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Health Director Fired For Discriminating Against Gay Couples Sues, Says He Was Victim Of Religious Discrimination

“This case shows the ugly face of the LGBQ lobby that is incapable of tolerating anyone brave enough to challenge their lifestyle.”

A 71-year-old health director in the U.K. who was fired over his opposition to same-sex adoption is now accusing his former employer of religious discrimination.

Richard Page was let go from his role as a non-executive director at National Health Services (NHS) in Kent in 2015 for rejecting a same-sex couple's adoption application because of his religious beliefs.

Page, who had spent 20 years working in health services, is now in the process of suing his former employer, claiming that political correctness makes it impossible for Christians to hold public office.

“This case shows the ugly face of the LGBQ [sic] lobby that is incapable of tolerating anyone brave enough to challenge their lifestyle,” Andrea Williams from the lobbying group Christian Concern, which is supporting Page's lawsuit, told The Telegraph. “The lobby will not be satisfied until they have eliminated any whiff of dissent in public life. They are the bullies.”

Page claims that he isn't homophobic because he “worked with numerous homosexuals” at NHS and “never commented on their sexuality because them being homosexuals was not relevant for the decisions we had to make.” He has also reiterated his position on same-sex adoption.

“It is best for any child to be raised in a traditional family with a mother and a father,” he told the employment tribunal considering his case. “God had good reasons to make the family include both a man and a woman—not just because the child, physically, needs both but also because of the respective ways men and women think.”

“The child needs the complementary roles offered by both parents, male and female, psychological as well as physical,” Page added. “Consequently, I take a skeptical view of same-sex adoptions, or adoptions by a single person.”

Page's former employers, Kent and Medway National Health Services and Social Care Partnership Trust, have defended their decision to fire him, saying that his opinions “undermined” the confidence of other employees and made LGBT staffers uncomfortable.

Page was also previously fired from his NHS role as a judge in 2014 after making homophobic comments regarding same-sex adoption during a nationally televised BBC interview.

“My responsibility as a magistrate,” Page told the BBC, “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.”

During another TV interview with Piers Morgan in 2016, Page expressed his opposition to same-sex marriage. In response, Morgan asked Page whether he was a homophobe (which Page denied), and was subsequently accused of discriminating against Christians.

In the U.S., lawmakers have passed legislation allowing adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples on religious grounds in Texas, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Virginia, and Alabama.

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