Court rules in delicate matter of religion

A Supreme Court judge has ruled on a dispute between separated parents over whether their young son should be baptised or not, in a rare intervention by the court on matters of religion. 

The father of the boy, described in court documents as “vehemently anti-religious”, brought the application before the court seeking to ban his former partner from proceeding with a baptism ceremony she had planned for their son. 

Faced with the application, Puisne judge Christopher Butler agreed that the mother should be prohibited from having her son baptised without the written consent of the father or further order of the court. 

But in doing so, he cautioned that his decision should in no way set a precedent for future cases of this sort, which by their nature were both exceptional and inevitably fraught with complications.

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