Northern Ireland is finally safe. Clive Johnston has been convicted and can no longer menace the public.
Johnson, 78, is a retired pastor who committed the heinous offense of preaching near the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine. That was considered within the “safe access zone” under Northern Ireland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act.
The Act prohibits “influencing,” “preventing or impeding access,” or “causing harassment, alarm or distress” to a protected person within 100 meters (about 328 feet) of facilities where abortions are performed.
So Johnson was found guilty of “influencing” inside the protected zone and fined 450 pounds (about $614).
Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service told Fox News Digital, “The defendant was found guilty and convicted by the court of doing an act in a safe access zone with the intent of or being reckless as to whether it had the effect of influencing a protected person attending the premises; and failing to comply with a direction to leave a safe access zone.”
The language of the law is absurdly vague and abusively broad. What constitutes an “influence” is undefined and could include any religious, political, or social exchange. Would it include encouragements to have abortions?
It is equally perverse to treat praying or preaching the same as blocking or impeding access to a clinic. Finally, a hospital engages in a wide array of activities that raise religious or political issues that can be the subject of free speech.
We previously saw several cases in the United Kingdom where people were arrested for silently praying near abortion clinics.
For its part, The Irish Republic has been a leader in censorship and the criminalization of speech. As the leader of the Irish Green Party proclaimed, “We are restricting freedom for the public good.”
By the way, his offense was reading John 3:16, including “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
What could perish in Ireland and the United Kingdom is free expression as speech regulators target bad influences under time, place, and manner laws.
Western Europe is a thoroughly lost cause. Our full attention now needs to be on preventing this kind of authoritarian horror from happening in the US.
Too late.
How dare religious fanatics like a Priest interfere with the slaughter, oops I mean healthcare choices, of mostly native citizens. While Ireland does not track abortions by citizens versus immigrants, if the ratio for most Western Industrial Nations holds (and it likely does), 1 in 6 abortions is for immigrant women and 5 in 6 are abortions by citizen women. Immigrants usually have deep belief in life and understand the future for them lies in offspring who become citizens of their ‘new’ country and eventually gain the upper hand in all aspects. Darwinism always works by letting the dominate population destroy/replace itself. Bye Bye Europe.
Hey, listen up pal! They ain’t abortions. They is healthcare. Reproductive rights! Baby! And don’t you forget it! Our HealthCare Leader now makes over a million bucks a year! (at don’t plan on parenthood,. inc.) She’s very important, you know, deciding who gets all that wonder medical assistance, you know? They got gloves and everything, baby!
I want comparable HealthCare, too, you know, especially as a trans man becoming a chick. You know what I’m saying?
The performance of human rites in liberal culture is a progressive imperative in the pursuit of RAAT (keep women reusable, affordable, available, and taxable) sociopolitical doctrine and the “burden” of evidence sequestered in umbrella clinical corporations in sanctuary states under the Pro-Choice ethical religion.
“We are restricting freedom for the public good.”
Terrifying.
How so? It’s same justification that every American president undertook “for the pubic good”.
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.
And the one Trump took to kill Iranians.
Before they detonated a nuke in the ship off the New York Harbor
Wrong. The war on Iran doesn’t rely on any purported “public good” exception to the constitution. The USA is entitled to wage war; that is perfectly constitutional. And no, the president does not need a war to be declared before he can wage it.
No recent president has violated the freedom of speech “for the public good”. The courts don’t allow it. There is no “public good” exception to the bill of rights.
meanwhile the LEFTIST import 3rd world murderers to Kill Citizens!
Imported you say? Got proof?
Yes, we do have proof. From Biden announcing to the whole world that they should feel free to come on over and they won’t be deported, to his literally flying them in!
abortation after 24 weeks is murder
the LEFT as fascists…who JAIL all that don’t agree with their EDICTS!
Abortion is homicide after six weeks when a human life reaches viability with nervous system function correlated with consciousness.
Abortion is a human right!
You mean it violates a human right. THE human right. Abortion is a “right” in the same way that the Holocaust was a “right”.
The comment section seems to have become a forum for the ridiculous. What is clearly illustrated in the article is that someone has decided to restrict freedom for the public good. The “greater” good. That’s every freedom loving person’s concern. That attitude is a malignancy, a cancer, spreading throughout the body politic. What begins elsewhere will eventually lead to the death of freedom everywhere. Deal with it like the dreadful disease that it has become. Fight it. Destroy it. Do not allow it to grow, no matter where it begins.
The new motto of Cornell University is “. . . . to do the greatest good.”
It is no longer an educational institution. It is now a charity.
The founding generation understood something we seem to be forgetting. When your own government turns against your basic rights, you look for allies wherever you can find them. The colonists did not win independence alone. France had no legal obligation to get involved in someone else’s fight. But they recognized that the principle being defended was larger than one country’s quarrel.
What is happening in Northern Ireland is small by comparison. A 78 year old man reads a Bible verse on a public street and gets a criminal conviction for it. Small. But that is exactly how these things start. Small, then normalized, then expanded.
The United States was built as a beacon for exactly this kind of fight. The First Amendment is not just an American legal technicality. It represents a principle that belongs to all people. And when we see it being strangled somewhere else, staying silent because it is “none of our business” is the same logic that would have kept France on the sidelines in 1778.
How does the world look if France makes that choice? We probably don’t have to imagine. We’d likely still be subjects of the Crown.
The question is whether America still sees itself as that beacon, or whether we have decided that liberty is only worth defending inside our own borders.
Good Lord, you twist and lie about American history.
France joined, reluctantly, and it was just to interfere with British trade. There was no (moral) imperative. Just harass the British. Nothing more.
That so-called question … that beacon. Is total BS. The USA was never a (moral) beacon. Never will be.
You write BS man.
Ben you’re mixing up the chairs at the table. France did not have to believe in everything the colonists stood for. The colonists believed in what they were doing, and that was sufficient justification for France to support them for whatever reasons France found useful. The moral weight sat with the colonists, not with France’s motivations.
Same principle applies here. This man believed in what he was doing. That is enough. The United States does not need to co-sign his theology to recognize that what was done to him was wrong.
You’re welcome to disagree with the argument. But “BS” isn’t a rebuttal. It’s a mood.
Olly you’re outright lying .. categorically. You are not a historian, I am. You’re just a bloviated big mouth.
France was in it only for the taking of British colonies.
And censorship doesn’t exist in the USA?
On this blog too.
That’s right. Censorship doesn’t exist in the USA.
Northern Ireland has succeeded in turning Monty Python and the Holy Grail into real life: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I’m being repressed! The humor, though, is still confined to the movie.
Nobody does Fascism quite as well as Great Britain does Fascism. “Vee vill silence you in za name of free speech!”
Is that Gaelic with a German accent?
A single Irishman went to jail for breaking Irish law? And you people are freaking out about that. If, as some here argue, what happens in Ireland is American’s business, Then how come are Americans attacking American Jews and there is no outrage here?
If Ireland is our business then why not our fellow Jewish Americans, or for that matter, European Jews etc.?
Um….
“The Act prohibits “influencing,” “preventing or impeding access,” or “causing harassment, alarm or distress” to a protected person within 100 meters (about 328 feet) of facilities where abortions are performed.” (JT)
Why should there be a “safe zone” (about a football field!) for abortion clinics. But not one for conservatives speaking on campus, federal law enforcement, those attending a synagogue, conservative journalists on the street?
Why does the Left not consider those individuals a “protected person?”
This article is a little confusing. The author keeps talking about Ireland even though this took place in Northern Ireland. I know that Northern Ireland is mentioned once, but usually “Ireland” refers to the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland is a separate country and is part of the UK, which is officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So, when mentioning Ireland and the United Kingdom in the last paragraph, is the author talking about the Republic of Ireland and the UK? If not, it is redundant to mention Ireland because Northern Ireland is already part of the UK.
Yes Ireland is more conservative than the UK government under Keir Starmer.
I’m beginning to think that the old USSR would still be in business today had they only referred to themselves as a democracy and they were only making a few rules and regulations to save it.
It was an internationally recognized constitutional democracy, representative bodies etc.. Recognized by the USA, no less. And 193 other countries.
Constitutional republic, not constitutional democracy. It was a dictatorship. Yes the USSR had a constitution that rivaled our own, but also dictatorship and repressed judges that had to do the dictators bidding.
Better study up anon. I see you googled it. Which is to say, you are wrong.
All USSR leadership was democratically elected… to this day! Biden wasn’t a dictator endowed with powers voted by a US Congress.Just like in the USSR of yore. And today. The PRC, also democratic, just not in the way you think.
As for judges, seems you inadvertently made a good point: USA Judges are also repressed. Either tow the (liberal) party line or else… off to the gulag.
The Bolshevik revolution began in 1917. Ended around 1921. The US did not recognize the USSR until November, 1933 – after our ancestors made the horrible, disastrous decision to elect our own pseudo socialist President, FDR.
FDR’s government, as we all now know from Venona decrypts, was filled with Soviet spies. Literally hundreds of them in associated with several spy rings. Most were recruited from academia – especially the Ivy League.
Some, like Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, occupied very high positions that strongly influenced and created policy. White spearheaded the global currency regime still in place today at Bretton Woods, and Hiss was the driving force behind organizing the United Nations.
The communists won the Cold War thanks to Democrat traitors from within.
A Democrat mayor from California recently pled guilty to being a Chinese government agent (spy). History repeats.
Yep.. Joe McCarthy was right.
A Democrat mayor from California recently pled guilty to being a Chinese government agent (spy).
No, she was not a spy. She was an agent, but that’s not a crime. Her only crime was failing to register. It’s the same as carrying a gun without a permit.
Thousands of U.S. judges who broke laws or oaths remained on the bench
REUTERS 2020
In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.
Judges have made racist statements, lied to state officials and forced defendants to languish in jail without a lawyer – and then returned to the bench, sometimes with little more than a rebuke from the state agencies overseeing their conduct.
Recent media reports have documented failures in judicial oversight in South Carolina, Louisiana and Illinois. Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years – 2008 through 2019 – in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition, reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from the public key details of their offenses – including the identities of the judges themselves.
TO BE BLUNT, until we confront and restore our judiciary so that the average citizen is assured of its integrity, the collapse of our democracy is inevitable.
TO BE BLUNT… wrong blog mister.
TO BE BLUNT… wrong blog mister.
Says the guy that changes every post to be about President Trump.
You got proof?
Collapsing democracy is germane, Bucko. Without integrity, we are the Soviet Union, Iran and China. And our judiciary is corrupt. Thoroughly. All the legal matters discussed here and everywhere else, mean nothing until we clean up The Mob of judges.
SU, I and China don’t have integrity? Whew!
oh, i’m sorry u do
Diversity or class-disordered ideologies, bloc judgments and labels, including racism, sexism, ageism #HateLovesAbortion, classicism is a forward-looking legacy of Democracy and a burden on our Republic.
“What could perish in Ireland and the United Kingdom is free expression as speech regulators target bad influences under time, place, and manner laws.”
So what, its Ireland. None of your business.
Human right is everyone’s business. I suppose you also think ‘So what Germany killed a few million jews and disabled people, it’s Germany’s business and was none of the rest of the worlds business’.
Human right is everyone’s business. Really? So how come no one cares? Better yet, lay out the applicable laws then? Oh, the bible says so maybe?
WTF, does Germany ca. 1942 have to do with Irish law?
“it’s Germany’s business and was none of the rest of the worlds business’.”
Response, then how come the world of 1940 let the so-called holocaust happen?
It didn’t. Way back when the colonists arrived in north america God was planning a response to nazi Germany and the holocaust.
He formed the soldiers in opposition and those men and women were God’s agents on earth. God acts through people over long ages of time. It’s the reason Americans have the 2nd amendment. God prepared a fighting people.
Yes, ashes rained day and night, hellfire and brimstone, Bert. God does what he does.
250 years, we salute you, USA.
Another ridiculous anon.
“So what, its Ireland. None of your business”
Not your call, not an authority you possess.
Not your call you insignificant fish.
OldFish,
HA! Good one!
So what.
I am sure there are still people in Ireland who are more conservative; I would love to know what they are planning. Are there MIGA citizens trying to stop this insanity? What about MUKGA citizens? Ireland is a lovely country with lovely people—not all nuts!
Question. What business is it of yours what happens in Ireland?
The language of the law is absurdly vague and abusively broad. What constitutes an “influence” is undefined and could include any religious, political, or social exchange.
When one country can get way with human rights abuses other countries will do that too. It is everyone’s business. Free speech is a human right.
As a liberal troll do you want to get locked up for your comments because the current government would disagree with you?
Silly response. What happens in Ireland is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
`Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. `Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’
Sure, and Scrooge during his lifetime lived his live free of moral constraints. Cute but relaxant. If that’s your basis for morals, you’re a pitiful example of humanity.
And yet, today’s world is continuing the extermination of Jews. Even in the USA, attacked and killed daily and you worry about about a single Irishman who went to jail for breaking Irish law? At least he lives, the Jews… no so eh?
If Ireland is your business then why not the Jew’s in the USA, or Europe etc.?
(First, Jacob Marley may have lived a selfish life, but his ghost clearly regretted it and tried to warn his friend Scrooge of that error – but of course its just fiction – a morality tale)
Who says no one is concerned with oppression of and/or by the Jewish people? There are some who are concerned about just about any group that someone considers oppressed. But no one can fix all the world’s problems at once. Each person chooses for themselves what their own ‘business’ is, and how to priortize that business. That’s called Freedom of conscience.
Question. What business is it of yours what happens in Ireland?
The same business as it was what was happening in the USSR and in Nazi Germany, and what is happening today in China, Iran, and other tyrannies. Now the UK is a member of that same club.
And yet, today’s world is continuing the extermination of Jews. Even in the USA, attacked and killed daily
What are you talking about? In the USA, at least, the government is not doing that, far from it; when a criminal does it the government does its best to catch them, convict them, and punish them. In the UK the government is the criminal. That makes everyone in the country responsible for it, just as all Germans were responsible for their government’s crimes.
This is crazy. How can someone silently praying be harmful to others?
Crazy, no. But you are.
Read the article again Dustoff. Or, summary: committed the offense of preaching near the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, a “safe access zone” under Northern Ireland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act. Get it?
Yeah. Easy. The people who wrote the law are the enemy. Ireland’s problems are relevant to Americans because the same enemy operates here. Get it?
He is way to stupid to figure that out.
Stupid is cheap on the net and very costly when it manifest in the real world🤣
You should.
Not only stupid, but evidently someone peed in his cornflakes this morning!
Ireland’s are relevant to … ? Now do you figure that, two independent nations with different laws. What are you going to do about it? Absolutely nothing, Whine here all day?
And what would the US gov. aka Trump, do about a senile old mans insanity who willingly broke Irish law.
The US gov would not be allowed to have such a law in the first place. If a state did pass such a law and tried to enforce it, the US gov, a/k/a Trump, would sue to stop it, and if necessary would send in the National Guard to prevent such an invalid law from being enforced.
In the USA a buffer zone may only be large enough to protect those entering and leaving the facility from being physically attacked or obstructed, but may NOT be large enough to “protect” them from hearing the protesters’ words. 100 metres would never be allowed. Even a zone of 100 feet (30.5 m) was struck down. I believe 25 feet is the largest zone that the courts have approved, and I think it may be even smaller than that.
Just like Stalin’s USSR.
Clergy were routinely arrested, imprisoned, sent to the Gulag, exiled, or — especially in the 1920s–1930s purges — executed for religious activity including public prayer, organizing worship, or alleged “anti‑Soviet” agitation. Sentences ranged from administrative penalties and internal exile to multi‑year prison or camp terms (commonly 5–10 years) and death (particularly during show trials and the late‑1930s terror). Outcomes depended on period, local NKVD practice, the priest’s prominence, and the charge.
Singing or composing an “anti‑Soviet” song could be prosecuted under the same broad political articles (e.g., Article 58) and resulted in penalties ranging from fines, short jail terms or internal exile to multi‑year Gulag sentences (commonly 5–10 years) and, in severe or repeat cases during purges, longer terms or execution. Enforcement varied by period, local NKVD practice, and the perceived seriousness or audience of the song (private complaint vs. public performance).
People who told “anti‑Soviet” jokes were arrested under broad political articles (e.g., Article 58/58‑10 for “anti‑Soviet agitation”) and sentences varied widely: from months of internal exile or short prison terms (6 months–3 years) to long Gulag terms (5–10 years, often 8–25 years) or even execution in extreme cases. Practically, many private jokes led to 5–8 years in the camps during the 1930s–40s, but outcomes depended on local NKVD practice, the exact charge, and the political climate.
The commies want to take us back to those times in every country in the world. It is a world problem.
DustOff,
Thought crimes.