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Wednesday 16 July 2008

Glass houses, stones and Lillian Ladele

It really doesn’t matter that Lillian Ladele had a baby “out of wedlock”, while “living in sin” some 27 years ago. It really doesn’t matter. It’s not the sort of thing this blog and many others of a similar flavour would want to report.

But what makes Lillian Ladele different (see here and here) is that she has refused to do the job the local taxpayers reward her for doing, but instead kicked up a fuss about same-sex unions and how they were sinful and how her Christian beliefs could not permit her to join two people of the same gender in civil matrimony. You’d think, therefore, that these fundamental Christian beliefs would have ensured she was “married in the sight of God” before she opened her legs.

Her revelation comes in an interview with yesterday’s Daily Mail, reported in Pink News.

“The revelation”, says Pink News, “has led to accusations that she was not properly cross-examined at the tribunal about the nature of her religious faith – details of her extra-marital sexual activities only came to light at the weekend.”

It then quotes the judment of the tribunal she won, when she claimed Islington Council had discriminated against her on the grounds of her superstition – sorry, religious faith – thus:

Ms Ladele is a Christian. Her unchallenged evidence was that she holds the orthodox Christian view that marriage is the union of one man and one woman for life to the exclusion of all others and that marriage is the God-ordained place for sexual relations.

She could not reconcile her faith with taking an active part in enabling same-sex unions to be formed.

She told us that she believed this to be contrary to God’s instructions that sexual relations belong exclusively between a man and a woman within marriage.

As I say, it really doesn’t matter that a woman is not married when she first has sex or subsequently gives birth to a baby; and, thankfully, we live in an age when it matters only to religious fruitcakes.

But what does 47-year-old Ladele say? Not “Oh, I wasn’t religious back then” or “The Word of God hadn’t yet been revealed to me” but “I would never claim to be perfect.”

Well, nor would any of us, but you’d expect one of the basic religious so-called morals – that sex is for wedlock – to be intact in someone as morally upstanding as Lillian Ladele. Before people start preaching their perceptions of God’s ideas of perfection, they should just think of a well-known saying that involves glass houses and stones.

And may those who are without “sin” cast the first of the latter.

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