Religious freedom and gay rights

The British Parliament's joint committee on human rights has issued a report that appears to call for increased (and intrusive) supervision of the content of education in private and religious schools, toward the end of making sure these schools do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.  Here's a bit:

In our view, the prohibitions on discrimination in the Regulations limit the manifestation of those religious beliefs and that limitation is justifiable in a democratic society for the protection of the right of gay people not to be discriminated against in the provision of goods, facilities and services. ... [T]here would be a compatibility problem if the Regulations provided for a wider exemption which expressly exempted religious bodies from the obligation not to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. ... An exemption to protect the absolute right of freedom of conscience and religion would therefore be likely to be justifiable, but not an exemption to protect the right to manifest one's conscience or religious belief, which, as we have sought to explain above, is capable of justified limitation and in our view can be justifiably limited in order to protect gay people from discrimination.

And then this:

We do not consider that the right to freedom of conscience and religion requires the school curriculum to be exempted from the scope of the sexual orientation regulations. In our view the Regulations prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination should clearly apply to the curriculum, so that homosexual pupils are not subjected to teaching, as part of the religious education or other curriculum, that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong. Applying the Regulations to the curriculum would not prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful. In our view there is an important difference between this factual information being imparted in a descriptive way as part of a wide-ranging syllabus about different religions, and a curriculum which teaches a particular religion's doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true. The latter is likely to lead to unjustifiable discrimination against homosexual pupils.

(Thanks to David Frum for the links.)