Christopher Mackay’s Blog

In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggests that more accommodation should be made in the British legal system for peoples’ religious views:

There’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts — I think that’s a bit of a danger.

He’s proposing nothing less than two classes of citizens; those with basic legal rights and responsibilities, and special people with extra rights and, presumably, fewer responsibilities.

Not wanting to cause undue alarm, he hastened to add that the

principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a western democracy.

He doesn’t seem to believe it, though:

But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that. [emphasis added]

The law should do no such thing.

Especially not based on anything as ill-defined as a belief system. Where would that lead? Exemptions for people who believe in Thor, Zeus or little green men? Special rights for Sagittarians? Why not? Astrology is a belief system.

One set of laws for everyone is the only way to protect everyone’s rights.

He stresses that ‘nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well’.

But this is exactly what his suggestion would lead to. Does he imagine that once that door is opened an inch, that the demands would end there?

Dr Williams is more interested in not offending anyone’s beliefs than in safeguarding democracy. The special accommodation he seeks represents nothing less than the undermining of western civilization.