Dale Mcalpine, a 42-year-old street preacher (i.e. the people you want to punch) in the UK, was arrested after distributing leaflets and telling shoppers homosexuality was a sin, and refusing to stop after “a gay police community support officer” told him to stop making homophobic comments. Dumb. [Daily Mail]
Street Preacher Arrested For Handing Out Obnoxious Propaganda
Help make sure LGBTQ+ stories are being told...
We can't rely on mainstream media to tell our stories. That's why we don't lock Queerty articles behind a paywall. Will you support our mission with a contribution today?
Cancel anytime · Proudly LGBTQ+ owned and operated
Jon
Free Speech all the way!!!! As long he was on a public street he SHOULD have that right. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
-Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Mike in Asheville, nee "in Brooklyn"
Yikes! Certainly I hate his message; but I hate the idea of “thought police” even more. According to the full report, there was not any type of Westboro Church venom nor veiled calls for violence let alone threats of violence.
Does this mean that I can’t sing Tim Minchin’s new “The Pope Song” on the streets of London?
John K.
Yeah, stuff like this doesn’t help. Important to point out that this would be completely unconstitutional in the US
Tallskin
Hmmm, free speech? I don’t agree.
Well possibly his freedom to spew out hatred was infringed Christians in the UK are currently complaining like whipped dogs that their rights to oppress gays are being taken away. Witness the recent Supreme Court judgement here in the UK that christians are NOT entitled to special treatment at the hands of the courts where their bigotry conflicts with gay equality legislation.
http://www.secularism.org.uk/high-court-judgement-affirms-tha.html
Personally, I think the persecution of the religious hasn’t gone far enough, yet. As an angry gay man I want recompense for 2,000 years of serious persecution at the hands of this filthy middle eastern cult.
Can we steal a slogan from the black americans/africans and demand “Reparations Due” for slavery -but unlike the ex-slave owning civilisations, ie us, the christians (and muslims and jews) feel no shame for their having started homophobia and prolonging it. If they had any fucking decency they’d at least apologise.
Read any books on the history of the ancient greek and roman worlds and you’ll be gobsmacked at the different attitudes then towards homosexuality – ie it was, in the main, at worst accepted and in the case of ancient Greece actively promoted – Alexandra the great, julius Caeser, Hannibal, Achilles, etc etc etc all serious knob gobblers.
And when that fucker, the megalomaniac dictator, the Roman Emperor Constantine made this filthy minority cult, Christianity, the state religion of the Roman Emperor within a few years the first anti-homosexual laws had been passed.
Within one hundred years of Constantine’s making christianity the state religion of the Empire, the world was so different that the homosexuality of the ancient world was as if from a different age, as if a schism had opened up between the two ages. When these fucking christians accept their guilt and apologise for their foul evil towards us, THEN, and only then will I accept their right to free speech. That is to say when they’re no longer a threat to us.
I have to add that I think the fact that you think morons like this preacher are having their freedoms infringed is a large part of the explanation as to why Europe has progressed so much further towards gay equality than the US.
Mike L.
Uh, dif constitutinal laws in the UK, We have freedom of speech in the US that protects scum like him, but since he’s over there he has to answer for the laws he broke. Period.
Queerty is obsessed with Jarret Barrios. ZZZ. (John from England)
It’s not freedom of speech. It’s bullying. Even if you agree, you don’t want your shopping day marred by some hateful person.
Steve
As Mike L. has said, the laws in the UK are not the same as in the US.
It is one thing to speak. It is quite another to block the way so that a passer-by may not pass until after he or she has listened to the speech. People are free to say almost anything they want, so long as they say it peacefully and do not impose on others. But there are some restrictions. In particular, speech that seeks to incite discrimination or violence is generally not tolerated. And of course, no one other than the Crown may require others to listen.
Lamar
I believe in free speech but only to a certain degree. We can’t have people in the street suggesting killing women because of a text interpreted in the Bible or someone in the street encouraging the use of ectasy in the gay community or advocating killing the President for example. Once free speech becomes potentially dangerous it should be limited. Free speech should have more limits – private thoughts should not.
Devon
Good.
I wish the U.S. had laws that allowed us to lock up our bigoted lunatics too.
Cassandra
It is ironic that Tallskin favors depriving homophobes of the freedom to spread their hate speech in public,
and then proceeds to unload a steaming pile of hate speech of his own.
Markie-Mark
@Cassandra: It wasn’t hate speech, it was the truth. Besides, Christianity if for the feeble-minded.
Sophie
The difference in the US/UK laws is interesting. I guess because we’re so small and crowded, and also because we’re a very old democracy, we have a different take on it to Americans. Both attitudes have their good and bad angles.
For example, there’s a weirdo tiny sect called godhatesfags in the US. These guys go the funerals of people who are gay or that they think are gay and yell things at the mourners. This couldn’t happen here (apart from the fact that a fag in the UK is a cigarette).
Same with protesters shouting abuse outside abortion clinics. Here they can petition or blog or write letters. Speech is fine, politics or legal action are fine. But they can’t harass people in public.
In Britain we have a nifty law called “breach of the peace”. We have a high regard from freedom of speech but if someone is deliberately shouting offensive or distressing things in a public place they can be stopped because they are breaching the peace. The penalties tend to be minor. That’s not the point. It’s the fact that the police can prevent passers by being harassed. AFAIK, it’s not normally employed against what one might consider normal legitimate public demos – anti-war protestors, fex.
DR (the real one, not the guy who made post #12)
The problem here is what is defined as “free speech” and “breach of the peace”, and clearly the UK law is erring on the side of Big Brother and the Thought Police.
The idea that someone might get offended at a religious statement and cause the speaker of that statement to be arrested is not progress in my mind, it’s a step backwards. The idea that any government can legislate what is and is not an acceptable opinion appalls me.
I cannot support this arrest or that law. You may not agree with him, but to suppress his speech based on your dislike of his preaching doesn’t sit well with me. This is why Americans are afraid of our laws turning into what the UK and Canada have…
Sophie
@DR (the real one, not the guy who made post #12): As I said, I can see a lot of good points about the US position on free speech. Our whole legal system is different from yours in that we don’t have a constitution we refer back to, and our laws have gradually accreted like rock strata for about 1,000 years.
However our view tends to be that free speech is fine but when you shout abuse in public or lecture complete strangers in a hateful way then you can be arrested. If some fundamentalist rants about gays being disgusting and damned there’s likely to be a punch-up so under our law he can be asked to desist and, if he refuses, he can be arrested.
In this case there seems to be a chunk missing from the story. We get his version but not the police one. This is normal in the UK but it makes it hard to judge whether the arrest was justified. If they’re going to charge him it would be improper to reveal their evidence publicly prior to any court case. If they decide not to charge him it could still be prejudicial to him to reveal exactly what they say he did.
An easy example would be a domestic dispute. If the police don’t charge someone it would be wrong for them to issue a statement along the lines of “He beat up his wife but she says she won’t testify so we decided it wasn’t worth charging him.” If they decide not to charge him they have no right to publicise or criticise his conduct. If he feels the arrest was unwarranted he can seek redress through an independent complaints process and I imagine that’s what he’ll do. He has free legal support so if he doesn’t complain it would suggest he knows the unreported conduct wouldn’t play well.
DR (the real one, not the guy who made post #12)
@Sophie:
I understand what you’re saying, Sophie, about our different laws, but here is my concern:
-There is no allegation that he was in any way being disruptive or “breaching the peace” (I guess that’s equal to what is “disorderly conduct” in my jurisdiction).
-One person approached an officer out of how many people? So how many people weren’t offended?
-There’s no allegation he did anything but preach. No allegation he was being hateful, mean-spirited, vicious, etc. The allegation is that all he did was list homosexuality as one of a number of sins contained within the Bible.
There is a big chunk missing, but based on the tracts he was supposedly handing out, which I’ve seen online, it sounds as though tis really is a case of the Thought Police going overboard.
Sophie
@DR (the real one, not the guy who made post #12): We’ll have to wait and see, is all I can say. If he really did do nothing more than he describes I’d imagine his complaint against the police will be upheld and, being very newsworthy, will be widely reported.
He’s supported by a Christian pressure group which will fund any legal costs so is well able to tackle the police if they turn out to have overstepped the mark.
I agree that the case, as it stands, is worrying. However I am by no means convinced that his version is the whole truth. We have had a flurry of cases here recently which appear to show discrimination against Christians but which, on examination, are unfounded but have been engineered for maximum publicity. They are all funded by the same group as this guy.
We were asked recently to get all steamed up about a nurse who wasn’t allowed to wear her crucifix at work. Her supporters failed to mention that the hospital had suggested she wear it on her breast pocket or on her lapel. The ban on neck chains was solely because distressed or angry patients had used necklaces to choke staff. But this simple explanation didn’t suit the militant Xtians. I’m a Christian, btw, and support equality across race, sexuality and gender.