BRITAIN: Adoption Panel Advisor Fired For Refusing To Recommend Gay Couples

A British adoption panel advisor has lost her employment tribunal and been fired for refusing to recommend gay couples as prospective adoptive parents.

Dr Sheila Matthews, 50, from Kettering in Northamptonshire, lost her job with the county council when she asked to abstain from voting in same-sex cases. She told her employers Northamptonshire County Council she felt that children "did best" with heterosexual parents. She is bringing a claim of religious discrimination against the council. Martin Pratt, the council's former head of services for children, said the authority wrote to Dr Matthews in April last year to terminate her position on the panel after she told him she was unable to set aside her beliefs on the issue of same-sex couples. He told an employment tribunal sitting in Leicester: "I asked her whether she could consider applicants on their merits ... and she said she could not. "She did not believe it was in the interests of the child to be adopted by a same-sex couple." Mr Pratt, who now works for Luton Borough Council, added: "Primarily it was a religious matter, I think. Her inability to act fully in her capacity posed a serious problem."

Matthews will, of course, instantly become a martyr for the Christianists in America, who will endlessly cite her case without mentioning the pesky detail that it happened in a foreign country.