Re: Australia Bans Prayers for Troons-- Up to 5 Years in Prison for Unauthorized Praying

On 2025-05-03 6:13 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On May 3, 2025 at 1:49:09 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:
 

On 2025-05-03 2:23 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

  On May 3, 2025 at 10:32:38 AM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
  wrote:
 

  On 2025-05-03 12:40 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

    moviePig <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

    On 5/3/2025 1:29 AM, BTR1701 wrote:

        The scope of this law is so broad, you could probably make a prima facie
  claim
    that I'm violating it right now by making this post if someone in New
South
    Wales were to read it.

>
    "Conversion therapy" is outlawed in NSW.  And, apparently, someone there
    believes in the power of prayer to effect it.
>
    This is an argument about the material efficacy of religious belief.  To
    get a more balanced view, free of gender-identity distractions, consider
    how an open prayer for misfortune to befall Jews should be addressed.

        In any free society, it should be addressed the way it's addressed in the
    U.S., which is to say it's not addressed at all, given that such a
thing is
    both protected speech and free exercise of religion.

>
  Then the UK isn't a free society given that a woman was arrested for
  praying silently near an abortion clinic.
>
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Td5GHNQIgY [5 minutes]

    Yes, they have these "protected zones", mostly around abortion clinics,
where
  all free speech is suspended and you can be arrested for just existing there
  if the police determine your presence is anti-abortion in nature. They've
even
  told people that they can be arrested in their own homes if their homes fall
  within one of the zones and they do or say anything that can be considered
  opposition to abortion.
    Regarding the clips I've seen of people who have been arrested for praying
in
  one of these zones, my question would be if they're doing it silently, how
do
  the police know if they're praying or just going over the week's grocery
list
  in their head? I don't know how burdens of proof work in England, but I
would
  assume they're at least similar to the U.S. in that the government has the
  burden to prove its case, so how does the government prove the person was
  engaged in anti-abortion prayer? Does the government now claim to have the
  ability to read minds?
   

In the video I linked, the woman was asked by the police what she was
doing there and she admitted she was praying in her head.

 She said she "might be" praying.

Fair enough.

That's basically challenging the cops to
prove it.
 

I hadn't taken it as a challenge but I can see that it might be taken that way.

But what do they do if they have a defendant who just says, "I was thinking"
or doesn't say anything at all and invites the government to prove its case?
 

I can't imagine what they would have done if she'd insisted that what
she was thinking was none of their business.

 Which would have been my response. "My silent thoughts are none of the
governments concern and here's the number to my lawyer if you have any further
questions because I won't be answering any more of them myself."
 Cops often have an inflated sense of what's their business and what isn't. I
may have told this story before, but I occasionally get stopped by the police
checkpoints here in L.A. The pesky Constitution and its probable cause
requirements means they're not legally allowed to do DUI dragnets, so they get
around that by saying the purpose of the checkpoints is to check for valid
licenses and insurance. If they happen to find someone who's drunk at the same
time, well, too bad for them.
 Anyway, I usually don't have a problem-- I exchange a few words with the cop,
show him my license, and I'm on my way-- but at one of them, the cop started
peppering me with questions about where I was going, where I'd been, who I'd
been seeing, what we were doing, what were their names, etc. After about 30
seconds of that, I was like, hey man, the details of my personal life really
aren't any of your business or the government's business. That got him pissed
off and he started giving me a bunch of bullshit about how since I'm using the
public roads, that makes anything he wants to know about me his business.
That's when I showed him my own badge and said I'd be happy to pull to the
side, call his supervisor over, and the three of us could discuss his
excitingly draconian and certainly unconstitutional legal theory together.
 COP: No, need for that. Have a nice night.
 

Well played, sir! We should all be as firm in our resolve not to give the authorities one bit more than they're entitled to by law.
--
Rhino