By Amanda Platell
Adrian Smith is a kind and gentle man. Friends say the happily married father is a pillar of the community, a practising Christian and a tireless worker for charity.
Yet this week Mr Smith was in court, defending accusations that he is a bigot whose personal views are so offensive and outrageous that they are incompatible with his work as a housing officer.
His crime? To have put a posting on his personal Facebook page which said he thought civil partnerships ceremonies in church were ‘an equality too far’.
Specifically, he said: ‘If the State wants to offer civil marriages to the same sex, then that is up to the State; but the State shouldn’t impose its rules on places of faith or conscience.’
Hardly inflammatory, then. Yet these comments led to him being demoted from his job, after complaints from colleagues and an investigation by his company’s ‘equality and diversity lead’.
His salary was reduced by 40 per cent by the Trafford Housing Trust, which claimed he was guilty of ‘gross misconduct’ because people might mistake his views as trust policy.
What utter nonsense. And what a
terrifying insight into the dystopian world we now live in — a world
where a man can be penalised for a thought crime, even when that thought
is shared by a huge proportion of the population.
No they didn’t. Yet such is the ludicrously PC world we now live in (fuelled by the metropolitan views of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and their liberal elite circle) that anyone who does not agree with gay marriage is automatically branded a bigot and a homophobe. They are no such thing.
As regular readers will know, I share Mr Smith’s views. I wholeheartedly support civil partnerships, but believe that it is not for any government to ride roughshod over centuries of tradition — or, indeed, over the will of the electorate — by introducing gay marriage.
Seventy per cent of people believe marriage should remain a union between a man and a woman. Even among the gay community, only 39 per cent agree that changing the law on gay marriage should be a priority.
Are we all to be investigated, demoted and financially penalised, as Mr Smith has been?
Of course, I respect the views of those who disagree with me, and I defend their right to express them — except when they do so violently and abusively. That is what free speech is all about.
What I deplore is the persecution of people like Mr Smith simply for standing up for what they believe in. There’s a word for that: tyranny.
