Whatever Happenned To The Right To Refuse Service?

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-29926372

[sp1814]

TTT

The point is, the legislation was deliberately vague.

As you have pointed out, the legislation states:

"shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship"

But no-one can be sure of what 'promotion' means, so it would be left to all public workers, teachers, college administrators etc to decide what they could and could not talk about.

The effect was this: as a public sector worker you could not in any way state that being gay was fine.

Swap it around for a moment and you can see how pernicious this was. Imagine if Section 28 actually forced all teachers to promote homosexuality as 'fine', and to teach about gay relationships in sex ed classes.

I know all the 'righty' people have certain views on this, as they have already posted on threads where this has been discussed.

Is the same not true the other way around?

[ToraToraTora]

It would be true vice versa but really I think this whole "what does promote mean" is a cop out the broad definition is clear, go with that, ok you can argue semantics over minutia but in the end it's clear mostly. So leave th e grey areas and go with the rest. What we had is equivqlent of "you said PI and you cannot define that so I'm not usiung anything", I say use 3.14159 then your 99.9% right. Were there never any court cases on this?

[sp1814]

TTT

Ummm...

What????