Freedom as a Zero-sum Game.

English philosopher Roger Scruton comments on a recent Englich decision that prohibits a Christian family from refusing to rent out a room on their house to unmarried couples.  This English decision is about a decade behind a similar decision in California.

Scruton initially notes the sea-change in convention:

A court in Britain has just awarded damages to a gay couple against the owners of a family hotel who had refused to allow them to share a bedroom. Until recently it was normal for hotels in Britain to demand proof of marriage, before allowing a man and a woman to lodge together. Even now it is permissible for a hotel to refuse a room to a couple if one is a prostitute and the other her client. But it seems that it is not possible, even for Christians running a family hotel, to withhold a room from a couple of homosexuals. How did we get to this point, and what should we make of it?

And concludes:

THIS, IT SEEMS TO ME, shows what is really at stake in these disputes. They are not about human rights, or about the perennial conflict between liberty and equality. "Non-discrimination" clauses are ways of smuggling in vast moral changes without real discussion. Their open-ended nature, and the vagueness of their application, renders them almost immune to reasoned rebuttal. There is no knowing, from one year to the next, which of our ways of discriminating between people will be ruled out in the next extension of the law. Sex, sexual orientation, and maybe soon sexual practices -- so that the hotel keeper will no longer be able to discriminate against the person who happens to live as a prostitute. By penalizing old-fashioned morality in this way you do not make toleration of the new morality more likely. On the contrary, you sow the seeds of resentment, by removing from ordinary people the freedom to follow their conscience in a matter that deeply troubles them.


Liberals do not usually notice this, for the reason that the new society, shaped by the ideology of non-discrimination, seems to be going their way. But it could easily start to go against them, as the Islamists use the non-discrimination clauses in order to protect the segregation of women, polygamy, incitements to violence, and all the other things that Islamists claim to be demanded by their faith, and which it would be "discrimination" to forbid. It will be clear, then, if it is not clear now, that vast changes in the moral standpoint of the law cannot be smuggled in by open-ended clauses, without creating a weapon that can be used as easily by your foes as by your friends.

In Britain - Where all religions are equally superior to Christianity.

According to this Daily Mail article, British sporting venues and restaurants have been surreptitiously serving meat slaughtered pursuant to Islamic halal purity laws:

A Mail on Sunday investigation - which will alarm anyone concerned about animal cruelty - has revealed that schools, hospitals, pubs and famous sporting venues such as Ascot and Twickenham are controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public.


All the beef, chicken and lamb sold to fans at Wembley has secretly been prepared in accordance with sharia law, while Cheltenham College, which boasts of its ‘strong Christian ethos’, is one of several top public schools which also serves halal chicken to pupils without informing them.

Even Britain’s biggest hotel and restaurant group Whitbread, which owns the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre chains, among many others, has admitted that more than three-quarters of its poultry is halal.

The Mail article points out this rich irony:

The extent of halal meat consumption, even in areas of Britain with a very small Muslim population, was revealed as the Pope, on his first visit to Britain, expressed fears that the country was not doing enough to preserve traditional Christian values and customs.


In a strongly worded speech to Parliament, he said: ‘There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.’

Vox Day observes:

It will certainly be interesting to see if Britain's aggressive public atheists speak out about this, or if they do what one would expect and remain silent since so many of them are actually more anti-Christian than they are anti-religion. The amusing thing, of course, is that the story is being portrayed as one that concerns animal cruelty, not corporate submission to Islam.

It should be interesting to watch whether the secularists are going to go after the halal issue as they've gone after Christmas, and thereby forfeit their "street cred" for being "tolerant."