When Vice President Vance called out the collapse of free speech and expression in Europe several weeks ago, many allied elites clutched their pearls. Vance was right, though, and he offered a number of illustrative examples in his address. A subsequent 60 Minutes package praising Germany's government censorship affirmed Vance's thesis. Additional instances the Vice President highlighted involved our British friends:
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. And 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. Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But, no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called “safe access zones,” warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thoughtcrime. In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
