THE law requires the suppliers of goods and services to treat all their customers equally, irrespective of race, disability, sex or sexual preference.

Following a recent case in which a guest house proprietor was prosecuted for excluding a same sex couple, a Supreme Court judge, Lady Hale, suggested last week that there should be a conscience clause that would enable Christians to opt out of this legal requirement.

I think this is one of the daftest suggestions that a judge has come up with. The whole point of the law is that we are all equal under it and that nobody is above it. Were Christians to be exempted in order that they can discriminate against homosexuals, there would soon be demands to extend the provisions to accommodate Muslim preferences for Sharia law. It would be the thick end of a very thick wedge.

Our Lord commanded that we render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. Nothing could be more explicitly in the realm of Caesar than the rules which govern the provision of goods and services.

We could no more allow a bed and breakfast to exclude homosexuals than we could allow them to exclude black or Jewish people. As a Christian myself, I have some difficulty with the notion that Our Lord would exclude homosexuals from his own guest house – the very notion militates against the whole teachings of the Gospels.

n Last week there was a further round of commemorative events in the New Forest to mark the 70th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. I attended a particularly moving ceremony at which a veteran unveiled a plaque marking the point at which he and his regiment embarked.

I am not surprised at our determination to continue to mark the anniversary of what I believe to be the greatest feat of arms in human history.

In terms of its significance in the sweep of human history, after a mere 70 years it is far too soon to make a judgement.

Perhaps in a thousand years historians will look back and see D- Day and the subsequent battle for Normandy as one of the decisive turning points in world history, just as we might look back across the millennia to the importance of the battle of Marathon, or to Leonidas in the gap at Thermopylae.

Someone suggested to me that, as the numbers of surviving veterans of Operation Overlord inevitably diminishes, so will our enthusiasm to continue with the commemoration of their valour. I take a rather different approach: on the contrary, as time passes and the memory fades, I believe we need to make more of an effort to commemorate these momentous events.

It is only by reminding subsequent generations of the magnitude of the bloody sacrifice by which our liberty was purchased, that we can have any hope that they will attach a proper value to liberty, commensurate to the price that was paid for it.