by Julian Mann, Christian Today
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.”