The political career of a senior Conservative politician is hanging in the balance after he suggested that Christian conscience should be respected when it comes to homosexual ‘rights’.
Chris Grayling, Shadow Home Secretary and MP for Epsom and Ewell, faced calls for his demotion after saying he believed that consciences of Christian bed-and-breakfast owners should be respected when they have to deal with homosexual couples wishing to stay at their properties.
Mr Grayling was secretly recorded making the comments at a meeting of the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank. Although he said that hotels should not be allowed to discriminate against homosexuals, those individuals running B&Bs were a different matter.
‘I think we need to allow people to have their own consciences.
‘I took the view that if it's a question of somebody who’s doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn't come into their own home,’ he said.
Some commentators suggested that the comments are a setback for David Cameron, Conservative leader, who has sought to make the party more accepting of homosexual ‘rights’ than in the past.
Michael Black, 62, who with his partner John Morgan was turned away from a Christian B&B in Cookham, Berkshire, because they wanted to share bed in it, said Mr Cameron should sack Mr Grayling.
(See the CCFON report)
‘I think he certainly needs to explain himself. I would hope that David Cameron would sack him as Shadow Home Secretary and make it clear the sort of attitude that religious belief puts people above the law is not acceptable in the Conservative party,’ he said.
The attack on Mr Grayling also came from other fronts of the political spectrum.
Alan Johnson, Home Secretary, urged Mr Cameron to ‘either back him or sack him’ while campaigners including Peter Tatchell, the homosexual rights activist, urged the Tory MP to apologise for his remarks.
Lord Mandelson, the openly homosexual business secretary, said the story undermined the Tories’ claims to being a party of social reform.
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said the Tories’ public face of modernisation was an illusion.
Support for the Shadow Home Secretary was muted even on his own side, with one senior Tory source saying his remarks were an 'unwelcome distraction' from the party's election campaign, the Daily Mail reported.
However, many other commentators have supported Mr Grayling’s remarks as fair and perfectly reasonable.
Writing for the Daily Telegraph, Melanie McDonagh, stated:
‘I don’t know about you, but for me the oddest aspect of this story was that these views should have been captured on a ‘secret’ tape, smuggled to the Observer and revealed as front-page news as if they were the policy programme of the late Eugène Terre’Blanche rather than the unremarkable musings of a mainline Tory to a perfectly respectable think tank.
‘... you have to ask: what’s wrong with thinking aloud about the boundaries between equality and conscience, between people’s rights to determine what goes on in their homes, even if they rent out bedrooms, and their duties as providers of commercial services? Mr Grayling’s distinction between a B&B and a hotel, which is a public space, not a private one, seems pretty reasonable to me.’
Richard Littlejohn, an author, broadcaster, and journalist writing for The Daily Mail, wrote:
'[The Observer] splashed on its front page a vituperative attack on the shadow home secretary Chris Grayling, who had the audacity to suggest that perhaps people who run bed and breakfast establishments should have the right to decide who sleeps under their own roof.'
'Self-styled 'liberals' are now trying to destroy the career of a decent politician simply for expressing a point of view which I would guess is held by at least half the population.
'Secret tape recordings, smear campaigns. These are the disreputable weapons of fascists, not liberals.
'I have often argued in this column that those who force 'tolerance' down our throats are among the most intolerant bullies on Earth. They only tolerate opinions which chime with their own world view. Anyone who dissents must be traduced and punished.'
Andrea Minichiello Williams, Director of CCFON and The Christian Legal Centre, said: ‘It’s important in a free and diverse society that we are not compelled to act contrary to our consciences in order to accommodate vociferous minorities.’