Is your law professor a closet bigot?
When I am doing the research for each podcast episode I try and read a range of articles on the case or issue at hand. These tend to range from well-reasoned pieces to those that clearly have a particular bias.
I have never, until this week, seen something that is just downright offensive and belongs in the dustbin of history.
The worst part is that it was written by an active law professor who is still on the faculty list at a British university.
Andrew Tettenborn teaches commercial law at Swansea University but that hasn't stopped him moonlighting as a wannabe Daily Mail columnist since his failed UKIP candidacy back in 2001.
This week's case looks at the right of heterosexual couples to get a civil partnership; an option that is currently only available to same sex couples as a leftover from the era before gay marriage was legalised in the UK.
Not only does Tettenborn question the upbringing of the applicants in this case but he then goes on to criticise the right to equality under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. There is no actual argument set out beyond the assertions of a tired old professor who should have retired many years previous.
You might argue that I should have known this was the sort of nonsense being produced when I saw that the name of the website is 'The Conservative Woman'; a title with vague Handmaid's Tale undertones to it. As with many views expressed by conservatives about women's issues, the majority of authors are men!
In all seriousness though this is a person who has turned his venom towards diversity in children's books, compared the LGBT community to the Taliban and attacked a service for victims of the Grenfell fire.
Now I am all for free speech and if Tettenborn wants to spew his hatred all over some of of the less salubrious parts of the Internet then that is fine. But we also have that same freedom and, if we so chose, could email the head of Swansea's law school (Elwen Evans QC - E.M.Evans@swansea.ac.uk) and politely suggest that they should perhaps reconsider their decision to employ a homophobic and racist bigot in their faculty.
Listen to the episode and make up your own mind.
Episode link: http://uklawweekly.com/2018-uksc-32/
Subscribe on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/uk-law-weekly/id1137316725?mt=2