THE GOVERNMENT'S proposed “Sexual Orientation Discrimination Regulations” which would bar adoption charities from discriminating against homosexual prospective parents are so extraordinary that I have been pondering them for days.

Why so? After all, only a very small majority of people adopt, get adopted or are involved in adoption agencies.

To start from the beginning, the government claim that they are only implementing an EU Directive. In fact there is no EU Directive which even mentions the issue of homosexuals adopting; nor should there, or indeed could there be. The government have taken as their excuse an Employment Directive (since the single market is also a single labour market, regulation has to be EU-wide). That directive (quite reasonably and properly in my view) bans job discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Of course, it is being implemented elsewhere in the EU without any consequences for adoption or adoption agencies. So much for the spurious justification.

What about the practical outcome? Will the proposed law make it easier for homosexual couples to adopt? Not really. There are already a number of agencies who are prepared to place children with gay or lesbian couples.

Some people may feel that is right, others that it is a wrong. Some may feel it depends, and that anyway a good home, with two parents of the same sex, is a great deal better than a bad home with a heterosexual couple, or no home at all.

The point is that at the present moment all views are catered for, and individual conscience is entirely respected.

If these regulations go through, however, a number of idealistic people, often inspired by Christian belief to spend their lives helping unfortunate children find good families will feel that they have to leave their jobs. And uniformity will prevail.

That that would be a terrible waste of dedicated talent I doubt anyone would feel able to deny.

What worries me quite as much is that it would say a lot about our values, about our acceptance of an interfering state, about the decline of respect for individual conscience, about our intolerance or even contempt for dissenting, old-fashioned or other unfashionable views, including it now seems the views of orthodox Christianity.

In short about the sort of society we have become.