If LGBT campaigner Jayne Ozanne gets her way, the Government's Conversion Practices Bill would criminalise Christian prayer.
This week the founder and former chair of the Ban Conversion Practices Coalition told the parliamentary committee taking oral evidence on the draft Bill: “We don’t have sufficient law in place at the moment to cover this most insidious form [of conversion practice] which is prayer.”
Ozanne, a former member of the Church of England’s General Synod, told MPs and peers:“You have created two categories, an abusive category and a non-abusive category and that’s by using this adjective ‘abusive’. And I understand, I think, why this has happened because you are trying to establish a criminal threshold. But the problem is, in saying that your non-abusive forms don’t meet that threshold, you’re giving licence to people to say: ‘Well actually what we’re doing doesn’t make that much difference, so we’re going to carry on doing it.’ And that is the vast majority of people who are … trying to pray the gay away. Prayer goes to the heart of this and I speak as a Christian …”
Asked by Conservative peer, Baroness (Victoria) Prentis of Banbury KC, whether she would be "happy to criminalise the behaviour even if it’s in a family or with a single religious leader praying”, Ozanne said the law ought to outlaw that.
“I think we need to be clear about what’s wrong and right. Stealing is stealing whether you steal a sweet or steal a car. It’s still stealing,” she said.
Labour MP for Bradford West, Naz Shah, asked Ozanne whether the parents of an 11-year-old girl who refused to purchase the breast-binder she was demanding should be deemed guilty of criminal abuse, Ozanne replied: “It’s so difficult talking in the abstract. I can’t give you a direct answer.”
Commenting on Ozanne’s reply, human rights lawyer Akua Reindorf KC posted on X: “It’s not difficult for me to know that I’d go to prison rather than let an 11yr old wear a breast binder.”
If the Conversion Practices Bill comes into law, offenders would face up to five years in jail for conversations judged to amount to pressuring people to change their sexuality or gender identity.
Reindorf and the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness (Kishwer) Falkner, are co-authors of a scathing report on the Conversion Practices Bill for the Policy Exchange think tank.
They called the measure “ideological, unworkable and wholly unsuitable” and “a threat to the liberties of the majority of citizens, as well as their fundamental human rights”.
That is what they called the Bill in its current draft. But if Ozanne and her fellow campaigners manage to persuade Parliament explicitly to criminalise prayer, then the following fictional news report could become real life for Bible-believing Christians in Britain:
“State Channel News has uncovered major violations of the Conversion Practices Act.
“In a ground-breaking investigation, our undercover reporter recorded a homophobic Church of England vicar agreeing to recite a pre-modern Christian text called the Lord’s Prayer with a person he believed to be 'struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction’.
“Our investigation also recorded a transphobic Pentecostal pastor agreeing to pray for a 14-year-old transgender hero (pronouns: they/them) who with exemplary courage had volunteered to wear a hidden microphone. They approached the pastor for a meeting in which they said they no longer wanted to wear a breast-binder and wanted to come off puberty blockers. Their parents were present when the pastor broke the law and committed the criminal abuse.
“The police say they have made a total of four arrests following our investigation …”
Prayer is already being criminalised outside abortion clinics. It must not be criminalised in our homes and churches too.
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
