Government proposes one of the worst threats to real marriage our country has ever seen. Parents and pastors could be criminalised for normal conversations.
By Dr Tony Rucinski,
Coalition for Marriage
For the first time in our history, making the case for marriage is about to become a criminal matter. The Government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, published on 25 June, would threaten up to five years in prison for anyone teaching, preaching or counselling that marriage is the union of one man and one woman – once a court decides that it was ‘abusive’ and that it caused serious distress.
Any ‘conversion practice’ – conduct intended to make a person believe they do or do not have a sexual orientation or a transgender identity – is potentially an offence. Nor are preaching, teaching and pastoral care exempt. Church leaders have condemned the Government’s proposals. Premier reported that Peter Lynas, Director of the Evangelical Alliance UK, said: “The definition of abusive practices is entirely subjective and could leave a wide range of people at risk of prosecution even years later.”
Simon Calvert, Deputy Director for Public Affairs at The Christian Institute, told Premier: “This legislation looks like it’s been drafted by a sixth former using AI. It brings the whole area of what you say and your opinions and your private conversations you have with your children, potentially into the criminal law.” As Christian Concern’s Andrea Williams puts it, the bill “opens the door to the persecution of parents and pastors through false accusations of abusive conversion practices”.
“It could leave a wide range of people at risk of prosecution even years later”
Ministers say the bill protects free speech, but that promise only appears in their press release, not in the bill itself. Nor is there any defence of consent: the friend or pastor who helps someone live according to their biblical conviction has no protection if it is later called ‘psychological or emotional pressure’.
Parents will not be safe to have honest conversations, if we believe Olivia Bailey, the Parliamentary Under- Secretary of State for Equalities. When asked in the Commons on 25 June to provide an exemption for parents, she refused to give it: “I do not think that it is appropriate for such an exemption to be in place in this legislation.” So a mother who does not hurry her troubled daughter towards a new identity is within the definition, and only a court will tell her, afterwards, whether she had committed a criminal offence. And none of it is necessary. Genuine abuse is already a crime, as the Government’s own 2021 consultation admitted, pointing to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.
After eight years, ministers have not produced one victim the law could not already protect. How would it work in practice? Ask Matthew Grech, whom I interviewed this spring. Malta passed a ban like this one, and Matthew went on television and spoke about his own life – how he had come to Christ, and what that meant for how he lived. For that he was prosecuted. It took three years and 17 court appearances before he was acquitted, and by then the point had been made to every believer watching. “The process itself was the punishment”, he told me. That is the lesson.
A law like this does not need to convict a single pastor. It only needs one complaint, and the years of distressing legal process that follow will act as a deterrent to others. The alarm is not only ours: the Free Speech Union warns that “the word ‘abusive’ is doing an enormous amount of work in the bill’s title”. This new law is no accident. It is the direct and predictable consequence of the 2013 redefinition of marriage. Once the law denied marriage as the exclusive union of a man and a woman, it was only a matter of time before holding to that truth was treated as a wrong for the State to stamp out. This is the moment to be heard, and there is more time than you might think. The bill is only a draft. No scrutiny committee has yet been appointed and no call for evidence has opened, and Parliament does not return until September
A letter written in August will land exactly when it counts. Write to your MP now, urging that genuine abuse is already illegal, and asking him the question ministers have not answered in eight years: what can this bill reach that the law does not reach already? Coalition for Marriage will not stop until the law once again honours marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, and the freedom to say so is put beyond all doubt.
Model letters to adapt for your MP and for peers can be obtained from Coalition for Marriage. Email: admin@c4m.org.uk