Naturally, the dullards and religious extremists of the right wing press were up in arms and Christians up and down the country, including the then prime minister Tony Blair, weighed in saying that they were being victimised and that it was their right to display their faith. Even Boris Johnson supported Mrs. Eweida, and he ought to know better.
Similarly, a nurse who offered prayers for patients, as if superstition could intervene where medicine struggled, was rightly disciplined for imposing her faith.
More recently the same numbskulls have defended the right of a council to have prayers as part of their meeting and claimed that this didn't prejudice or favour anyone or any group! There has been a lot of whining and whinging about "militant atheism" and "creeping secularism" as if atheism and secularism are bad things.
Surely, if there is any sense, it is time for parliament to drop its prayers and for courts to abandon the nonsense of witnesses swearing on the Bible, a book so full of lies it throws into doubt every word sworn on it!
Although, through extreme pressure from religious groups, supported by the government, BA were forced to initially back down and allow employees to advertise their religion on their work uniforms, it is pleasing to hear that the case is not yet over and that the current Tory government, which many would have thought would have been on the side of the religious nut jobs, is supporting BA's original decision and saying that there is no right to wear religious symbols in the workplace.
Mrs. Eweida has continued to fight to be allowed to advertise her faith at work and, with financial help from a number of Christian fundamentalist sources, she has now taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The British government, in a rare moment of common sense, will oppose her petition - and rightly so.
Sadly, though, Ministers will only be opposing "optional" religious symbols such as the Christian cross, and not all religious symbols, some of which have a compulsory element, like headscarves, bangles, etc.
This is a shame. There has already been a hearing in which Justice Stephen Sedley threw out Mrs Eweida’s case for discrimination, accusing her of following a “sectarian agenda”. Given that, she doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Mrs Eweida will probably argue, in Strasbourg, that her deep personal convictions drove her to wear a cross in the same way that another female employee may well argue her deep personal convictions drove her to wear a burka. But that is simply a nonsensical argument.
BA have acted both reasonably and proportionately in the way it dealt with Mrs. Eweida and its time that all religions were prevented from flaunting their beliefs in public. It is time that religious faith, a clear mental illness and a display of ignorance and stupidity, was forced to be a private matter at worst, and educated out of society at best.
As a society we mustn't fall into the trap of thinking the only fundamentalists are Muslims and they're all suicide bombers. To adhere to a religious faith in the 21st Century, denying science, reason and all rational thought, is a ridiculous position to hold and good governments must act to prevent the cancer of religious faith spreading any further.
The banning of religious symbols in the workplace is the act of a courageous company standing against the would-be oppressors of the Church. The government and the European Court of Human Rights now need to stand up for sanity.
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