The recorded evidence of a policeman telling a street preacher that it is a crime to identify homosexuality as a sin reveals the resounding success of the politically-correct ideological drive in Britain’s police force in the last decade.
Mr Andy Robertson, a street preacher with the Open Air Mission, which was founded in the nineteenth century, preaches once a month for an hour in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. He has recently started recording his preaching because the local council had been making allegations about the content of his message. The conversation with police officers was caught on tape and the YouTube video can also be seen on the Christian Institute website
Police officers told Mr Robertson that they had received complaints that his preaching was ‘homophobic’ (even though Mr Robertson had not even mentioned homosexuality in his preaching). Mr Robertson asserted that it is not a criminal offence under the Public Order Act to identify homosexuality as a sin, to which one of the police officers replied:
‘Well, as I understand the Section Five of the Public Order Act, that [identifying homosexuality as a sin] would cause harassment, alarm or distress to people. And if you’re saying that’s a sin and if I was gay I’d be quite offended by that.’ The logic is quite clear in the police officer’s mind and it is thoroughly post-modern.
An individual has the right to curtail another person’s freedom of expression not by appealing to a transcendent standard of right or wrong, but by invoking their own subjective feelings of offence. I am upset by what you are saying, so you cannot say it. The policeman in question is more sinned against than sinning. He has simply been brainwashed by the politically-correct establishment into sacrificing a precious and hard-fought-for traditional British liberty – the freedom to disagree – on the altar of the all-consuming, autonomous self.
Julian Mann