UK Upper Tribunal rules that a Catholic charity cannot exclude same-sex couples from its adoption service.
The Upper Tribunal in the UK has ruled that a Roman Catholic adoption agency, Catholic Care, could not prevent gay couples applying to adopt or it would lose its charitable status. The Tribunal rejected the agency’s argument that its funding would dry up and cause the number of adoption placements to be reduced.
The charity had been forced to change its policy towards same-sex couples following the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulation 2007. The regulations gave agencies a period of one year to comply with the regulation and required that the new laws be implemented by December 2008. Catholic Care appealed on numerous occasions to have its service exempt from equality laws but this was rejected in the High Court, the Charity Commission, the Charity Tribunal and, most recently, the Upper Tribunal.
The agency argued that the Equality Act went against Roman Catholic teaching and tried to change its Constitution so that it would be committed to following catholic teaching and placing children with heterosexual parents but this was dismissed.
The Upper Tribunal considered Strasbourg jurisprudence in homosexual discrimination cases and noted that the Court demanded weighty and convincing reasons to justify discriminatory treatment against homosexuals. According to the UK Human Rights Blog, the case turned on the evidence. If the charity had been able to show that there was a significant likelihood that more children would be placed in adoption if it were allowed to discriminate against homosexuals than would otherwise be the case, then the interest of those children would provide an argument in favour of permitting the charity to proceed in that way. The charity however did not discharge the evidential burden.