So I think conscience and reasonable accommodation are the ways forward here. The European Court judgments that have come out recently in four cases that were before it point out that every government must balance competing rights. The question is, in this country, whether competing rights have properly been balanced. If the government wants to give the homosexual community certain rights and privileges, there is a democratic process to do it. The question now is whether the rights of believers, of those who for ethical, religious, spiritual and moral reasons want to exercise their right of conscience, have been recognised enough. And the European Court leaves that question open. I am sure it is a question that is not finally closed and will have to be reopened.

We find a situation where the Church is growing rapidly in many parts of the world and sometimes in places where there is great hardship. We praise God for that and we praise also those Christians, our brothers and sisters, who are living their faith in those difficult situations. But at the same time we need to think about ways in which their lives, sometimes, their way of life, can be safeguarded, and not just to endorse uncritically popular movements that appear to us to be attractive. 

Here in Britain the danger is of forgetting the Judaeo-Christian tradition which is the basis for this country's common life and has been for more than a thousand years. I've just written a little article on the sacramentality of the Coronation service. Obviously I had to read the service to write the article, and it is shot through with Christian symbolism and Christian teaching. At the very beginning, the Sovereign to be crowned and enthroned says that he or she will uphold the laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel. And so it carries on throughout: the Anointing, the receiving of Holy Communion, the giving of the ring to uphold the Catholic faith in the form of the reformed religion established by law. This is the basis for national life. It seems to me anyway sometimes that the nation is saying: "We don't really want to be reminded of this." That may be so, but if they don't really want to be reminded of it, what is the alternative? Secularity has undermined so much of what has been held in common by the people of this nation, but it has not provided an alternative world view. When we need to decide moral questions about the dignity of human life at its earliest or latest stages, when we want to talk about the family, when we want to talk about equal opportunities, we need some kind of moral and spiritual basis to do so. If it's not going to be the Judaeo-Christian tradition, what will it be?

This is an edited version of a lecture given at Portcullis House, Westminster, last January, organised by Rehman Chishti MP