Regulations have come into effect to ban discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the provision of goods, facilities and services, premises, and education throughout the whole of the UK.

That the Regulations survived, and with some teeth, was far from a foregone conclusion. The campaign against them from the religious community was broadly based, well organised, and generously funded. It was also bigoted in the extreme, scaremongering, and—to put it at its most charitable—careless with the truth. I am convinced that the churches would have got their way, as they have done so often in the past, if outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair had been fully in control—but he was becoming an increasingly lame duck.

For once, the majority of the cabinet stood up for Human Rights in the face of the most intense opposition from all the mainstream churches. The religious had been so used to being given what they want that they were slow to realise that the climate was currently subtly shifting away from them. When they belatedly realised that there might be a problem, they acted like bullies, seemingly impervious to any thought that they might lose. And there were virtually no lengths to which they would not stoop.

They placed a full-page advertisement in The Times which contained four scaremongering claims about the Regulations, every one of which was wrong, and the National Secular Society’s formal complaint against the advert has been upheld. Erroneous and scaremongering claims were made in tabloid papers that the Regulations would force churches to marry homosexuals or bless same sex couples, or that the Regulations were brought out in response to some sinister EU Directive. They also picketed Parliament twice, bringing young children far too young to understand the issues.

But worst of all, they even threatened to withdraw services to the poor if they did not get their way. As Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian: “Christians running soup kitchens say they want to refuse gays shelter and soup. (Soup!) The Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool threatens to withdraw all cooperation over schools and charity programmes if the law goes through. The [Anglican] Bishop of Rochester says it will damage church work in inner cities. (Only if his church shuts down services.) The C of E pretends that the law would force it to bless civil unions (it won’t).”

Cardinal Murphy O’Connor and his Anglican counterpart Dr Rowan Williams wrote forceful letters to the Government. Each included the same absurd phrase “conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning”. The Guardian underlined the moral ambivalence of both Anglican archbishops’ positions in an excellent critique: “as anyone [will have appreciated] who heard the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York equivocating on the Today programme, as he tried to explain why being ‘in conscience unwelcoming to gays’ was entirely different from in conscience discriminating against black people”.

The UK has the dubious distinction of being the only Western democracy to give religious representatives the right to sit in its legislature. Twenty-six bishops of the state church, the Church of England (C of E) have seats in the House of Lords. It was there that the most furious debates took place on these Regulations.

The Archbishop of York spoke, and even apologised for the absence of his Canterbury fellow Archbishop, the head of the Church. All the Anglican bishops who spoke opposed the Regulations, as did all church representatives who spoke. Not one mainstream church representative spoke in favour of the Regulations.

The main opponents of the Regulations were spokespeople for religious organisations, Conservatives and those from Northern Ireland, the most religious part of the UK. There were exceptions. Lady Blood, a courageous human rights campaigner in Northern Ireland spoke out strongly in favour.

Two gay peers, both identifying themselves as Christians, spoke out for the Regulations. One implicitly rebuked the clerics: “I also happen to be a Christian. My Christianity is about being inclusive”. He pointed out that a briefing circulated by the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship was deeply inaccurate in a number of respects. It claimed that the Regulations affected fundamental freedoms and would remove the longstanding liberty enjoyed by Christians to live according to their religious beliefs, which was untrue. No-one was trying to stop anyone believing or living according to their beliefs. But where a service was offered to the public, especially where that service was sold to the public, where something was offered to be used or purchased by all, or where something was funded on behalf of the public by the Government, the Regulations required an end to discrimination.

The other gay peer was Lord (Waheed) Alli who replied to Viscount Brookeborough. Lord Brookeborough takes paying guests in his grand mansion and sought to justify discriminating in Bed & Breakfasts on the grounds that a guest house involved the guests in the family.

Waheed Alli challenged him: “Would he allow me to stay in his guest house on the basis of my colour? And would he allow me and my partner to stay in his guest house on the basis of our sexual orientation?” Lord Brookeborough realised that he could not possibly say “no”, but in not doing so he was conceding the bigotry of his argument. In that instant, the opponents lost any chance of victory.

Baroness Howarth of Breckland spoke as a Christian. She was distressed because it was a question of whether the Lords accepted gay people as equal human beings. She said that many gay people felt outcast. They deserved access to goods and services as much as any of us, just as Wilberforce said that every black person deserved equal treatment.

The Regulations passed in the House of Lords, and, with less dramatic force, in the lower house, the House of Commons.

The churches’ scurrilous handling of this issue could yet come back to haunt them. Several factors will, I suspect, have weakened the churches’ position in the longer term. They have been seen to be discriminatory and bigoted. They have made breathtakingly unprincipled threats – it matters not whether they were empty ones or not – which should also make the Government pause as to the wisdom of introducing faith-based welfare.

And as I pointed out on air, the Catholic position, driven by dogma, is irrational. The Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham acknowledged on television that his Church accepts homosexuals as adopters but only provided they are not in civil partnerships. Isn’t it vital that adoptees are found the most stable homes possible? And aren’t homosexuals in partnerships much more likely to provide stability? By having lost after raising the stakes so high, the churches have been architects of their own humiliation.

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Keith Porteous Wood is Executive Director of the National Secular Society