Respecting freedom of conscience in our laws is a crucial criterion of the extent to which a country attains a civilised status, said the former Lord Chancellor in a debate in the House of Lords on 13 January 2010.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern argued that current laws should be more accommodating in dealing with differing points of view. He stated that in Britain everyone should be assured that the law would not require them to violate their consciences, even if there were ‘matters about which people could be legitimately anxious’.
‘Respecting conscience is not merely a matter of human rights; it is also a matter of prudence. One of the earliest speeches that I heard in this House was given by the former Lord Chief Justice, the late Lord Lane. He was a man of great experience in the law, and the criminal law in particular. In it, he spoke of the need to ensure that we should not denigrate conscience, because he recognised, rightly, that conscience plays a very important role in upholding the criminal law.
‘As Edmund Burke once said, the less you restrain a man from within, the more you are required to restrain him from without. Failure to respect conscience is a fundamental mistake on the part of any State that aspires to be Liberal Democratic in relation to human dignity and the maintenance of law and order,’ he said.
(Click here to read the debate)
Lord Mackay proposed an amendment to the Equality Bill (number 57A) which says:
‘Conscientious objection
Nothing in this Act shall have the effect of requiring a person (A) to provide a good or service to a person (B) when doing so has the effect of making A complicit with an action to which A has a genuine conscientious objection.’
Andrea Minichiello Williams, Director of CCFON, said: ‘The entire fabric of our society was built on ideas and actions of people acting according to their consciences—for many rooted in the Word of God. How have we come to this situation where we have to struggle in Parliament to preserve the notion of conscience in our law? We applaud the Peers who are standing for freedom in this Bill, which represents an attempt by the Government to promote the most significant State intervention into people’s individual religious freedoms and practices since the Reformation.’