Thoughtcrime
Having faced, twice this year, the serious possibility of losing a child, I can only imagine the anguish of one who has actually participated in the death his own child, only later to be genuinely remorseful for it.
TV’s Father Brown, who may or may not bear a passing resemblance to the literary character of the same name invented by G K Chesterton, is fond of saying, “God knows what it is to lose a child”.
Indeed. Losing a child must surely be the ultimate crushing of a parent. The tragedies of post-natal depression driven killings, of the depression of fathers who snap having been denied parental access to their children, of the child victims of drunk drivers on the roads, of childhood cancers and of SIDS, come readily to mind.
This week, a man called Adam Smith-Connor was convicted in Britain for thinking something. He made the mistake of standing outside, or at least proximate to, an abortion clinic (in 2022), and silently praying. For the loss of a baby to whose abortion he had contributed in a parental decision some decades earlier.
The Bournemouth Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday found Adam Smith-Connor guilty of silent prayer stemming from a demonstration he conducted in Bournemouth in 2022.
The court “sentenced Smith-Connor to a conditional discharge and ordered him to pay prosecution costs of £9,000” (about $11,700), Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, said …
A demonstration? Hardly. Anyway, Adam’s support page notes:
Adam Smith-Connor is an ordinary man. He’s a husband, a father, and a practicing physiotherapist providing for his family. But his courage is extraordinary. The British Army veteran and Christian is unafraid to defend his faith or share his pro-life views publicly.
Before Adam’s conversion to Christianity, he had paid for the abortion of his first son, Jacob, whom he conceived with an ex-girlfriend – a decision that he deeply regrets. He’s found forgiveness but knows firsthand the trauma of abortion and the loss of life it causes. That’s why he prays silently in public – about his own son, other unborn babies and their mothers, and fathers.
https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/campaign/support-adam
In other words, he is doing God’s work, nobly and with a heavy heart. Yes, he found God. Many will sneer at that, of course. But he also found profound humanity. He is, as Billy Joel might have said, an innocent man. Adam stated:
Today, the court has decided that certain thoughts — silent thoughts — can be illegal in the United Kingdom. That cannot be right.
All I did was pray to God, in the privacy of my own mind — and yet I stand convicted as a criminal?
I served for 20 years in the army reserves, including a tour in Afghanistan, to protect the fundamental freedoms that this country is built upon.
It certainly strikes one as a shock to the system, on its face. Or is it?
I suppose that if the secular state can take away the right to life of a baby inside the building, it would appear an easy, further step to take away the right of free speech outside the building. Oops. Hang on, the man didn’t actually say anything. So technically, not a matter of free speech, but free thought. Freedom of belief, of course, is upstream from free speech, as the great John Anderson has recognised.
https://johnanderson.net.au/opinions-freedoms-of-west-worth-defending/
(As an aside, I wonder how anyone knew what Adam was thinking … I suppose he just fessed up).
It is literally a thoughtcrime. Is it a world first? It might well be. Certainly, the Stasi or the Gestapo or the KGB could, and did, routinely march innocent people off to the gulag or the executioner, often via a show trial, for doing nothing wrong. Arguably, these poor souls were guilty of some thoughtcrime or other. But this is surely new to Western democracies. A sickeningly low point has been reached. And Smith-Connor wasn’t actually opposing anything or anyone, unlike many of the Soviet, Nazi or East German dissident-victims. He was just standing on the pavement, deep in remorseful thought. The pictures attest to that.
Will this cause a shock to the untutored voter class, either in Britain or here? Probably not. After all, the political class in Australia has moved against such “protests”, state by miserable state. These are the so-called “exclusion zones”.
Protests Outside Abortion Clinics Are Finally Illegal Across All Of Australia.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-au/2021/08/10628268/abortion-clinics-protests-illegal-australia
Finally? Finally? It isn’t as if Australians were marching in the streets demanding this “reform”. Most socially liberal legislation is top-down. No one is ever demanding it. Just like Alex Greenwich’s latest (alas, successful) effort in New South Wales in support of “equality”.
Most people probably don’t know this piece of legislative detritus has passed, or what is in it, or hat it portends. (To be fair, a handful of trannies probably “demanded” Greenwich’s legislation; they have been, inevitably, captured for the fawning media in celebration with the beaming Wellingtonian homosexualist activist).
But this British case at hand involved no harassment, no interactions with anyone, no words spoken in or not in anger. No violence. No placards. Nuffin.
Adam Smith-Connor’s lawyer opined as follows:
Jeremiah Igunnubole, an attorney with ADF UK, called the decision “a legal turning point of immense proportions.”
“A man has been convicted today because of the content of his thoughts — his prayers to God — on the public streets of England,” he said. “We can hardly sink any lower in our neglect of basic fundamental freedoms of free speech and thought.”
A turning point, indeed.
Even the British mainline Christian churches have roused themselves to comment. To object, even. There is a first time for everything:
The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have condemned recent legislation relating to prayer outside abortion clinics, arguing that the proposal represents a step backward for civic and religious freedom.
Under the Public Order Act, starting Oct. 31, buffer zones will be introduced around abortion facilities across England and Wales, constituting a distance of 150 meters (almost 500 feet) of “any part of an abortion clinic or any access point to any building or site that contains an abortion clinic.”
The state has championed abortion to the max, in an unholy alliance with the post-sexual revolution zeitgeist. And radical feminists. And “liberated” men. The state is therefore heavily invested in punishing abortion dissent. It is not an innocent bystander, a neutral referee.
But it turns out that this stance by the state is all of a piece with the state’s rabid anti-children policies. Australian and other Western governments haven’t got too much to be proud of, safeguarding-children-wise. The Covid years taught us that. Thousands of children have been killed or sentenced to a life of heart disease as a result of the jabba-jab that was not remotely needed for young people.
Study of 1.7 Million Kids and Teens Who Got Pfizer COVID Vaccine Found Myopericarditis Only in Vaxed Groups.
The same governments allow children to change their gender through puberty blockers and subsequent acts of mutilation, without parental consent (of course). They allow babies to be aborted up to birth, on demand. They intend to demand facial recognition in order to forcibly prevent children (from 13 to 16 years) from accessing social media. They poison young minds through hideous “safe schools” programs and teaching sexual techniques to infants. They ignore parental rights, generally. They have actively participated in the decline in standards of literacy and numeracy, sentencing children to a life of ignorance. They want that, of course. They have outsourced the raising of children from parents to day-care centres. And billed the taxpayer. They have memory-holed the sex abuse crimes of public school teachers, like those of Chris Dawson’s mates on Sydney’s northern beaches.
They have sentenced many women who were forced to get the state injectable to a life of sterility. And have ignored the calls for an end to obviously lethal Covid vaccines, including for women and children.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/covid-jabs-for-mothers-to-be-the-lies-keep-on-coming/
They want this, as well. Despite hat Mark Steyn has called a “torrent”, a “Niagara Falls” of peer reviewed studies showing vaccine harms and ineffectiveness.
https://www.steynonline.com/14705/voyage-of-the-damed
No, the secular state doesn’t like babies and children much. It doesn’t care for them, in both senses of that phrase. It should, therefore, be no surprise that it takes the side of abortionists against the silent dissidents who beg to differ.
Back to punishment for wrongthink. Who invented the word “thoughtcrime? No prizes for guessing:
Thoughtcrime is a word coined by George Orwell in his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel it describes politically unorthodox thoughts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc (English Socialism). In contemporary English usage, it describes beliefs that are contrary to accepted societal norms.
Note Wikipedia’s subtly sneering, sinister use of the phrase “contrary to accepted social norms”. Not really a problem, then, except for the pesky dissidents who don’t get with the (progressive) program.
Two points on this. Who decides on “accepted”? Second, is abortion an accepted social norm? Among left-liberals, of course it is. And the political class. Across the Christian and Muslim and Jewish suburbs and regions, perhaps not so much. Many people remain decidedly queasy about abortion, especially up to birth, on demand. Infanticide on demand, as Tony Abbott correctly called it, post the efforts of the corrupt Gladys Berejiklian. They got that through while, inevitably, we weren’t paying sufficient attention.
Famously, as an American resident in the late 1970s, the Soviet gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn expressed horror at the totalitarian drift in American society. That was nearly half a century ago. At Harvard University.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
One observer has noted of this famous speech:
In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, A World Split Apart, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a fierce enemy of the Soviet system, delivered a forceful and insightful critique of the West, a society which he characterized as spiritually weakened by rampant materialism. The man who, when forced to leave his own country four years earlier, encouraged his countrymen to “live not by lies”, gave us a magnificent lesson in how to not be blinded by our own sense of superiority, and urged us to ask hard questions about who we are and where we are going.
… It is now painfully clear that, as Solzhenitsyn was able to discern 42 years ago, the West has been gradually losing the will and intellectual ability to defend itself, not so much against foreign armies as it may have appeared in 1978, but against an army of internal critics determined to demolish everything the West used to stand for.
https://quillette.com/2020/10/24/reflections-on-solzhenitsyns-harvard-address/
What would Solzhenitsyn say now, I wonder? When you can be arrested for standing on the street, thinking.
One of the defining differences between the Western and its enemies, then and now, has been our utter commitment to free speech. Not any more. Now we will face jail-time for wrong-talk, here, thanks to Albo, Michelle Rowland and Julie Inman-Grant.
Oh, and now, wrongthink too, certainly in the United Kingdom. No words needed. As Adam said, “all I did was pray to God”.
https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/campaign/support-adam
Paul Collits
21 October 2024
“A man has been convicted today because of the content of his thoughts — his prayers to God — on the public streets of England…We can hardly sink any lower in our neglect of basic fundamental freedoms of free speech and thought.”
How can this be happening?!
Who is actually responsible for this? I mean the actual specific people who have facilitated this? What are their names? Bring them to account.
The police and judiciary can surely sink no lower.
Can they?