The Hansard record of day three can be found here as a PDF, or starts here in html.
The official news report of the day is here.
There was an interesting debate on an amendment proposed by Lord Alton of Liverpool. This starts here.
What the Bishop of Winchester had to say can be found here.
The article in The Times yesterday by Shami Chakrabarti referred to in the debate, can be found here.
The Bishop of Winchester’s amendment dealing with Gender Reassignment and the Marriage Act was accepted without any difficulty by the Government. The debate about that starts here (the Bishop of Southwark stood in as the Bishop of Winchester had to leave before this was reached).
A further exchange of religious interest occurred starting here. The topic being discussed was the content of television programmes. The Archbishop of York participated in this debate.
The amendments to Schedule 9 will now certainly be discussed on Monday afternoon. There has been a change to the texts of Amendments 98 and 99. New wording is here. The old wording was in both cases simply: leave out “proportionate”. The wording was not in the 2003 SO Regulations, but was put into the Equality Bill in order to make plain on the face of the bill the proportionality requirement of the underlying European Employment Equality Directive 2000.
I very much like the idea of the Bishop of Southwark standing in for the Bishop of Winchester in the debate. To my American ears, that’s a little bit like, say, Dianne Feinstein agreeing to substitute for Orrin Hatch in a Senate debate on abstinence-only birth control programs. Tickles the imagination, and reminds me that yes, things can be different across the pond.
“The 2004 Act was passed to provide transsexual people with legal recognition in their acquired gender. Under that Act, legal recognition of a person’s new gender follows from the issue of a full gender recognition certificate by the gender recognition panel. Legal recognition of the new gender has the effect that, for example, a male-to-female transsexual person is recognised for all purposes as a woman in English law. On the issue of a full gender recognition certificate, a person is entitled to a new birth certificate reflecting the acquired gender and is able to marry someone of the opposite gender… Read more »
Yet more examples of churches wishing to have their so-called ‘consciences’ (ie right to discriminate) recognised.