SHAWN A. AKERS - CHARISMA NEWS
A Christian doctor who was fired for refusing to use a hypothetical patient's preferred pronouns in a training exercise says the persecution of medical professionals of faith is more widespread than people think.
After practicing medicine for 26 years, Dr. David Mackereth lost his job in the United Kingdom four years ago for not compromising his Christian beliefs in his job. He is urging other medical professionals to and other people of faith to "stand up" and affirm truth in battles over gender ideology.
"I told them as a Christian in good conscience, I couldn't do that," Mackereth told Fox News Digital recently.
In failing to use a patient's preferred pronouns, his employer invoked the U.K. Equality Act of 2010 and dismissed Mackereth. His employer labeled his refusal as "harassment" under the law established 13 years ago.
Not using transgender people's personal pronouns had not been an issue in the U.S. until the last couple of years, but it has been a point of contention in the U.K. more much more than a decade.
Mackereth told Fox News Digital that he would "never treat a transgender patient different than any other patient," but to him "it was a matter of honesty."
"If we are introducing a fundamental principle of dishonesty into medical practice ... that has a very big impact on the quality of our health care," Mackereth said.
After his dismissal, Mackereth filed a lawsuit against his former employer for religious discrimination but lost the case before the Employment Tribunal just three months later. The Tribunal ruled that his biblical beliefs on gender were "incompatible with human dignity."
Mackereth claimed that the law and the ruling was contradictory to what it is supposed to espouse. The anti-discrimination law claims to protect citizens from being harassed or discriminated against for their religious beliefs, gender identity and other characteristics. But apparently the former doesn't apply, especially in Mackereth's case.
"If Christianity isn't protected by the Equality Act here in the United Kingdom, then surely the Equality Act is useless," Mackereth told Fox News Digital.
This ruling gives American doctors a lot to think about as well, as Democratic lawmakers have been attempting, since 2020, to pass a bill titled The Equality Act (H.R.5), that "seeks to protect individuals from such discrimination, applying existing state anti-LGBT laws nationwide."
The Equality Act seeks to incorporate protections against LGBT discrimination into the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.
With the recent uproar in the United States about the use of personal pronouns for transgender people, it is not a stretch to believe that if H.R. 5 were to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate that the U.S. would see the same conundrum Mackereth has experienced in the U.K.
Mackereth's verdict was partially overturned in May 2022 by the Employment Appeal Tribunal, says the Christian Legal Centre that supports Mackereth. The Tribunal, however, still held that his firing had been justified and was upheld by the Court of Appeal.
"For a court to declare that Christianity was not illegal but wasn't protected was more or less saying that Christianity was irrelevant to the modern world," Mackereth told Fox News Digital. "There are still a lot of Christians around, and we've got an awful lot of history behind us." 
Shawn A. Akers is the online editor at Charisma Media.
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