A father who tells his teenage daughter that she is a girl is not an abuser. Britain's government says its new bill would not treat him as one. The country's former chief prosecutor says the bill's own words could.
Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, a crossbench peer who served as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2003 to 2008, told The Telegraph that the draft Conversion Practices Bill is "completely contrary to the rule of law," the Christian charity CARE reported Tuesday. The bill's test of "psychological or emotional pressure," he said, would make it "very difficult for parents to know when they're talking to their children" whether they are breaking the law.
He doubted the bill was needed at all. "I don't think it criminalises anything that isn't already criminal," he said, GB News reported.
The text bears out his warning. The draft, which the government published in June for England and Wales, defines a conversion practice as any conduct meant to cause a person "to have or not to have" a transgender identity. Abusive conduct that causes serious harm, or "serious alarm or distress" that substantially disrupts daily life, carries up to five years in prison. In judging whether conduct is abusive, a court must weigh "psychological or emotional pressure." The bill shields health care unless it falls "far below" professional standards. It offers parents no such shield. The words "parent," "child" and "religion" do not appear in it.
It goes further than prison. The bill lets the family court issue "conversion practice protection orders" with whatever "prohibitions, restrictions or requirements" the judge considers appropriate. Police or a local council may apply. Breaking an order carries up to two years.
The government's answer is a promise. "The draft Bill will not prevent parents from making choices on how to raise their children," Simon Lightwood, an equalities minister, wrote on Oct. 29, after independent MP Rosie Duffield asked whether a parent who declines to support a child's transition would fall under it. A minister's answer is not a statute. Judges read the law, not the answer. If the government means to protect parents, it can write that into the bill. It has not.
Every serious talk between parent and child carries emotional weight. Love for a child in danger always does. A bill that treats that weight as evidence of abuse puts every such talk under suspicion.
The Church settled who raises children long before Parliament tried. "Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State," Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum in 1891, "for it has the same source as human life itself." The Catechism calls the parents' right to educate their children "primordial and inalienable." The state did not grant that right, and it cannot take it away. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that doing anything to a young child "against its parents' wish" would be "contrary to natural justice."
A Catholic parent also teaches the truth about the body. "Male and female he created them," Scripture says (Gen 1:27). A mother who says so to a confused son tells him the truth. If he were left in serious distress, a court could weigh whether she pressed too hard.
Macdonald's point about legal certainty is old wisdom. A law that a careful parent cannot read and obey is no law at all. It is a threat.
Churches and parents have barely been heard. None of the six witnesses at the committee's first hearing, on Oct. 29, came from a church, a parents' group or a marriage organization, the committee's own schedule shows. The Coalition for Marriage raised the point on Nov. 2.
Parliament's joint committee on the bill takes written evidence until 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16. Parents and pastors in England and Wales should send it. The bill should be withdrawn. If it is not, it must state plainly that a parent who guides a child, and a church that teaches what it has always taught, commit no crime.
