THE Archbishop of York has hit out at the Government for seeking to have "consciences surgically removed" during a debate on the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007.

In a hard-hitting speech in the House of Lords, Dr John Sentamu said they wanted to introduce a "new hierarchy of rights" where people of faith had become a "new sub-category".

He claimed the Government had given in to "the emergence of a new kind of secular dogmatism, which seeks to limit the proper sphere of religion to the internal activities of religious organisations".

Quoting anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, the Archbishop said that he feared, "the time is fast approaching when Christianity will be openly disavowed, in language as in fact it is already supposed to have disappeared from the conduct of men: when to believe will be deemed the indication of a feeble mind and contracted understanding".

He also suggested the legislation created a new category of people of faith against whom it would now be legal to discriminate, "through the most laudable aims of removing discrimination against those who rightly deserve protection, the Government will in effect enshrine in legislation a new sub-category of those whom it will be legal to discriminate against.

"Rather than levelling the playing field for those who suffer discrimination, an aim we fully support, this legislation effects a rearrangement of discriminatory attitudes and bias, so as to overcompensate and to skew the field the other way."

In his speech, the Archbishop also argued that the legislation over-reached the proper role of Government in interfering in the content of an individual's religious belief: "It now seems to me that a legal sausage machine is being created by these regulations, requiring many of us to go through it and come out at the other end, sanitised, and with our consciences surgically removed," he said.

"The freedom of a good and magnanimous conscience and the voluntary association for the common good cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning."

Dr Sentamu also questioned why the Government had not followed other European countries, in adopting the legislation in acknowledging the rights of people of faith, something the British government had chosen not to.

"The Employment Equality (Religion and Beliefs) Regulations (2003) do in fact provide an opt-out in relation to religious beliefs, and a similar opt-out was granted in the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations issued in 2003," he said.

"In each of these cases it was recognised that religious organisations, as well as their individual members, were entitled to protection for their individual and collective conscience, recognising that a civilised society should make room for dissenters. Why, in the present regulations, has a similar opt-out not been granted?"