Legal Question
March 4th, 2007 at 17:00
Are there any lawyers or law students reading? Your help is required!
I got into a moral argument with JD last night. I was mortified that he said he’d happily provide sound and lighting tech (that’s his job) to BAE systems – a company who amongst other things, manufacture landmines. He did, however, say that he wouldn’t provide a service if a group of mental Christians like this asked him to. (The video linked to is well worth watching – it’s insane, and provides lashings of context.)
This then raised an interesting question: with the new religious discrimination laws, is a business obliged to sell its products or services to someone, or can it deny service if it chooses? Basically, if a Christian said to JD “I want you to provide the sound equipment for our stage show about how excellent Jesus is and how wrong evolution is”, could he deny them service?
I’m thinking that he probably could… but then this surely means that a shopkeeper could deny selling a Muslim a Twix on the grounds of their religion… which sounds illegal. If some Nazis owned a chip shop, could they refuse to sell to Jews?
We thought of the non-religious example of the companies dealing with Huntingdon Life Sciences stopping dealing with them after the animal rights terrorists blew up their cars, so presumably a business can choose who it deals with, and isn’t obliged to provide the service. Which means business can be discriminating when offering its services?
Can anyone clear this up? Can you deny selling a product or service to fundamentalist Christians?
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