Trevor Phillips, the chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, has said that religious believers should not be free to adhere to their own tenets when acting in the public domain. “Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules, for example child protection, then it has to go with public law,” he said. He agreed with the court ruling that forced the closure of all Catholic adoption agencies in Britain because they objected to adoption by persons identified as homosexual. [The Telegraph]
The same principles, applied in health care, would result in the closure or state expropriation of dissenting denominational health care facilities, and the suppression of freedom of conscience in medical practice.