'Promoting' homosexuality...

The High Court has ruled that there should be no more demonstrations outside a Birmingham school, where concerned parents - mostly Muslim, plus a few conservative Christians - are protesting that the school “promotes” homosexuality. This isn’t true, of course. The teachers don’t “promote” homosexuality or advocate a “gay lifestyle”; nor, as one meddlesome imam fantasised, do they instruct children about “anal sex, paedophilia and transgenderism”. I don’t even know how the “promotion” of homosexuality would work. “Go on, shag another bloke. You know you want to”?

Children are being taught to have respect for other people, whatever they believe, and whoever they are attracted to: an agenda we should be endorsing, not criticising. Respect, equality: who could possibly find fault with that? Well, here they are, mustering at the school gates with their placards and slogans and verses from the Bible and the Koran.

Same-sex attraction isn’t even a choice. We’re either attracted to members of the opposite sex… or we’re not. Hard-core believers prefer to think that gay people are freaks of nature who freely choose their “sinful” lifestyle. Otherwise they might have to face up to the uncomfortable idea that gay people are God's children too, made in his own image.

I appreciate that equality before the law is still an aspiration rather than a reality, but at least we’re trying. The High Court has drawn a line in the sand. This is is one occasion when we should back educational standards rather than acquiesce to religious sensibilities.

Licensed today: a Yodel employee delivering the High Court verdict...