"The Supreme Court This Week Effectively Made the Jewish Religion Illegal"

In the Telegraph (U.K.), Charles Moore comments on the implications for religious freedom in the face of a daunting Human-Rights-addled legal orthodoxy. The case in question -- whether an orthodox Jewish school may exercise its discretion in determining, based on ancient Jewish law and custom, who does or does not qualify for admission.

Actually, it goes wider than that. The court is effectively saying that a religion's way of defining its own membership, practised over 3,500 years, is illegal. This is an acute problem for Jews, who are at great pains to maintain their own rules while respecting the law of the land. It will also be used by anti-Jewish groups, which are growing in strength, to bolster their argument that Judaism is racist and that the state of Israel is the equivalent of apartheid South Africa. So the Race Relations Act, set up to help minorities, ends up punishing them.

I would argue that the judgment goes wider still. It is part of a current idea of equality and of human rights which, in the name of freedom, is beginning to look like tyranny.

The whole article: Charles Moore, "Our human rights culture has now become a tyranny," Telegraph (U.K.), 18 December 2009.

*Related*

Christian Horizons, anyone?