been to Pakistan or anywhere else Christians really are persecuted as Christians.

Historic Christianity does have massive historic, cultural and legal influence in the UK, not least in the pursuit of ancient rights founded on the principles of Equity that gave rise to our human rights law in the first place. The surest way to destroy this influence is for a group of zealots to take upon themselves the role of being the “one prophet left,” and indulge in the legal equivalent of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.