NI racing to criminalise marriage support

On Tuesday the Northern Ireland Assembly spent a whole day on a Bill that would make it a crime, with up to two years in prison, to help someone live by the truth about marriage. MLAs haven’t yet voted. But the Communities Minister, Gordon Lyons, told the Chamber what he found when he read it: “there is nothing in the Bill that states that legitimate conversations between individuals or between a parent and a child are ruled out. It is simply not there.”

Jamie Bambrick is Senior Pastor of Hope Church in Craigavon. I spoke to him recently, to find out what it could do to a pastor, a counsellor and a parent. You can watch our conversation here:

Eóin Tennyson, deputy leader of the Alliance Party, introduced the Conversion Practices (Criminalisation) Bill on 30 June. Clause 4 defines conversion therapy to include “counselling or any form of talking therapy” and “coaching or instruction”. Clause 8 says psychological harm includes “fear, alarm or distress”. Clause 1 says plainly that “It is not a defence that the victim consented to the therapy.” And Clause 7 protects anyone whose intent is “to affirm” a person’s identity, but parents who oppose get no such protection.

Jamie’s first point is the one others raised on Tuesday. “The laws are already written in such a way that such things are illegal”, he says. “We don’t actually support abuse, and abuse is illegal in all forms.” The only thing left to become a new offence is conversation itself. This could be a young man who asks his pastor what the Bible says he should do about a relationship, or parents talking with their thirteen-year-old who has gone “down some TikTok rabbit hole” and announces she is a boy. If a parent says they love her and won’t lie to her, they could be caught by this Bill. Jon Burrows, the Ulster Unionist leader, told the Chamber that “a parent would, in effect, need a KC at the kitchen table before having conversations with their child”.

Jamie explains: “The perception of the purported victim is determinant of whether or not something is a crime”, he says. “Lots of things can cause people to feel distressed or alarmed, and I hear plenty of things in my life that make me feel distressed and alarmed. I don’t think the people that say those things should go to jail.”

This isn’t a Northern Ireland matter alone. Westminster’s own draft Bill for England and Wales has a five year penalty, and C4M opposes that too. Stormont’s version is even broader. Unlike Westminster’s, it doesn’t require the conduct to be “abusive” or the harm to be “serious”. Victoria banned so called conversion practices in 2021, and its own Law Reform Commission reported this year that “there have been no criminal prosecutions under the Act”. A criminal law with nobody to prosecute is a law about something else.

Even though the Bill is passing through the Assembly, its Committee is taking evidence until 1 October. Northern Ireland supporters may wish to respond, saying no, and why in their own words. Jamie’s verdict on whether it’s worth twenty minutes is: “If enough people do that, I really do think we can stop this, but we do need to act quickly.”

At C4M we know that marriage – the voluntary, exclusive, lifelong union of one man and one woman – isn’t a private preference to be tolerated in silence. A country that won’t let a father say this to his own daughter, has stopped being a free country. Keeping it free is the work we do together. Do watch my conversation with Jamie, and send it to someone in Northern Ireland who needs to see it before 1 October.

How to respond: the Committee’s survey is here. You can ask for your personal details to be redacted. C4M’s position is that the whole Bill should be withdrawn, not improved. You can say no to it throughout. In a few sentences of your own, say why the Bill should be dropped in its entirety. The points that matter include:

• Abuse is already a crime, and in Australia, where such laws already exist, they have produced no prosecutions;
• The Bill makes a crime out of how a listener later says they felt, even with consent;
• And no parent, counsellor or pastor should have to ask themselves whether a court will find their private conversations reasonable.

If you need another format, the Committee Clerk, Emer Boyle, is at Committee.Communities@niassembly.gov.uk or 028 9052 1895. Northern Ireland MLAs can be found here – tell them, in your own words, that you want the Bill withdrawn.