The Lawyers' Christian Fellowship has criticised a ruling from the Sheffield Employment Tribunal against the appeal of a Christian magistrate to be granted exemption from ruling over cases that might require him to adopt children to same-sex couples.
Following the ruling, committed Christian magistrate Andrew McClintock will no longer be able to serve on the family panel despite the recognition of the tribunal that he had an "unblemished record" and is "well regarded by fellow magistrates".
In 2004, Mr McClintock approached the chairman of the family panel in Sheffield with his concerns about the potential conflict between his Christian beliefs and the implications of same-sex adoption in the wake of the 2002 Civil Partnerships Act.
Mr McClintock, who believes that children should be placed in households with both a mother and a father, asked that the family panel accommodate his religious conscience and "screen" him from cases which might require him to place children up for adoption in same-sex households.
He also expressed concern that children could be put at risk by the untried social experiment of same-sex adoption in which he said vulnerable children were being used as "guinea pigs".
The employment tribunal rejected Mr McClintock's claim, however, that he had been discriminated against because of his religious beliefs and that his right to religious freedom had been infringed.
Andrea Minichiello Williams, Public Policy Director of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship, criticised the tribunal's ruling, saying that the case was "a clear picture of how Christian faith is becoming privatised in society".
"It is yet another example of the repression of Christian conscience and signals the prevalence of a secular 'new morality' and the erosion of Christian values at the expense of our children's welfare," she said.
Ms Williams warned of more cases like McClintock's in the future as a greater number of "men and women of integrity - as the court described Mr McClintock - are forced to choose between applying a law which runs contrary to their fundamental Christian belief or obeying their conscience", she said.
