The Employment Framework Directive was approved on 18 October 2001 by the European Council of Ministers. The directive includes sexual orientation, which means it will be illegal to discriminate against, harass or sack an employee because of his or her sexual orientation and will provide long overdue protections for lesbians and gay men in their workplaces.

The European Parliament had been debating the equal treatment directive which makes it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of age, disability, race or ethnic origin, religion or belief and sexual orientation. The UK government faced a fierce lobby from the Christian Institute urging them to 'Ditch the Directive' or to provide a very wide exemption for any religious organisations, not just churches but all religious schools and charities.

The Government will now have to introduce legislation in this country to enact the EU directive. Stonewall has been meeting with the Government to talk about the wording and nature of this legislation. The final text of the religious exemption clause has not yet been issued. We understand that there has been hard lobbying from the Irish Government to widen the exemption to include religious bodies and organisations.

Christians for Human Rights, an ecumenical coalition of UK Christian organisations and individuals founded in 1998 to promote domestic human rights and civil liberties legislation, also urged the UK Government to support the Equal Treatment Directive including its provisions on sexual orientation discrimination, and to reject calls for blanket exemption for religious bodies.

Paul Vallely, writing in the Independent, said that "the prospect of a team of atheists being bothered to infiltrate a church school to subvert its values seems pretty remote." But the idea of a gay Christian applying for a job there is distinctly less so. All of which explains why the issue has become so heated. Opposition is merely "bigotry ... dressed up as religious necessity", according to one government minister. The directive is a kind of liberal fundamentalism, riposte the critics, which places the modern concept of equality before time-honoured notions of religious liberty.

"Evangelical fundamentalists might say that traditional interpretations of Christianity abhor homosexuality; but gay Christians can argue as cogently, if not more so, that such abhorrence resides in church culture rather than in its essential gospel values."

"We could, of course, leave it to the courts to arbitrate on theological as well as legal matters. More sensibly the Government could amend the directive so that reasonable discrimination on religious grounds is permissible, but that no such waiver is admissible in matters of sexual orientation."