Where Is the Outcry From British Churches on ‘Nightmarish’ Nature of Scotland’s New ‘Thought Crime’ Law?

It is conceivable that a Priest may be fined or imprisoned for preaching the Church's doctrine on sexual morality. Scotland is leading the way for the West in its descent into the abyss. 

From the Catholic Herald

By Gavin Ashenden, MTheol, PhD

Not so very long ago, there was a simpler time when discussion about JK Rowling in Catholic circles was generally limited to a discussion between diocesan exorcists and fans of the Harry Potter books.

Back then, the diocesan exorcists warned Catholic parents against allowing their children to read Harry Potter (or reading the books themselves) because they perceived that the romanticisation of magic presented a danger to the soul and our society.

Fans of the books disagreed. They insisted that magic was metaphor, and that no one would take it seriously, while the moral and ethical content of Rowling’s  books were unashamedly Christian and constituted a new Narnia genre for a younger generation.

We’re not in a position to gauge what damage (and of what kind ) might have been caused to a generation of children through the glamorising of magic; but we are in a position to judge the integrity of JK Rowling herself. She has become a public heroine advocating for the protection and defence of vulnerable women subjected to unwanted and threatening attention by men who have supposedly transitioned from one sex to another.

And this week she is once again back in her advocating role due to the implementation in Scotland of hate crime legislation. As Rowling and others have pointed out, the new Scottish law poses a serious threat to freedom of speech in general. And it poses another threat: the triumph of the disordered imagination over the facts of biology; the subjective over any attempt at objectivity. 

In this criminal “Alice through the Looking Glass” scenario that the new Scottish legislation has introduced, the test of criminality lies with the person complaining. If they suspect, or feel, or imagine, or simply decide that offence of a hateful kind has been caused, they can invoke the police. 

This is nightmarish at so many levels; it is difficult to believe that progressive ideology has managed and been allowed to achieve such a cultural, psychological and political coup.

It is hard to understand why there is no collective outcry from the British Churches? But the bishops and priests are remaining largely silent. 

The legislation creates a criminal offence of “stirring up of hatred”, expanding on similar criteria based on racist abuse that has been on the statute book for decades. And it extends the offence to other grounds on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation and, of course and most controversially, transgender identity.

The penalty for “stirring up hate” ranges from a fine to a prison term of up to seven years.

The secular conversation has taken up the issue of freedom of speech and the issue of preferencing the subjective over the objective. But the more serious issue of the whole concept of hate-crime as a species of thought crime has not been addressed at all. 

This ought to be a category error – a mistake in logic in which something belonging to a certain category is presented as belonging to another category – that the Church has an interest and duty in correcting. As a law student decades ago, I and my colleagues were taught it was an accepted axiom that you could not legislate for virtue. It was impossible to make human nature better by passing laws that made them more virtuous. The task of the law was to restrain antisocial or criminal behaviour. It could not create virtue or make people virtuous.

The older view, upon which our society had been built, had a different anthropology: Christianity taught and recognised that the flaw in human nature was sin – that “original sin” that we have in the drama of Genesis.  

But there has been an ideological struggle in the West offering a different analysis of the human condition: a secular and hubristic alternative. And it has replaced the Christian world view. The result of the eradication of the Christian insight into the human condition has led to the replacement of sin with the illusion of human perfectibility, achieved by the double whammy of education and coercion.  

The illusory wishful thinking associated with Rousseau has become the new anthropology from the Left. And as Jordan Peterson has pointed out with such cogency, it always follows the same trajectory: education, coercion and then, when that fails, imprisonment and (looking at the Gulag Archipelago of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) death camps. 

The death toll associated with progressive campaigns of social compulsion amount to something over 60 million deaths under Stalin and 80 million deaths under Mao Tse Tung.

The introduction of thought-crime amounts to what has almost become a reflex response from the progressive Left as it seeks to extend its power and control in the sanctuary of the human heart and mind.

The whole edifice of thought crime is not only predicated on a misreading of human nature and the reality of the human condition, but is a harbinger of aspiring State control that ought to set off the loudest of alarm bells.

Progressive secular culture pursues its ambitions in its labelling and “othering” of the neighbour as committing racism (despite it being unable to define race), misogyny (never androgyny, we notice) or any one of the spurious and illegitimate phobias (from homophobia to Islamophobia – but never Christianophobia) that have been invented to further the fantasy of correctable thought crime and extend its controlling reach.

By accepting without question the validity of this range of thought crimes, the Church loses the battle for the mind, imagination and culture. 

Human beings are not perfectible through education and coercion. Instead, our diagnosis is what we have called “sin” which describes the complex mix of flawed aspirations in the human heart and mind. 

Much though we value, treasure and have extended education, the Catholic prognosis is a restored relationship with our holy Creator through the sacrifice of Christ.

But our cowardly and insecure adoption of the labels of secular misbehaviour, and our scurrying along to be as notionally “anti-racist”, “anti-bullying” and “anti phobic” as the most utopian secularist, is a dangerous type of category error. “Thought crime” cannot be remedied either by social ostracisation or by legislation. 

And the discovery that the State has reached such a level of self-confidence and stupidity that it has implemented legislation to criminalise what it calls the hate crime of misgendering, ought to have, again, started the loudest of alarm bells amongst Christians.

“Hate” cannot be remedied by legislation or disapproval. And the refusal to challenge the flawed anthropology it is based on will lead to a surrender of our human rights to the totalitarian aspirations of progressive utopianism.

Evangelism has become not only a matter of duty and desire that it has always been, but now, more pressingly, the only means of saving our society from falling into the grip of a police state that has taken to itself the right to know what is in your mind – and to lock you up until otherwise satisfied with your mode of thinking.