Graeme Archer is a statistician who lives in Hackney, has his own blog and is about to be civilly partnered "to the long-suffering Keith".
I don't know how to express myself politically except through personal demonstration, so please bear with me. We woke up yesterday morning, as we always do, to very strong cups of Teasmaid tea and "Farming Today" (god the rubbish they speak about organic produce on that programme). Then "Today" started up and the second headline was about a demonstration, planned for yesterday evening, outside Westminster, by a coalition of Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups, hoping to sway the vote in the House of Lords on the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006, an Act which will make it illegal to discriminate against self-defining gay people with respect to the provision of goods and services. The Spiritual were hoping to persuade the Temporal that it's wrong to make discrimination against gay people a criminal offence, since such discrimination is a matter of personal and moral conscience.
Would you like to know my thoughts when I heard this item, struggling as I was at 6.02am to fully regain consciousness? Probably not - I mean, why would you - except it's maybe a bit more complicated than you'd expect from a fully-paid up member of the Gay-Tories-R-Us club. My first thought was "good". And then "bugger" (ha ha). And then "I hope the government wins". And then "I hope the government loses". It's this internal conflict that interested me as much as the law itself (debated fiercely yesterday on Conservative Home).
Here are two diametrically opposed responses, both of which I could just about convince myself I hold utterly:
(1) The Richard Dawkins response. As well as being gay, I'm also an empiricist, by virtue of inclination and of training. I believe there are two components to knowledge: evidence, and belief, but I believe (ha ha, again) that belief is nothing without evidence. That is, I believe in the epistemic supremacy of evidence with respect to the evaluation of any hypothesis, but also that you can't "know" anything about any particular hypothesis without the incorporation of belief. Officially, this makes me a "Bayesian" (type "Likelihood Principle" into wikipedia if you're reallly interested). Therefore I'm atheist, because there is no evidence for the existence of a supra-human deity. In his article in the Telegraph yesterday, the Lord Mackay of Clashfern (a man I rate extremely highly & have done for decades: he's self-evidently a good man) moved that this law is wrong because it might cause religious people problems, and he advanced as an argument for his case that "the faith of many Christians, Jews and Muslims includes the view that homosexuality is sinful". From my point of view, this "argument" is neither here nor there, since the mere observation that an identified group of people have convinced themselves that their tradition makes a particular practice Not Good is not "evidence" that the practice is Not Good, in any meaningful sense of the word. It's just a belief. And without evidence I don't understand (nobody does, for once this isn't just a personal failing) how to refract that belief experience into a decision about how to act. So while I'm very sorry that people who are religious have problems about some legal protection for gay people, I think the demonstrable evidence of the experience of gay people is more important. I don't want to live in a country that makes a harmless group of folk (gay people) feel bad because another group of folk (the religious who feel that their belief gives them a de facto right to legislate) feel bad. Ergo, I hope the government wins. Evidence trumps belief.
(2) The "Conservative" response. Well I've been accused often enough on Conservative Home of Not Being A Real Conservative so this might shock some people, but in the abstract I think this law is dreadful. What on earth has it got to do with the government whether or not a hotelier offers or declines to offer a room to a gay couple? I have exactly the same abstract response as I did to the ban on fox-hunting (I can think of few things I'd less like to do, and few things I'd less like to ban) or the soon-to-be ban on smoking in pubs (for god's sake). One of the tenets of our Tory principles is the importance of private property. And if I were to own a hotel (the important verb is "own") why should the government have a say in to whom I let out my rooms? Why should the state interfere in the contract between myself and my potential customers? Ergo, I hope the government loses. Principle trumps personal experience.