Senior British Conservative Defends Christian B&B Owners The Right To Refuse Gays

From Britain, the shadow home secretary for the ruling Conservative Party, Chris Grayling, was secretly recorded suggesting that those who run bed and breakfasts from their homes are well within their rights to refuse gay couples. Grayling is taped telling a meeting at the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank, last week “I think we need to allow people to have their own consciences. I personally always took the view that, if you look at the case of should a Christian hotel owner have the right to exclude a gay couple from a hotel, I took the view that if it’s a question of somebody who’s doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn’t come into their home,” the comment a not so subtle allusion to an incident in March, when a gay couple were turned away from a B&B in Cookham, Berkshire, the owner, Susanne Wilkinson, telling a gay couple that it was “against her convictions” to allow them to stay. The couple reported her to the police and is considering whether to sue. Grayling is heard on the tape drawing a distinction between B&B’s and hotels, telling the same meeting that “if they are running a hotel on the high street, I really don’t think that it is right in this day and age that a gay couple should walk into a hotel and be turned away because they are a gay couple, and I think that is where the dividing line comes.” Grayling’s inanity comes at a poor time for the Conservatives, who, under the leadership of David Cameron, have gone to great lengths to court the gay vote, a general election almost certain to be called this Tuesday.