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Christian Concern
UK News

Christian magistrate to sue Michael Gove over sacking for gay adoption stance

by Aaron James

Richard Page, who sat on the family bench in Kent, was struck off for his "biased and prejudiced" views, but insists his "motivation is to do what was right for the child".

He has pledged to take legal action and sue the Lord Chancellor (below) through an employment tribunal, saying he has "the wrong end of the stick".

The 69-year-old was previously sent for retraining after saying during an adoption hearing that it would be better for a child to be brought up by a mother and father than a same-sex couple.

Rex

During a BBC interview in March 2015, Mr Page said: "My responsibility as a magistrate, as I saw it, was to do what I considered best for the child, and my feeling was therefore that it would be better if it was a man and woman who were the adopted parents."

Afterwards a spokesman for the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said his comments "would have caused a reasonable person to conclude he was biased and prejudiced against single sex adopters".

On his decision to take legal action, Richard Page said: "As a magistrate, I have to act on the evidence before me and quite simply, I believe that there is not sufficient evidence to convince me that placing a child in the care of a same-sex couple can be as holistically beneficial to a child as placing them with a mum and dad as God and nature intended."

"It isn't that I'm homophobic. As a Christian I think homosexual activity is wrong. I think that sex outside marriage is wrong."

"In the case of single sex people adopting children in America, a very, very high percentage have huge psychological, personality disorder problems, all sorts of things.

"I can't tell you what they are medically correctly but they have tremendous problems which is vastly greater than is normal to every one of us who've been through that situation."

 
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