SussexSocialist wrote:
I don’t understand how any court can rule that an entirely legal and legtimate view point can be described officially as ‘repugnant’,
Unfortunately, the “principle” of “repugnancy” is now well incorporated into English legislation and jurispridence. The Tribunal decided that it was “able to apply a narrow construction to the regulations to take account of accepted mores of society such as repugnance” and went on to rule that any employer can sack with impunity anybody whose views “society” considers “repugnant”.This all goes back to the bigoted Catholic judge Lord Devlin who introduced this concept. Here’s how his wikipedia entry describes his approach:
Quote:
After the Wolfenden report in 1957, Devlin argued in support of James Fitzjames Stephen that popular morality should be allowed to influence lawmaking, and that even private acts should be subject to legal sanction if they were held to be morally unacceptable by the “reasonable man”, in order to preserve the moral fabric of society (Devlin’s “reasonable man” was one who held commonly accepted views, not necessarily derived from reason as such). H. L. A. Hart supported the report’s opposing view (derived from John Stuart Mill) that the law had no business interfering with private acts that harmed nobody. Devlin’s argument was expanded in his 1965 book The Enforcement of Morals. As a result of his famous debate with Devlin on the role of the criminal law in enforcing moral norms, Hart wrote Law, Liberty and Morality (1963) and The Morality of the Criminal Law (1965).Devlin argued that a society’s existence depends on the maintenance of shared political and moral values. Violation of the shared morality loosens one of the bonds that hold a society together, and thereby threatens it with disintegration. Devlin proposed a public morality that, in certain situations, would override matters of personal or private judgment.He argued that because an attack on “society’s constitutive morality” would threaten society with disintegration, such acts could not be free from public scrutiny and sanction on the basis that they were purely private acts. In Devlin’s view, homosexual acts were a threat to society’s morality. In short, he maintained that legal intervention was essential to ensure both individual and collective survival, and to prevent social disintegration due to a loss of social cohesion.Devlin believed that “the limits of tolerance” are reached when the feelings of the ordinary person towards a particular form of conduct reaches a certain intensity of “intolerance, indignation and disgust”. If, for example, it is the genuine feeling of society that homosexuality is “a vice so abominable that its mere presence is an offence”, then society may eradicate it.
Fortunately he was opposed by other Establishment figures and he didn’t get his way on this particular point. But the concept that people’s ideas and behaviour can be discriminated against on the grounds of being “repugnant” to “society” did get through. It is something that the Christian Right could build on if ever they were to gain more than the marginal influence they now have.In this respect the Christian People’s Alliance is politically active in Kingston in South West London where they contest local by-elections and the general election. No doubt we’ll come up against them in the Greater London Assembly elections next year. They are even part of the Kingston Anti Cuts Group and supported the 30 November public service strike. In a recent local by-election in Kingston they got 7% of the vote. On the other side of London, in Newham, they’ve got three councillors.So, we do have to deal with them and their arguments.
