Age of Consent Fight Not Over

Christian peers in the House of Lords are to try to retard the progress of the Crime and Disorder Bill when it returns to the House of Lords.

Threatening noises are coming from Baroness Young, an Anglican, and the Duke of Norfolk, the country’s leading lay Roman Catholic. They will be supported by Church of England bishops, who have already issued a strongly-worded statement opposing the reform.

Baroness Young managed to get an amendment passed earlier this year exempting religions from the Human Rights Bill. She did this with the support of the Rutherford Institute, a deeply homophobic evangelical pressure group based in America, and on a tide of anti-gay rhetoric. She dishonestly claimed that without the amendment to the Human Rights Bill, churches would be required to “marry” gay couples and ordain gay priests. She is now talking of the amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill as “a paedophiles’ charter” and saying she will support a campaign against it in the Lords.

George Broadhead of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) said: “When equality was approved by the House of Commons on 22 June, there was understandable jubilation, but if the Christian lobby in the House of Lords manages to organise itself as successfully as it did around the Human Rights Bill, it could cause serious delays to the implementation of this new legislation. We could also see a nasty propaganda war being conducted in which powerful religious lobbies within the House of Lords will repeat all of the discredited lies which have been circulating in those circles about gay lifestyles.

“We must be prepared to fight these religious dinosaurs as vigorously as we lobbied for an equal age of consent in the first place. GALHA will be seeking the support of Humanist peers in opposing any alteration to the Bill in the House of Lords.”