Alicia Kearns MP retables 'conversion therapy' amendment yet again

By James Kennedy

In an extraordinary move, Alicia Kearns MP has once again withdrawn and re-tabled her conversion therapy amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill.

Now on its seventh version, the amendment could criminalise innocent Christian believers and loving parents for refusing to affirm radical LGBT ideology.

Evidently Kearns realised the previous version (NC90) had gone badly wrong after several senior lawyers warned that it explicitly covered private prayer. But new version NC117 doesn't fix the problems, merely dropping a couple of words and leaving it even more ambiguous.

We recently wrote a blog explaining that Kearns' repeated attempts to redraft an amendment demonstrate the impossibility of the task. We said:

For the last few years, the Westminster Government has been trying to craft a conversion therapy law. But for all their efforts, they have failed to find a way of drafting legislation that does not risk interfering with basic liberties.

It is perhaps no surprise that even the proposal’s most prominent supporters among MPs can’t figure it out either.

Now, several attempts later, the MPs are no further along. They have tried to make the proposal more palatable to those who are sitting on the fence, by removing the most outlandish wording - swapping prison sentences for unlimited fines, for instance.

But they've done nothing to assuage the concerns of Christians, feminists, and ordinary parents, whose human rights are still trampled by this amendment on several counts.

The amendment is due to be debated by MPs on 4 June. Sign up to the Let Us Pray campaign for updates on the amendment and more - join the campaign.

See also: ‘Conversion practices’ to be debated in Westminster on 4 June