Month: June 2021

neilfoster

COVID restrictions on NSW churches

There are a number of restrictions on church activities in NSW at the moment under rules introduced to manage the current outbreak of cases in Sydney. In this post I will try to briefly summarise what I think is the best interpretation of the rules. These rules are generally in place until midnight Friday 9 July. Keeping up with the various version of the Public Health Orders is not easy. The two main ones at the moment are the Public Health (COVID-19 Temporary Movement and Gathering Restrictions) Order 2021 (No 282 of 2021) (“the TMGR Order”) and the Public Health (COVID-19 Mandatory Face Coverings) Order (No 3) 2021 (No 279 of 2021) (“the Face Coverings Order”).

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neilfoster

Fined for declining to make a “transgender cake”

A Colorado District Court has handed down a decision imposing a penalty on a cake-maker for declining to provide a cake designed to celebrate a “gender transition”, in Scardina v Masterpiece Cakeshop Inc (Denver District Ct, Co; 19CV32214, 15 June 2021). If the name of the shop sounds familiar, it will be to those interested in “law and religion” issues in recent years. Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakes business were previously sued, all the way to the US Supreme Court, because he had declined to make a cake designed to celebrate a same-sex wedding (for my comment on the Supreme Court decision, see “Colorado Wedding Cake Baker wins before US Supreme Court” (June 5, 2018). Sadly it seems that Mr Phillips will need to appeal this latest decision as well.

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Belief that sex is immutable can be a protected belief

The view that biological sex is immutable and that a man cannot become a woman is, of course, controversial today. But in a very welcome decision, the UK Employment Appeal Tribunal in Forstater v CGD Europe [2021] UKEAT 0105_20_1006 (10 June 2021) has now overturned a previous single judge decision, and ruled that such a belief is “worthy of protection” as a “philosophical belief” under UK discrimination law. The decision, while not based on religious belief, will have important implications for protection of religious freedom in the UK, and hopefully in other parts of the world as well.

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Can employees be ordered to support controversial views in email signatures?

This question has been raised by a report that a Victorian council has required its employees to add a graphic to their email addresses featuring a “rainbow flag”. One employee is reported as saying:

the rainbow flag can look like moral support for identity politics or sexualities prohibited by many religions in this multicultural area

This is an important issue which will present challenges to employees of organisations which are determined to make political statements on various causes. To what extent can an employee in such an organisation decline to provide their own support for the stance taken by their employer, where the “core business” of the organisation is not involved? In this post I want to consider religious freedom protections that might apply in the reported circumstances.

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