Days after a British nurse was reinstated after a suspension for offering to pray for a patient, it has emerged that a foster mother has also been struck off the register for allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity.
The woman, who has looked after more than 80 children in the past ten years, is considering suing the council over the decision, The Daily Mail reports.
Although she is a practising Anglican, she said she had put no pressure on the girl who was baptised last year at the age of 16.
She said social workers had also raised no objections to her own attendance at church.
But officials insist she failed in her duty to preserve the girl's religion and should have tried to stop the baptism.
Last April, they ruled that the girl, now 17, should stay away from church for six months.
The foster mother's removal from the register followed in November.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has launched a legal challenge to the decision with funding from the Christian Institute.
Mike Judge, a spokesman for the institute, said: "All people should be free to change or modify their religious beliefs.
"That surely must be a core human right in any free society.
"I cannot imagine that an atheist foster carer would be struck off if a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God. This is the sort of double standard which Christians are facing in modern Britain.
"In recent months we have seen a nurse, adoption agencies, firemen, registrars, elderly care homes and now a foster carer, being punished because of the Christian beliefs they hold. It has to stop."
The carer is a single mother of two in her 50s who has worked with young children for much of her life. She has had an unblemished record since becoming a foster parent in the north of England in 1999.
Of the Christian convert, she said: "I did initially try to discourage her. I offered to find places for her to practise her own religion.
"But she said to me from the word go, 'I am interested and I want to come.' She sort of burst in."
The move has stripped the carer of her sole source of income, forcing her to downsize to a one bedroom flat.
SOURCE
Struck off, Christian foster mum who let Muslim girl convert (Daily Mail)