Canada’s hate speech push targets real marriage. UK next?

Over the past fortnight, Canada has seen a fast moving row over whether quoting marriage-related scripture could be treated as hate speech.

Canada’s Culture Minister, Marc Miller, said he doesn’t “think people should be using the Bible, the Qur’an or the Torah to escape from committing a hate crime”. Canadian bishops have warned this could have a “chilling effect on religious expression”.

In the UK, Westminster is again accelerating towards a ban on so-called “conversion practices”. In the Commons on 10 December 2025, the Equalities Minister said: “conversion practices are abusive and we will ban them”.

Under the draft bill discussed by Sky, conversion practices include attempts to “A: change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, or B: suppress a person’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity”. Coercion, threats, violence, harassment, or abuse are already crimes. As one MP put it in a Commons debate, coercion “is already against the law. It is also, thankfully, incredibly rare, to the point of being all but wiped out.”

The live policy fight is therefore about whether new law will criminalise ordinary speech, prayer, pastoral support, and even marriage counselling.

The danger lands directly on support for real marriage. As explained in the Sky piece, defining “suppression” broadly could mean that saying sex is only for marriage between a man and a woman – a belief held in various faiths – would be treated as suspect.

Moreover, as C4M supporters will know, the claims that nobody ever changes or that all help is inherently harmful, have been disproved by Sociologist Dr Paul Sullins. He has shown (using large US survey data) that many people report moving away from same-sex behaviour and identity over time. Therefore, policy should not assume change is impossible.

C4M therefore calls for two clear protections before any “conversion practices” bill is published:

• First, that consensual pastoral care, parental guidance, prayer, and marital counselling are explicitly protected in the legislation.
• Second, that lawful discussion of marriage, including the sex of the parties, is not treated as “hate”, consistent with existing safeguards in the Public Order Act 1986.

You can ask your MP to back these points via https://www.writetothem.com.

News round-up:

• An open letter with 7,000 signatures organised by ‘Inclusive Church’ has increased pressure on Church of England bishops to reverse their provisional decision not to move ahead with wedding-like services of blessing for same-sex couples.

• A father has said he was betrayed by his son’s boarding school after it supported the 14-year-old pupil in socially transitioning to a ‘girl’ and taking gender-changing hormones without his parents’ knowledge.

• Campaigners have written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting telling him that the forthcoming puberty-blocker trial is unethical and threatening legal action.

• The Independent is running a series promoting divorce as the supposed route to midlife happiness. The New York Times recently published a similar piece. This despite the statistics showing that, on average, marriage makes people happier – and divorce the opposite.