A few media outlets have reported a landmark ruling this week. The Leeds-based Roman Catholic adoption agency Catholic Care lost its appeal against a tribunal ruling which said that it cannot change its Memorandum of Association to exclude same-sex
couples from using its adoption service. This could have significant consequences.
I was intrigued to see how this story was reported, bearing in mind Roger Bolton's criticisms of the BBC's failure to do justice to socially-conservative attitudes.
If there's one media outlet you can usually rely on not only to give socially-conservative attitudes a hearing but also to place them well ahead of liberal social attitudes (and sometimes the actual point of a story), there's always the Daily Mail. The Mail article by Steve Doughty, Catholic adoption agency loses five year legal battle over its refusal to accept gay couples, begins with something found in Paragraph 45 of the judgement:
Roman Catholics who support traditional marriage and oppose gay rights are not bigots, a High Court judge declared yesterday.
Mr Justice Sales said those who follow religious beliefs long established across Europe ‘cannot be equated with racist bigots’.
Rather, he said, these Christian views ‘have a legitimate place in a pluralist, tolerant and broadminded society’.
This makes up the first three paragraphs of his piece. Only in the the fifth paragraph do we get what I would have thought was the main point of the story:
Despite his call for tolerance, Mr Justice Sales rejected the claims of the Leeds-based agency.
The judge said that Parliament had outlawed discrimination against gay couples and that Catholic Care had failed to demonstrate why it should be exempt from this legislation. Catholic Care's opponents were the Charity Commission. It was they who had make the 'bigot' charge against the adoption agency.
So, Steve made the 'judge says social conservatives are not bigots' angle the focus of his report. He seems to know what his readership wants from him and the best-rated comments below his article bear that instinct out. There the judgement against Catholic Care is attacked, as are the "bigotry" of the Left, political correctness and (inevitably) Muslims, while the Catholic Church and traditional Christian viewpoints on gay issues are vigorously defended.
