Anti-discrimination - how NOT to do

Boy, have the Faroe Islands screwed the pooch. The Løgting recently turned down an ammendment to the local anti-discrimination law that would have made discrimination because of sexual orientation illegal.

That is a sad story indeed - but what is possibly even more omnious is the silence of so many of those politicians who normally pretend to be interested in anti-discrimination.

As my regular readers (humor me here) will no doubt be aware by now, civil liberties is high on my Things To Defend List. In a time where noisy religious bigots abuse antidiscrimination laws to wedge their undemocratic special interests into the public sphere, it is sad indeed to see a government failing to use anti-discrimination laws they way they are supposed to be used: To protect citizens from bigotry.

Unfortunately, it is increasingly being used to protect the bigots and their bigotry, as several relatively recent cases in the Danish Supreme Court demonstrated. I suppose that I could live with that - grudgingly - if those same anti-discrimination laws were simultanously protecting the civil liberties of citizens from those religious bigots. After all the old proverb about the perfect and the good still stands.

Now conservative christian politician in the Faroe Island Løgting have refused even that.