Last week, in a landmark ruling, the British High Court banned a Christian couple from becoming foster parents because of their faith-based opposition to homosexuality. The judges announced that despite Britain’s long Christian tradition, the rights of homosexuals to “equality” “should take precedence” over Christian moral values.

The couple, Owen and Eunice Johns, have been married for almost 40 years and have provided foster care for nearly 20 children. “It seems a dark day for Christians,” Mrs. Johns said. “All we wanted was to offer a loving home to a child in need. We have a good track record as foster parents.”

“All we were not willing to do was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing,” the couple said.

Incredibly, this ruling comes at a time in Britain when there is an urgent need for another 10,000 foster carers, a need created largely because of family breakdown!

It was the British government’s 2007 Equality Act making it an offense to discriminate against homosexuals that enabled the judges to make the ruling. They stated: “Our society is now pluralistic and largely secular. … [T]he laws … of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form.”

To add insult to injury, with sinister undertones, the government-funded Equality and Human Rights Commission suggested during the court case that Mr. and Mrs. Johns could attend a “re-education” program.

The Telegraph’s condemning editorial piece declared that Britain is “witnessing a modern, secular Inquisition—a determined effort to force everyone to accept a new set of orthodoxies or face damnation as social heretics if they refuse” (emphasis mine throughout).

Britain’s hugely divisive homosexual equality laws have already caused the Roman Catholic Church to close its adoption agencies there. Marriage registrars have been fired for refusing to conduct same-sex civil ceremonies; bed-and-breakfast owners who refuse unmarried or homosexual couples have been ruled against and persecuted; a nurse has been suspended for offering to pray for a patient; a Christian GP sacked for holding anti-homosexual views. Thus it is that the traditions of a country that for centuries based its society on accepted Christian virtues sees its moral base being progressively destroyed by judgments made within a legal system warped by tampering godless liberal judges.

The former bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, said the ruling on the Johns case was “absurd.” According to the Telegraph:

He pointed out the monarch took a coronation oath promising to uphold the laws of God, while acts of Parliament are passed with the consent of “the Lords Spiritual,” and the Queen’s speech finishes with a blessing from Almighty God.”To say that this is a secular country is certainly wrong,” he said.”However, what really worries me about this spate of judgments is that they leave no room for the conscience of believers of whatever kind. This will exclude Christians, Muslims and Orthodox Jews from whole swaths of public life, including adoption and fostering.”

In today’s Britain, religious believers are facing a new anti-religious—most especially anti-Christian—inquisition.

Even the liberal bbc admitted, “This was the most decisive ruling against the idea of Christian values underpinning English law since judges ruled last year that to protect views simply because they were religious would be irrational, divisive and arbitrary.”

Social commentator Gertrude Himmelfarb was right when she commented that the effect of our society redefining the accepted Judeo-Christian norms for deviancy “has been to normalize and legitimize what was once regarded as abnormal and illegitimate, and, conversely, to stigmatize and discredit what was once normal and respectable” (The Demoralization of Society).

Yet those Judeo-Christian traditions based on the law of God—so disparaged by liberal judges—are actually the very teachings that Britain so desperately needs to recapture if it is ever to deal with the pathologies that stalk this green and troubled land. History itself proves that Christian traditions and laws, if observed, ensure a more happy, stable, and fully functioning society—with no need for the alternative housing that many of those 10,000 poor, parentless foster children are in need of today.

We can be most thankful for the revelation—contained within the very book that documents the law of God—that a wonderful new world is fast approaching under the loving government of Almighty God which will bring forth stable families and universal happiness. To find out more, request your free copy of our booklets Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete? and The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like.