British magistrate fired for airing opposition to homosexual adoption
UNITED KINGDOM, – A British magistrate suspended
last year for preferring heterosexual adoptive couples to homosexuals has been
fired outright for repeating his views on the BBC.
Richard
Page, 69, a magistrate in the Maidstone and Sevenoaks courts in Kent and a
father of three, was fired for expressing his "biased and prejudiced"
views on the BBC without permission, but says he will appeal through the
employment tribunal.
"To
punish me and to seek to silence me for expressing a dissenting view is deeply
worrying. I shall challenge this decision, as it is deeply illiberal and
intolerant," he told reporters.
Andrea
Williams of the Christian Legal Centre agreed: "This unmasks the face of the
new political orthodoxy; it is unkind. It tries to silence opposing views and
if it fails it crushes and punishes the person who holds those views. To remove
someone like Richard from the bench is modern-day madness. He has a lifetime of
public service, expertise in mental health. He is motivated by his Christian
faith and a deep compassion for people."
Chris
Joyce, a spokesman for Christian Concern, said the group "absolutely
supported Page" on both moral and empirical grounds, believing that the
research from the North America, where homosexual adoption has been permitted
for longer, indicates that Page is correct that children do better in
heterosexual families.
Joyce said
the actual reason for Page's firing was technical: judges are not allowed to
speak to the news media without their superiors' permission. "But Mr. Page
will argue that since he was under suspension at the time, this did not apply
to him," Joyce told LifeSiteNews. "We will also argue that he was
under oath to do what was in the best interest of the child and he should be
able to state that."
Page spoke
to the BBC a year ago after being suspended and then ordered to undergo
re-education to improve his beliefs on sexuality issues. Part of a tribunal
considering an adoption case, he had expressed the view in private to the other
judges that "because a baby comes from a man and a woman, it made me think
the child would be better off with a father and a mother than with single-sex
parents. The other judges didn't agree at all." Not only that, but one of
them reported his views to his superiors.
Page, an
evangelical Christian, did not submit to re-education meekly; rather, he was
openly critical of the government's action. In explanation of his original
comment to his fellow judges, he told the BBC, "As a magistrate, I have to
act on the evidence before me, and quite simply, I believe that there is not
sufficient evidence to convince me that placing a child in the care of a
same-sex couple can be as holistically beneficial to a child as placing them
with a mum and dad as God and nature intended."
While
homosexual adoption has not been permitted for long enough to analyze the
results, there are studies of children raised by gay couples, one of whom is
the child's natural parent and the other is that parent's same-sex lover. One
of the largest of such studies is Simon Fraser University's economist
Douglas Allen's "High school graduation rates among children of same-sex
households," published in the December 2013 issue of the Review of
Economics of the Household. Based on Canadian census data, the study showed
that 33 % fewer children raised by same-sex couples graduated from high school
than did the children raised by different-sex couples.
While
there are more than 40 other North American studies showing no difference in
outcomes from the two sets of parents, scholars such as Allen claim that these
have seriously flawed methodologies, especially in the selection of the parents
surveyed.
The
Judiciary Conduct Investigations Office, however, states, "The Lord
Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice found that Mr Page's comments on national
television would have caused a reasonable person to conclude he was biased and
prejudiced against single sex adopters; they considered this to be serious
misconduct which brought the magistracy into disrepute."
