One of the worst threats to real marriage our country has ever seen
For the first time in our history, making the case for marriage is about to become a criminal matter. The Government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, published on 25 June, would threaten up to five years in prison for anyone teaching, preaching or counselling that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, the moment a court decides it was ‘abusive’.
This is no accident. It is the direct and predictable consequence of the 2013 redefinition of marriage – once the law denied marriage as the union of a man and a woman, it was only a matter of time before holding to that truth was treated as a wrong for the State to stamp out.
The offence catches any ‘conversion practice’ – conduct intended to make a person believe they do or do not have a sexual orientation or a transgender identity – and it exempts no preaching, teaching or pastoral care. Ministers say it protects free speech, but that promise sits in their press release, not in the Bill itself. Nor is there any defence of consent: the friend or pastor who helps someone live by that conviction has no protection if it is later called ‘psychological or emotional pressure’. As Christian Concern’s Andrea Williams puts it, the Bill “opens the door to the persecution of parents and pastors through false accusations of abusive conversion practices”.
And none of it is necessary. Genuine abuse is already a crime, as the Government’s own 2021 consultation admitted, pointing to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. After eight years, ministers have not produced one victim the law could not already protect. We have seen where these laws lead: in Malta, Matthew Grech – whom I interviewed this spring – endured three years and seventeen court appearances for telling his own story on television before he was acquitted. “The process itself was the punishment”, he told me. The alarm is not only ours: the Free Speech Union warns that everything turns on the single undefined word “abusive”.
This is the moment to be heard, before the wording hardens into law. Write to your MP now, urging that genuine abuse is already illegal and that free speech and the freedom to commend marriage would be threatened under this draft Bill. The guide accompanying this email shows you how, with model letters to adapt for your MP and for Peers, and the key points to make the case your own.
Coalition for Marriage will not stop until the law once again honours marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman – and the freedom to say so is put beyond all doubt.