“How could my presence, standing here, possibly in any way, shape or form be considered harassment or intimidation?”
“It’s the praying that you’ve admitted to, Sir.”
Thou shalt not pray, it seems, has now become official dogma in Britain.
The exchange noted above took place on a cold November morning on a street in Bournemouth, where Adam Smith–Connor – a father of two and an Afghanistan veteran – had stopped to pray. The street was within a so-called ‘buffer zone’ – really a censorship zone – imposed by the local council around an abortion facility. The zone bans the expression of any form of approval or disapproval of abortion, including through prayer, handing out leaflets, or crossing oneself.
Adam had been present in the zone, which covers several streets, for only a few minutes when he was approached by officers.
It wasn’t an out-of-the-ordinary activity for Adam. He had been volunteering near the abortion facility since 2019 as part of a group which prays and offers leaflets about charitable support available to women who express interest in finding alternative options to abortion. Removing the tribal spectacles of abortion politics that can warp our views of such measures, it’s not hard to view this as a noble cause. Almost one in five women who have an abortion in the U.K. do so against their will, according to the BBC. If women would like to avoid abortion if only they had financial, emotional or practical support, then it is right to supply these needs. This, surely, is the real ‘pro-choice’.
However, the introduction of buffer zones across five local councils, and soon to be rolled out across the country at the behest of the Conservative Government under the Public Order Act 2023, has forbidden Adam’s group from engaging in this charitable activity in Bournemouth. So they don’t. Adam wasn’t speaking to any women that day. He wasn’t even looking at them. He prayed silently, with his back to the clinic, standing by a tree to ensure he was out of the way and not bothering anyone. He stopped to pray in his mind, rather than expressing anything out loud, since that would have been forbidden in the censorship zone.
He prayed specifically about his own experience of abortion. Adam has participated in the procedure as part of his medical training in the past. And 22 years ago, he paid for his girlfriend to have an abortion – a decision that grieves him deeply now. He prayed about his son, Jacob, who he lost – and for the men and women facing these same difficult decisions today.
You might think Adam is abhorrent for his views. Or you might sympathise with a grieving man. Maybe you agree with him that no woman in the U.K. should feel like she has no other option.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that Adam was penalised for silently praying outside an abortion clinic. He admitted to council officers who approached him that he was praying in his head. Game over. Adam was issued a fine, because he was thinking thoughts that were disapproved of by the authorities.
He didn’t pay the fine. This army vet had fought in Afghanistan because he believed in the principles of freedom that the U.K. had championed – democracy, free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of thought.
To pay the fine, he believed, would be complicit with the erosion of these fundamental freedoms secured both in international and domestic law. It simply shouldn’t be illegal to pray anywhere in the U.K.
Fast forward eight months of legal uncertainty and Adam was in court on Wednesday. He entered a ‘not guilty’ plea. His trial date is fixed for November.
It’s a terrible cliché to invoke Orwell when describing the news these days. But one can hardly fail to compare this dystopian tale to the activities of the Thought Police in 1984. For all the Home Secretary’s commitments to stamp out wokery in public order regulations, the suppression of free speech in abortion clinic ‘buffer zones’ has gone from bad to worse under this Government. The ‘a’ word – abortion – can cause politicians to lose their minds when it comes to freedom of expression. Protecting free speech for gender critical feminism wins more favour and applause. But Adam’s belief in protecting babies in the womb, and supporting women to avoid abortion, is not illegal. The right to free speech exists to protect those beliefs that are not currently in vogue.
As the Government prepares guidance for the role out of the Public Order Act 2023, it has a chance to clarify that even in these censorship zones, the human right to think heretical thoughts inside one’s own head remains in tact.
Lois McLatchie writes for ADF UK, the charity backing Adam Smith-Connor’s legal defense. Find out more, and add your support here.
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Stop please world, I’m desperate to get off..
My wife just said the exact same thing about Banks cancelling accounts.
What a complete load of nonsense. How can anyone possibly break the Law by refusing to pay for something? My Dad wanted to get me a horse when I was a kid but my Mom said no: was that child abuse? Where does this crap end? Little Johnny is told he can’t have an ice cream, Little Johnny has been taught his Human Rights at school and sues his parents. Meanwhile, Janey has successfully sued for a 4 week holiday she needs for her mental health.
Janey and Johnny’s Maternal Person and Paternal Person have meanwhile been prosecuted by the CPS and have both lost their jobs.
All coming to a house near you.
Where does this end? It ends where enough people refuse to get on board with this claptrap. Until then, don’t expect the establishment, including the CPS, to do much that makes sense. How is anything like this going to play out anyway? Is anyone really going to be forced to make a settlement of thousands of quid on the strength of a court ruling that someone with money refused to fund the gender reassignment surgery of a family member (especially a spouse!)? I’ll believe it when I see a single successful case.
What about similar situations when one spouse is exhibiting symptoms such as compulsive self-immiseration, either as a behaviour pattern in its own right, or as part of more embracing mental health problem such as depression, borderine or bipolar mood disorder or similar self-harming behaviour? If one spouse refuses to agree to paying for some grossly excessive purchase, is that “coercive control” or “enforcing clear boundaries”? (Background: I became aware of a case in which some person, already diagnosed with bipolar, entered a manic phase in which she bought a racehorse for tens of thousands of pounds, without any interest in horses, and was appalled when she came out of the manic phase and realised what she had done, with no memory of the event, and then asked why nobody stopped her?)
My wife (well, she was last time I checked) just made a good point on this: if your wife changes to your husband he won’t be buying as many dresses.
I believe one should make strenuous efforts to stay married, within reason. I also think one should try to be supportive if you discover that your partner is mentally ill. But I think at some point if they can’t be convinced I’d be asking for a divorce.
Sort of makes the phrase ‘who wears the trousers round here?’ a little more pertinent…
I just can’t get my head around it. Someone I know quite well had a daughter who suffered from anorexia. It’s quite scary because it makes no sense but using logic doesn’t really work.
“I do. I wear the trousers – and I wash and iron them too”
I was thinking along the same lines. If someone has a true case of gender dysphoria it’s not something that would have occurred overnight but over many years, probably leading to considerable relational upheavals way before being asked to cough up to have ones parts removed. Or are people who broke up/separated/divorced under such circumstances now considered abuse criminals? And what happens if the mentally ill person decides that gender assignment didn’t work and wants to revert back to their original gender label – or even another one: does the same concept of ‘abuse’ apply? It’s the same illogical thinking that insists lesbians are transphobic if they won’t sleep with trans (wo)men with all their original parts. The mind truly boggles.
I know rationality is a waste of time in these matters, but it’s true that the issue boils down to the general claim that what you believe about yourself is, unchallengably, true:
So unless some reason can be presented why “gender”, including creative genders of your own invention, is exceptional, does this principle cover every other case of self-identification?
So gender dysphoria aside, we seem to be moving to a world where all delusions are indulged, whether harmful or not, or whether we treat them medically, spiritually, or just informally.
I suppose the liberal mind might wish to say that we make the exception where such beliefs about oneself are are harmful to others, when we must seek to change them. In that case, it’s an admission that “self knowledge” is, after all, merely an opinion subject to everyone else’s objective reality.
Or has anybody here ever heard any academic or activist argue the grounds upon which supposed “gender” (which seems to include being a cat now) is, alone, an objective truth? I thought not.
But objectivity no longer exists.
You can’t argue with a fact like that…
“the other fools are there to be exploited”, i.e. Dale Vince
If George Orwell was alive today, his head would be spinning round like a top with all the possible subjects to parody. In this, I only see more interference in what is essentially a private family matter. In any other age, no one would be able to sue other family members for withholding money or for telling their child they are what they were born as. Depending on the family, there would be different levels of how the message was conveyed. Once again, we see an opportunity to create division. Remember, the powers that be are hell-bent on societal collapse and that means undermining the traditional family because it represents the – or used to be – strongest unit within a community.
Anti family = Marxism
“I only see more interference in what is essentially a private family matter.”
The state has no business interfering in how a married couple spends their income.
I know one bloke who gives his wife an allowance every week and she is responsible for all their weekly shopping from this – he pays all the bills.
I know numerous couples who divvy up all bills on a 50-50 basis but any money they have left over is theirs.
I know couples who pool everything and every financial decision is shared.
If one partner decides to spend £50k on a car for example without the other’s consent does that constitute domestic abuse?
This is way out of order and perfectly confirms that the legal system has been taken over and corrupted.
Any clear thinking legal mind would reject this gratuitous, interfering nonsense out of hand.
My brain has short-circuited.
Up=Down
1=0
Your=My
Evil=Good
Insane=Sane
Injustice=Justice
And Right and Left no longer exist, in their place we have Centre.
If we’re going to play silly beggars, how about another, quite valid legal argument?
We are continually told that the victim group du jour have known since a young age (indeed, even in the womb!) that they are the wrong sex or fancy the same sex or species or whatever (it is getting very hard to keep up).
If I married a man who never gave me any indication that he felt he was a woman/a combo/a nothing/a double act (they) or that he fancied men, surely I would have a legal claim for fraud? I invested time, effort, finances into establishing a long term relationship with someone who obviously did not want the same things and hid this from me.
If I understand the CPS correctly, if I wished to have breast implants so I looked like Katie Price and my partner indicated he rather wished I wouldn’t as a) he preferred me not to look like a freak and b) he was genuinely concerned about my undergoing unnecessary medical procedures, as they always carry a risk, this would constitute domestic abuse? At the same time, if my husband were to suggest that I get implants so I looked like Katie Price, this too would constitute domestic abuse if I claimed that he was pressuring me?
Sophie Cook…
That explains it then….
Yep, it certainly does, who the feck do these people think they are..
And what on earth does he look like… Ffs
What a scorcher….oh…woof
A freak show in the clown world
What is guidance?
Is it a parallel legal system?
Somebody said to me the other day that we have the most right-wing government in recent years. I can see why he said it – there are strong words on controlling immigration, on curbing absurd wokeism, on making Brexit work, on pursuing unnattainable climate goals, curbing spending, etc, etc.
But in fact it’s the last 13 years of “Conservatism” that have seen all these these things grow from almost nothing to a true dystopia.
So it’s a right facing government, actually acting as a left-progressive government, either by saying one thing and doing another, or by setting up scapegoat ministers to fail at the hands of the Blob and an unsupportive executive.
What we have in Britain is as if Brezhnev’s government loudly extolled their commitment to capitalist enterprise, unilateral disarmament and Christianity in Pravda. They actually did trumpet their Soviet constitution’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion etc at the Russian Exhibition in London in 1968, much to my amusement, but our political rulers are exhibiting another level of hypocrisy altogether, and to their own voters rather than foreigners.
People of the right need to stop voting Conservative.
People of the Right are a shrinking minority. The majority of ‘Conservatives’ are fully signed up Statists, totally dependent on the State for everything.
Sadly you seem to be right, though I think there’s still a majority against mass immigration and that would get behind a sensible energy policy
The error is to assume Socialism is exclusive to Parties of Left.
Elevation of the State over the individual, destruction of property Rights, central economic planning and control can be adopted by all Parties.
Communism, Fascism and National Socialism shared these common roots, yet supposedly are polar opposites.
BwaHaHa – an aromatic aromantic! Pungently soul-less then?
Today were are getting Met Office Weather Warnings for a thunder clap and a passing shower.
If your spouse changes ‘gender’ you may well consider that they are not the person you married.
Some outcomes are worse than others. None are great,
So someone can identify as something they are not. ———Yep that’s fine by me except I might not choose to identify them as such. If a leopard wants to identify as a hyena must I accept that? Are we going down the rabbit hole of absurdity now? Yes we are. Soon a silly child who decides he is a fox will require to be put in a pigeon loft to rip the unfortunate birds to bits and it will be a crime not to allow it. ——This has now gone way beyond PC madness, or wokery now.
I’ll just dump this here. Absolutely sick to the back teeth of having women ignored, cancelled & treated with utter contempt.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12274419/Now-health-professionals-urged-call-vaginas-bonus-holes-avoid-offending-patients.html
If my husband decided he was a woman I’d be filing divorce that very day on the grounds that I’m not homosexual. Thankfully there’s zero chance of that happening.
I don’t think ‘grounds’ are required for divorce though it might help speed things up if one could agree them with the person who used to be the person one married.
People change. Some more than others
“Grounds for divorce” is an obsolete concept. One simple self-identifies as newly divorced and then gets the papers stamped at court. Five minutes. The onus is on the respondent to argue that the marriage has not irretrievably broken down, but the cost of a contested divorce is huge and the likelihood of success is minimal.
If my husband came home wanting to be ‘reassigned’ – I’d certainly help him on his way
- you get the picture……
Dysphoria includes, for example, blind people trapped in a sighted body. Where does a partner stand legally who refuses to stab their other half in the eyes to make them ‘whole’ and the person they ‘really are’?
It this transablephobia?
Surely thats the same as having an affair ! So would the court say you would need to help your partner with hotel shag bills , gifts ,sweet nothing phone bills etc ! Every day more bollocks ( if you’ll pardon the pun ) comes to light
Doesn’t look as if the CPS has improved much since Starmer’s incompetent and malign reign.
No doubt Max Hill also thinks that our schoolgirls should just lie back and think of “diversity” whilst being ravished by Labour supporting Pakistani taxi drivers and kebab shop owners. Whilst he denies any knowledge of what is happening, happy that “Jim” will fix it.
Seroius question: Why are you even with that person? Just leave. No law broken there.
Perhaps poor Serena Lau’s parents should pay for the damage to the Range Rover. CPS needs to be dismantled.
This whole state of affairs is “aromatic”, just not in a good way!
So if I had been happily married for five years and my wife decided she wanted £3000 out of our joint bank account to turn into a man, it is now a crime to put up an objection to that? Is is also abuse to then file for divorce, finding the prospect of being married to a man undesirable, on the grounds of discrimination?