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Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006

My Lords, the employment regulations outlaw discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation; that is, the tendency to favour a particular mode of sexual conduct. It is a tendency, not a practice. The difference between those regulations and these regulations is that these regulations, although they come under the heading of sexual orientation regulations, would make it unlawful for a person to refuse to accept a same-sex couple into their boarding house. I am much too old to offer any such facilities and the regulations are unlikely to affect me in any way whatever; I am thinking of a person who has a religious conviction of the kind that I have just mentioned and who does not believe that it is right in conscience to accept people into their house who would use it to practise a way of life that they considered sinful. That is the essence of the problem. The regulations seek to override their conscientious objection to that behaviour in their home. The adoption agencies are another area of difficulty. There may be a regulation that helps to exempt adoption agencies that are charities—at least it does so on one construction of it—but there is a difficulty if an adoption agency declines to place children with same-sex couples on the ground of religious conviction. Again, that might be outlawed by the regulations. The regulations are not particularly easy to construe and I am not going to attempt to do so, because they are quite complicated, but this is the essence of the matter as I see it—differentiating these regulations and the kind with which we are familiar.