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SCOTLAND

Catholics fight legal threat
Schools may be forced to hire non-Catholics

The Catholic Church in Scotland is preparing for a legal battle in the face of a challenge to attempt to force it to employ teachers of other denominations in Catholic schools.

The Church is facing a legal threat under the European Convention of Human Rights which came into operation in Britain at the beginning of October, and which could force the Church to dispense with the centuries-old practice of employing only Catholic teachers.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church told the Daily Telegraph that it was confident of winning any such case. “As far as we’re concerned, we have an argument for positive discrimination whereby it is better in Catholic schools to employ Catholic teachers,” he said. “The law states that parents have a right to have their children educated in tune with their religious belief and, although we would not condone discrimination normally, we believe in this case we have a valid argument.”

The spokesman said the Church had been taking legal advice from Brussels. “It makes sense, for example, to have Gaelic teachers in Gaelic schools, and we see no difference in principle here.”

The legal threat is likely to come from the EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union, which has stated that it wishes to see an end to discrimination within teaching.

Couple wants to choose baby’s sex
Parents want to use new human rights law

A couple, whose only daughter died in a bonfire accident, plans to use human rights legislation introduced in Britain in early October in their fight to choose the sex of their next baby. Alan and Louise Masterton, both 42, have four sons but believe that another girl would help to “heal” their family after the loss of Nicole, 3, who died last July.

The couple, from Monifieth, near Dundee, are seeking to change the rules governing gender selection in Britain which ban couples from choosing the sex of their child unless there are life-threatening medical reasons for doing so.

The couple applied to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) last year and asked it to consider them as a special case but their application was unsuccessful.

Mr. Masterton said, “We are not looking to replace Nicole; we are intelligent enough to be aware that we can never replace her. Our family will be imbalanced for eternity because we lost a very special and precious member of our family. We can never replace Nicole, but what we’re hoping to do with the use of technology is create the female dimension again.”

The Catholic Church in Scotland has condemned the family’s attempt at sex selection, saying a child is “not a product, but a gift from God.”

Kevin Male of the pro-life charity Life said that what the family was proposing was “simple eugenics,” and he could think of no circumstances in which sex selection was justified.

He said, “We are totally opposed to engineering the numbers and genders of people in society. That road leads only to disaster.”