The Christian Institute: Scotland’s Justice Secretary says he intends to clamp down on hate speech inside the home under his sinister new hate crime Bill.
Free speech campaigners have warned that the Bill leaves out a crucial defence included in other UK hate crime legislation, which protects conversations in the home from police intervention.
However, Humza Yousaf is refusing to provide a “dwelling defence”, insisting that ‘hateful speech’ in the home deserves to be criminalised.
Well-founded concern
The Minister made the comments earlier this week in response to questioning from the Justice Committee, which is tasked with scrutinising the legislation.
Lord Bracadale, the judge whose recommendations led to the Bill, later advised MSPs that they should think carefully about allowing a public order offence to extend into the private sphere.
The Committee’s Convenor asked if the judge would say from his “experience of the operation of criminal law”, that Parliament should “be alert to some danger in that”.
Bracadale responded: “I think that your concern is well-founded”.
Free speech threatened
Last month, the Scottish Government agreed to raise the threshold of the ‘stirring up’ offences from behaviour ‘likely to stir up hatred’ to behaviour ‘intended to stir up hatred’.
The Christian Institute welcomed the Justice Secretary’s willingness to compromise on one of the most controversial parts of the Bill, but warned that many more changes are still required.
Our Comment:
While this isn’t the USA, it is part of the country that spawned America. Criminalizing speech in private homes can lead to all sorts of problems for the constitutional monarchy, including prosecuting religious hate speech. Teaching the Bible in one’s home could lead to prosecution of Bible believers’ teaching what the Bible says about homosexuals, or its teaching of Babylon. Scotland is in danger of repudiation of every principle of its constitution similar to America.
Prophetic Link:
“When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near.—Testimonies for the Church 5:451 (1885).” Last Day Events, 131.4.