“It’s not necessarily that type of persecution here [in the West],” ACN-USA Director of Outreach Edward Clancy told CNA.
Clancy said that Western governments often engage in “polite persecution,” referencing a term used commonly by Pope Francis. He cited examples such as a U.K. doctor who lost his job for refusing to use preferred pronouns, French laws that have restricted religious symbols in certain public places, and COVID-19 restrictions that put harsher rules on religious gatherings than other functions, such as in New York.
On the subject of cancel culture, the report notes that the rejection of new concepts about gender have subjected people to threats of “legal sanction” in some Western countries and that “laws have been introduced, such as hate speech, to legally enforce and entrench these concepts as new [human] rights.”
The report detailed a case in Finland in which Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola and Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen were charged with hate speech based on a Twitter post about the Lutheran teaching on homosexuality. The prosecutor general alleged that Räsänen’s post, which referenced a 2004 pamphlet published by Pohjola, was “likely to cause intolerance, contempt, and hatred towards homosexuals.”
Although the charges were dismissed, the prosecutors have appealed the verdict.
As an example of compelled speech, the report cites a practice direction from the British Columbia Supreme Court in Canada that advises parties and their lawyers to adhere to self-identified gender pronouns, which the report argues “implicitly enforces adherence to gender identity belief without regard to religious or conscientious objection.”
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