You can always count on the fact that some idiot in authority, somewhere, is going to try to destroy the fabric of civilization:
Lord Justice Laws condemned any attempt to protect believers who take a stand on matters of conscience under the law as “irrational” and “capricious”. In comments likely to set the church on a collision course with the courts, he claimed that doing so could set Britain on the road to a “theocracy”, or religious rule. His comments came as he dismissed a legal challenge by a Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked after refusing to offer sex therapy sessions to homosexual couples because it was against his beliefs.
The views expressed by the amusingly mistitled Lord Justice Laws are largely the same views previously expressed by every totalitarian leader or bureaucrat throughout history. For it is empirically and demonstrably obvious that what is capricious and irrational are the many vagaries of present UK/EU “law”, not belief systems that have been much more clearly codified and accepted by far more people for centuries.
Every intelligent individual, religious or irreligious, should be able to see the very clear danger involved in declaring the right of the state to override conscience and that “no religious belief itself could be protected under the law ‘however long its tradition, however rich its culture'”. This is overt totalitarian madness and is a direct conceptual strike at every cherished freedom of Western civilization. If there is no room for the law to respect religious beliefs, there is no room for it to respect beliefs of any kind and it rests upon a foundation of nothing more than the law of tooth and claw. It is not only absurd, but downright backwards to claim that respecting religious beliefs would put the UK “on the road to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.” Most historical theocracies have been less autocratic than the current EU, and far less autocratic than dozens of the bloodthirsty anti-religious regimes of the 20th century.
Secularists should beware of celebrating this form of superficially secular form of jurisprudence, as it isn not indicative of a movement towards a rational and progressive secular humanist society, but rather the unlimited state power formerly seen in ancient pagan societies.