On his brand new blog Hell Patrol, serial blogosphere commenter asquith takes up the story of the registrar who is now being compensated for her homophobia, because she holds her views on religious grounds.

Anyone who holds religious beliefs is, on “faith”, taking on a set of assumptions for which there is no evidence. I have chosen to be a liberal, & will defend my beliefs against those who think differently. Why can’t Christians, Muslims… or devotees of Zeus, Baal, Wotan, or Zarquon do the same? Why is it that we’re required to genuflect before religious beliefs, when no other set of beliefs get the same “respect”.

First of all, I do love the Douglas Adams reference. The world can never have enough Sci-Fi nerds. The great man himself used similar terms to express the argument1:

Religion doesn’t seem to work like [other debates]; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘Fine, I respect that’ … the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.

I find myself in complete agreement with asquith. Religion has no monopoly on morality, after all. The strangest thing about this news story, though, is that by request of the Catholic Church religious material (or even implied religious connotations) is expressly banned from wedding ceremonies. That includes songs like Angels by Robbie Williams. I was told that Prince’s Adore was a boundary case, containing as it does the lyric “If God one day struck me blind/Your beauty I’d still see”. 

If the religion of the happy couple is banned in the strictest sense from civil ceremonies, how can the religion of the registrar play such an important part?

  1. ‘Is There An Artificial God?‘ Speech at Digital Biota, Cambridge, UK. Reprinted here with audio, although I read it in The Salmon of Doubt originally [↩]