Vice President JD Vance has been holding up the value of free speech on his international travels. European leaders and dense CBS journalists don’t like it, but Vance has been expressing the hard truths about how freedom of speech has eroded throughout the West.
In his Munich speech, Vance brought up the case of Adam Smith-Connor:
And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.
A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
It’s difficult to imagine that police would arrest someone who is praying silently and minding his own business, but that’s the state of free speech in the UK. Smith-Connor didn’t know that Vance was going to name-check him, but he told The Telegraph that he appreciated Vance highlighting his case.
“I am tremendously grateful that the vice-president is showcasing the deterioration of fundamental freedoms in the UK and… holding the UK accountable for prosecuting innocent people,” Smith-Connor said. “The UK is a democracy founded on deep respect for fundamental freedoms. It is right and good that the U.S. should be exposing the reality of what is going on.”
“My son Jacob’s life was brief, but it mattered, and I’m deeply moved that the value of his life is being acknowledged by others,” he added. “As a fellow Catholic, I assume like me [Vance] acknowledges that every abortion is a tragedy not just for the baby whose life is lost but also for their family.”
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The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which the numpties at the Guardian refer to as a “hate group,” is assisting Smith-Connor with his appeal, and Paul Coleman, executive director of ADF International, told The Spectator’s Freddy Gray that his isn’t the only free speech case the organization is fighting:
And so a lot of the laws that we have in place, scattered around different councils across the country, are now national legislation. It is potentially criminalizing silent prayers. We saw in Adam's case also consensual offers of help and support. We have another case next month. A lady holding a sign saying, “Here to talk if you want.” That's literally all she's doing. She's being criminally prosecuted for that as well.
So it is happening. One of the things about it is a lot of these pro-life volunteers have started wearing cameras, and so we can see it with our own eyes, because we're seeing the interactions they're having with police. They're not making it up.
Gray and Coleman discussed a letter that the Scottish government sent residents telling them they could violate the law by praying in their own homes. Vance mentioned it in the speech, and when a left-wing politician tried to call Vance out for “misinformation,” Scots brought the receipts.
Coleman reiterated just how wrong CBS’s Margaret Brennan was when she tried to tell Secretary of State Marco Rubio that freedom of speech led the Nazis to power in Germany. Much like Rubio took Brennan to school in his response, Coleman pointed out that Nazi crackdowns on speech prevented the opposition from speaking out.
Coleman also told Gray that he thinks Vance’s speech is a historic one.
“I think it will be interpreted that way, at least I hope it will in years to come, because it was so clear in what he was saying, and really laying down a marker, I think, for how the Trump presidency is going to be over the next few years,” he said. “What they are referring to as free speech diplomacy, which could be exceptionally important, because prior to this moment, essentially the whole of the Western world was united in censorship, even the us and we're seeing more and more of that now.”
It's too soon to tell if we’ll see a reversal of Western censorship and a return to freedom of speech in places like the UK anytime soon. But if cases like Smith-Connor’s continue to receive attention, maybe we can see the ship start to turn, even if it’s slowly.
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