In the United Kingdom, homosexuality has gone from being the sin that dare not speak its name to the behavior that some people aren’t allowed to not talk about–and only one perspective is permitted, according to the Daily Mail:

They are devoted foster parents with an unblemished record of caring for almost 30 vulnerable children.

But Vincent and Pauline Matherick will this week have their latest foster son taken away because they have refused to sign new sexual equality regulations.

The Mathericks are both Christians ministers. They apparently do a wonderful job performing deeds of mercy for children that no one else wants. As foster parents, they are helping to fill a gaping void in the social safety net for kids at a time when the UK needs thousands more such parents. But none of that matters if they refuse to toe the line on what has become, by government fiat, society’s most important standard for acceptability: rightthink on gayness.

The 11-year-old boy, who has been in their care for two years, will be placed in a council hostel this week and the Mathericks will no longer be given children to look after.

Earlier this year, Somerset County Council’s social services department asked them to sign a contract to implement Labour’s new Sexual Orientation Regulations, part of the Equality Act 2006, which make discrimination on the grounds of sexuality illegal.

Officials told the couple that under the regulations they would be required to discuss same-sex relationships with children as young as 11 and tell them that gay partnerships were just as acceptable as heterosexual marriages.

They could also be required to take teenagers to gay association meetings.

Mrs Matherick, 61, said they had asked if they could continue looking after their foster son until he is found a permanent home, but officials refused and he will be placed in a council hostel on Friday.

Said regulations may be found here, and my prior discussion of them is here. Presumably the pre-teen boy will be required to go to sexuality indoctrination classes at the hostel, which is the only reason I can think of why it was necessary to pull him out of a home in which he’d been living for two years so quickly.

Religious campaigners say the couple are the latest victims of an equality drive which puts gay rights above religious beliefs.

Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders have complained that the rules force them to overturn long-held beliefs.

It isn’t simply a matter of “gay rights,” of course. No gay person would be deprived of any rights if the Mathericks weren’t required to talk about issues of sexual orientations and preferences with pre-teen children. This is far more punitive, and has to do with a government that has decided that it must impose a specific view of sexual morality on those who refuse to believe the new sexual orthodoxy. Local governments in scattered places in the U.S. are starting to do the same thing.

Traditionalists beware.

(Via T19.)