Newsline 28 October 2016

Newsline 28 October 2016

It's deeply concerning that Theresa May's plan to open a new wave of fully religiously selective 'faith' schools will not require new legislation or even the approval of Parliament. As our campaigns director states below, academisation has created an alarming democratic deficit at the heart of our schools system, and the fact that these regressive changes could be being made at the whim of the Prime Minister should concern us all. That's why it's so important that you respond to the Government's consultation on the issue. Lifting the 50% cap on faith-based admissions will undoubtedly lead to a proliferation of fully religiously selective faith schools. The consultation may be our only opportunity to oppose these dreadful plans. Please read our briefing on the proposed changes and respond to the Government consultation here.

Also in this week's Newsline we explain why the Ashers verdict, far from being the 'threat to free speech' that some have portrayed it as, was in fact a clear and logical judgment – and one we fully endorse.

News, Blogs & Opinion

Plans to increase discriminatory faith school admissions ‘reveals an alarming democratic deficit’

News | Fri, 28th Oct 2016

The education secretary's power to relax faith school admissions without parliamentary approval or scrutiny reveals a disturbing democratic deficit, the National Secular Society has warned.

Under current rules, newly established faith schools must limit the number of pupils they select on the basis of faith to 50%. However, under proposals published by the Government, religious-based free schools will, when oversubscribed, be able to select all of their pupils by religion.

The Government is currently consulting on its plans to remove the 50% cap, but the NSS has warned that powers granted to the education secretary mean there is no meaningful mechanism for MPs to challenge the "regressive move" towards more discriminatory admissions.

The 50% cap is applied to free schools through their funding agreement with the Secretary of State. Any changes to the 50% cap that ministers want to make will not require legislation.

Following publication of the proposals the NSS called on the Education Select Committee to launch an inquiry into faith-based admissions. However, the committee's Chair, Neil Carmichael MP, has confirmed to the NSS that it "will not be able to accommodate [such an inquiry] in the foreseeable future".

Stephen Evans, campaigns director of the National Secular Society, said:

"School admissions policies that discriminate on religious grounds are unfair and unjust and need to be eliminated. For the Government to be able to increase levels of religious discrimination without parliamentary approval reveals an alarming democratic deficit at the heart of our school system.

"By lifting the 50% cap the Government will be facilitating a proliferation of discriminatory and divisive faith schools. This may well serve the desires of some religious organisations but it fails to serve the needs of the majority of parents and pupils who simply want good schools, rather than religious schools – particularly ones that they will not have fair access to.

"The fact that such a regressive change can be being made at the whim of the Prime Minister reveals a disturbing democratic void – one which religious groups will be more than happy to exploit."

The Catholic Education Service has said the removal of the cap will allow it to open "between 30 and 40" new publicly funded Catholic schools, creating "thousands of new Catholic school places across the country."

Ashers Bakery loses appeal over cake with “Support Gay Marriage” slogan

News | Mon, 24th Oct 2016

A bakery firm which cancelled an order for a cake with the slogan "Support Gay Marriage" has lost its appeal against the ruling that they had unlawfully discriminated.

The Court of Appeal rejected their appeal that they were being forced to make a political statement they did not agree with.

In the appeal the bakery said they were being forced to print a message they did not agree with, but the court said that "the issue of forced speech only arose because the appellants chose to provide" a customised cake service.

The court found that "The fact that a baker provides a cake for a particular team or portrays witches on a Halloween cake does not indicate any support for either."

The case was initially brought about on behalf of Gareth Lee, an LGBT rights activist who placed an order with Ashers Bakery for a cake with the words "Support Gay Marriage" printed on it.

Though the order for the cake with the personalised message was initially accepted, several days later Mr Lee was contacted by Karen McArthur of Ashers Bakery who said they would not be able to make the cake because the slogan went against their religious beliefs and that she should not have accepted the order. Mr Lee was given a refund.

The bakery contended in their appeal that they objected specifically to the slogan "Support Gay Marriage" and were not discriminating against LGBT customers. The bakery said they did not know what Mr Lee's sexual orientation was when he placed the order, but the court found that the original ruling of direct discrimination was correct.

Northern Ireland's Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan sided with the initial ruling that found Ashers had "discriminated against the respondent directly on the grounds of sexual orientation contrary to the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2006".

The Belfast Court of Appeal ruled that it was the word "Gay" which "prevented the order from being fulfilled" and that Ashers Bakery would have fulfilled an order for a cake with the slogan "Support Marriage".

"The reason that the order was cancelled was that the appellants would not provide a cake with a message supporting a right to marry for those of a particular sexual orientation. This was a case of association with the gay and bisexual community and the protected personal characteristic was the sexual orientation of that community. Accordingly this was direct discrimination," the judgement said.

The Attorney General contended that the bakery were required to "produce a political message with theological content to both of which they objected on the grounds of their own religious belief and political opinion".

They were therefore "at a disadvantage" compared to those holding pro-gay marriage views, he argued.

Karen McArthur told the court: "as part of my faith I believe it would be sinful for me to say or do anything which has the intention or effect of promoting homosexual sexual relations or same sex marriage."

But the court concluded that the legislation treated Ashers Bakery fairly, and that "Anyone who applies a religious aspect or a political aspect to the provision of services may be caught by equality legislation, not because the legislation treats their religious belief of political opinion less favourably but because that person seeks to distinguish, on a basis that is prohibited, between those who will receive their service and those who will not."

Considering calls for a so-called 'conscience clause' to allow types of discrimination against LGBT people on religious grounds, the judges' ruling said that "The answer is not to have the legislation changed and thereby remove the equality protection concerned. The answer is for the supplier of services to cease distinguishing, on prohibited grounds, between those who may or may not receive the service."

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said the verdict was "a defeat for freedom of expression."

However, writing on the BBC website, legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg said there was "nothing in the court's decision requiring Ashers or any other business to promote a view with which the company's directors disagreed."

Ashers Bakery was supported in the case by the Christian Institute.

Review: The Battle for British Islam, by Sara Khan with Tony McMahon

Opinion | Thu, 27th Oct 2016

There are three million Muslims in the UK. The evidence shows they are becoming more religiously conservative, thousands are thought to have joined Islamic State; vast majorities would criminalise blasphemy and homosexuality. What hope is there?

'The Battle for British Islam' begins with a fascinating tour through recent history, charting the rise of Salafism from the fringes of Islamic thought to its position today as what author Sara Khan describes as a "major influence within British Islam" today.

Khan has spent much of her life campaigning for equality and human rights within Muslim communities in the UK, and through her organisation Inspire, she works alongside the Prevent strategy, challenging Islamic extremism and helping to save some very young teenagers from a short, brutal life in Syria and the rest of us from their quite literal self-destruction.

She espouses a liberal religiosity in the book that puts human rights above scripture, and she laments the rise of the "austere" and extreme Islamism that the west now grapples with.

The book rejects a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations, and describes the real ideological dispute of the modern world as a "furious" intra-Islamic struggle to "claim or reclaim what Islam stands for in the twenty-first century".

But the battle within British (and global) Islam between the 'moderates' and the Islamists is a competition fought on losing ground. As long as scripture and, importantly, the sayings of Mohammed, are the deciding factor that overrides everything else, the moderates will lose.

Khan favours interpretations of religion which can be reconciled to human rights, pluralism and citizenship. But the polling doesn't give much hope that many Muslims agree with her. Thank goodness then, that there are at least dissenting voices like hers.

From the outset 'The Battle for British Islam' presents a chilling account of the Islamist 'utopia', alongside accounts of this nightmarish vision in practice from the now-shrinking dominion of the Islamic State.

In Dar al-Islam (the world which is under Islamic law), the state is ruled by a caliph, all male Muslims over fifteen train for jihad, women are mothers and wives only, and education is centred entirely upon "the forming of the Islamic personality and nothing else."

There are schools in the United Kingdom today which are bent on such an end, yet many local authorities have shamefully failed to aid efforts to prosecute them, instead abandoning countless children.

In the book, written with Tony McMahon, Khan recounts some of the cases of would-be ISIS recruits she has come across during her career. The examples of female recruits are the often most appalling and, from a secular mind-set, the hardest to comprehend.

Khan writes that "up to seventy British women may be members of al-Khanssaa", a sort of Islamic SS which inflicts sometimes random, always brutal punishments on civilians under the group's control. In one case a woman was reportedly executed by al-Khanssaa for breastfeeding (under a burqa).

Targets of ISIS propaganda "hear that the kuffar hate you, that Britain is a kuffar country, you cannot live there as a Muslim as God has warned that if you die in such a land you will die as a disbeliever. The kuffar hate your religion and they want to eradicate Islam."

This is the artful trap Islamic State set to destroy the 'grey zone' in which Muslims and non-Muslims coexist: the worse the atrocities they commit the more hostile the British people feel towards Islam. The more Muslims feel alienated. The more join Islamic State. The more hostile the British people feel towards Islam.

It is through this grim cycle that ISIS hopes to "force Muslims into a binary choice between leaving to live in the territory held by ISIS or residing in the West and becoming apostates to their faith."

The book considers anti-Muslim bigotry, rising intra-Islamic sectarianism and carefully articulates a criticism of the term 'Islamophobia' – which Khan says has come to include "a prohibition on criticising Islamist ideology" and "shutting down discussion on theological matters within Islam".

Khan says that this "trepidation among non-Muslims about Islam and Muslims" is inevitable, and adds her voice to warnings over the way in which Islamic extremism and far-right responses feed-off each other

The root cause of this cycle is Islamic extremism, and without this there would be no far-right backlash. So countering jihadism at the source is essential.

This makes the conspiratorial effort to undermine counter-extremism efforts, described in great detail in the book, a very serious practical threat. Khan and McMahon write extensively about the pushback against Prevent by groups like CAGE, aided and abetted by left-wing papers that seem to imagine open theocrats as the representative (and desirable) voice of British Muslims. The book gives an informative account of the anti-Prevent hysteria.

The bizarre alliance of the far-left and the Islamists is one of the strangest features of our politics. The authors describe it as more than a pact however, calling it (quite rightly) a "de facto merger".

"Traditional socialist ideology" has been replaced by cultural relativism and multiculturalism and this inevitably marginalises "secular voices within Islam."

Millions of Muslims now live in the west and they aren't going anywhere and neither are their religious beliefs. Indeed, the theory of secularisation (that in wealthy, modern societies younger generations are less religious than their elders) cannot be said to apply to Muslims at all, in fact the reverse is true.

Pragmatic approaches, both secular and religious, to the myriad problems Islam and Islamism pose are therefore essential. This is what Khan provides.

Whether or not you agree with their defence of what the fundamentals of Islam 'really' are, liberal Muslims are an essential part of this coalition.

Extremism cannot be defeated by "diktats from Whitehall"; a united society is needed to defeat it. They make this case convincingly.

Though hard-headed about the challenges we all face, Khan and McMahon write that the "overwhelming majority of British Muslims remain patriotic, attached to Britain and hostile to the radicalisation activities of ISIS."

This is all to be welcomed, but poll after poll also finds appalling attitudes to be prevalent, as Khan notes: "A BBC survey in 2015 found 20 per cent of British Muslims believed western liberal society could never be compatible with Islam."

She mentions as well the poll which found that one-in-ten British Muslims "thought that organisations printing images of the Prophet deserved to be attacked."

These cultural divisions may be impossible to resolve; or it may take decades to do so, but at least people like Sara Khan are trying to do bridge these vast divides.

If there ever is an Islamic enlightenment, it may be generations away. Until then some path to coexistence must be found, Khan presents a hopeful but realistic look at what some of this might look like.

'The Battle for British Islam' is available from Amazon UK.

Forced cutting of young boys’ genitals violates the most fundamental medical ethics

Opinion | Mon, 24th Oct 2016

Too often those who carry out forced cutting of young boys' genitals escape with gentle admonishment, rather than punishment commensurate with the severity of their actions, writes Dr Antony Lempert of the Secular Medical Forum.

In 2013, Dr Hassan Abdulla, a psychiatrist, was convicted of performing illegal surgery on children. Ordinarily this would set major alarm bells ringing but the devil is in the detail. The reason this surgery was illegal was that he had failed to register with the Care Quality Commission, the (CQC), in doing so. The CQC was therefore unable to regulate the conditions under which he operated on children. Once alerted to his practice, the CQC inspected Dr Abdulla's private surgical premises and found that the facilities were substandard and potentially dangerous. In particular, infection control practices were inadequate, equipment was out of date and support staff were not appropriately trained.

In 2014, the Medical Practitioners' Tribunal Service (MPTS) imposed restrictions on his practice. In September this year, already two years later, it was felt that Dr Abdulla had not fully reflected on his misconduct and had not demonstrated sufficient insight; subject to his appeal he has now been suspended from the medical register for 9 months.

Yet this tells only half the story. For years, Dr Abdulla not only admitted but advertised that he operated on the normal genitals of dozens of healthy children. It is common knowledge that the children's parents paid Dr Abdulla to perform the irreversible, surgical assignation of their children's healthy genitals with the parents' own religious or cultural values and beliefs. The right of each of those children to an open future unrestricted by forced genital cutting at an early life was not apparently considered as part of the verdict in this case either by the magistrates court or by the MPTS.

The irony is that if Dr Abdulla should wish to continue to perform unregulated genital surgery on children without any interference from regulatory bodies as he states he does, he might consider de-registering as a medical practitioner. Non-medics are not required to register either with the CQC or with anyone else before they take a knife, scissors or specially-designed surgical instruments for clamping, tearing and removing the highly functional, sensitive foreskin from young boys and babies. It is only after the event, when some babies have died or have been seriously injured that action is occasionally taken. Contrast the response to the deaths four years ago of 28 day old Goodluck Caubergs in Oldham with the death under similar circumstances of 28 day old Joseph Ofori-Mintah in London. Both babies died of haemorrhage from their cut penises within 48 hours of unnecessary surgery performed in the community at the request of their parents. The Nigerian midwife who cut Goodluck was convicted of manslaughter whilst the rabbi who cut Joseph was told by the coroner that it was "a tragic unforeseen accident".

The fact that so many otherwise reasonable people consider it hardly a problem that (male) children's healthy genitals are fair game to any person with a knife, qualified or not, stands testament to the fallacy of common practice. Because something such as non-therapeutic circumcision, has been practised for generations, perhaps with the weight of biblical endorsement, does not mean that it is safe or reasonable to continue to do so. Non-therapeutic forced male genital cutting results in serious physical, sexual and emotional harm to many people. As babies their future views, beliefs and wishes cannot be known, however much their parents may wish them to conform to their own beliefs. Some of these babies don't make it to adulthood, others do so but with significant and enduring harm.

Dr Abdulla might have done better to stick to the branch of medicine in which he is trained: as a psychiatrist. Instead, he has demonstrated an inability to understand the most fundamental medical ethic of 'First do no harm'. In these circumstances, a short-term suspension from the medical register seems like a gentle admonishment rather than punishment commensurate with the severity of his actions.

Dr Antony Lempert is chair of the Secular Medical Forum. The views expressed in our blogs are those of the author and may not represent the views of the NSS.

India debates replacing religious laws with one secular law for all

News | Thu, 27th Oct 2016

The author Taslima Nasreen, an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, has called on India to embrace a new Uniform Civil Code which would abolish religious personal laws for minority groups.

In India minorities are subject to specific religious laws on issues like marriage, divorce and inheritance.

Muslim Personal Law has come under particular criticism and campaigners for women's rights and the Indian government have criticised the discriminatory nature of the sharia-based system

The debate in India about moving to a Uniform Civil Code is a long-running one, but the Indian Law Commission is now consulting on the proposal, which would replace separate religious laws for each minority with one law for all.

In an interview on Indian television the writer Taslima Nasreen said that "It is very undemocratic to have religious laws" and that "no personal laws should be based on religion. Personal laws should be based on equality and justice."

Nasreen said that a uniform civil code to replace specific laws for religious groups was "the best solution for India, and in fact all over the world."

She said that in both India and other countries where Muslims "have their own laws" women are oppressed and treated unequally. Nasreen said those laws "should be changed."

"All religious fundamentalists are misogynists", she said, "who want to have religious laws so that they can oppress women. But in a democracy, in a secular state there must not be any religious laws that oppress women."

"In South Asia, countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have laws based on religion. If you have laws based on religion, then women would not have equality. We should have [a] Uniform Civil Code based on equality because all religions are against women."

Muslim women's groups having been clamouring for reform, particularly to triple takaq, the process by which men can arbitrarily and unilaterally divorce their wives.

Earlier this year the Muslim Women's Quest for Equality said that sharia "should be abolished to save the country and Indian Muslims from … fundamentalists".

In response to these calls the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which administers sharia, defended Islamic rules on marriage and divorce because triple talaq was better than "criminal ways of getting rid of [an unwanted wife] by murdering her".

Nasreen was forced to flee Calcutta in 2007 after violent protests by Muslims who claimed she "seriously hurt Muslim sentiments".

NSS Speaks Out

The Society's response to IPSO's ruling over the complaint about The Sun's article on Fatima Manji was quoted in The Herald.