Religion & Law

This post, "Religion and the Judiciary" -- about the relevance of judges' religious faith -- from the "U.K. Supreme Court blog"("SCOTUK?"), by MOJ-friend Aidan O'Neill, is worthy reading and thinking about.  (Among other things, the post is a reminder that even someone as gifted as Ronald Dworkin will sometimes say shockingly unhinged things.  Aidan's post quotes an example.)  Aidan's interesting post closes with this:

What the religiously motivated find difficult to understand or accept is that the freedom from discrimination on grounds of religion or belief which has been afforded them by the law does not extend to giving the religious a general right to discriminate (on otherwise unlawful grounds such as sex, age, race, disability, or sexual orientation) on the basis of religion or belief.    There will undoubtedly be more litigation ? if not further legislation ? on this whole vexed issue.   The UK tradition of being blind to our Justices? religion will come to be further strained as a result.

If the term "does not extend" is meant to be used descriptively -- that is, to report that, in fact, the laws in the U.K. are not understood to protect religiously motivated "discrimination" -- then, of course, I have to defer to Aidan, who knows far more about the laws in the U.K. than I do.  If, though, the suggestion is that the laws should not distinguish between (irrational, invidious, etc.) "discrimination," on the one hand, and "religiously motivated decisions about employment and related matters by religious institutions and authorities," on the other, then I'd have to disagree.