A legal centre helping Christians in the UK gets around 1,000 case inquiries “every single year” where people get in trouble over their Christian beliefs, the centre’s chief said.
Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern (CC) and its Christian Legal Centre, said secular anti-discrimination laws are “enforcing compliance to a new ideology” and have become “deeply illiberal and deeply intolerant.”
Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme, Ms. Williams said Christian Legal Centre gets “1,000 case inquiries ... every single year, where people are in trouble in this country simply for believing that marriage is between a man and a woman” or for challenging the transgender ideology.
Referencing a scenario where “an eight-year-old child that says that they want to transition,” Ms. Williams said “a teacher that questions that loses her job, and is reported to the authorities, and even deemed unsuitable to teach at all, to have a teaching regulation licence removed.”
CC listed a number of cases on its website where teachers, parents, and preachers lost jobs or reported to the police for allegedly “misgendering” people, questioning pupils’ requests to social transition, or challenging the promotion of transgender ideologies in schools.
In one of the most recent cases, a Christian primary school teacher, who’s given a pseudonym Hannah for legal reasons, was sacked for for raising safeguarding concerns about a child who was due to join her class, who wanted to identify as the opposite gender, CC said.
Ms. Williams spoke of another example where a Cameroonian asylum seeker was first kicked out of a course, then had a job offer rescinded, for holding a Christian belief on marriage.
Felix Ngole was doing a master’s degree in social work when he quoted a Bible verse that described homosexuality as an “abomination” in a Facebook discussion.
He was later told that he had brought the social work profession into disrepute and expelled from the course. With the help of the Christian Legal Centre, the Court of Appeal ruled in his favour in 2019.
Describing Mr. Ngole as a “warm” and “bubbly” person who’s “made to be a carer,” Ms. Williams said there was no evidence he had “ever discriminated or would ever discriminate.”
“One funny point in this case was when one of the Court of Appeal judges said: ‘Well, wouldn’t Mother Teresa be a discriminator on this analysis?’ So that was a great moment in the case because indeed, she would have fallen foul of the test that was being applied to Felix Ngole,” Ms. Williams said.
Christian Legal Centre is assisting Mr. Ngole again, this time because a healthcare provider allegedly withdrew a job offer after reading about his court case.
Referencing the Magna Carta, Ms. Williams said Britain is “the place of freedoms,” but Britons have “forgotten” that it was “the Biblical law” that “gave Great Britain those freedoms.”
With God as “the supreme law giver,” he gave “each one of us innate dignity in the eyes of the law. And each one of us is accorded that dignity according to the law. And that is a beautiful, that’s a beautiful thing. And that’s how you get taught true tolerance. That’s how you get a true understanding of the worth of every individual and respect for every individual, and lack of coercion of every individual,” she argued.
“And what a hard, equality, secular, so called anti-discrimination, set of laws has done,” she added, is that it “removed the idea of God, asserted a whole load of human rights which compete with one another, and has in fact become deeply illiberal and deeply intolerant, and enforcing compliance to a new ideology.”
