It’s not normal to find yourself needing to call the police when you are being threatened with violence - making the emergency call, having the police arrive, and then discover that the solution to the problem seems for them to arrest you.
But that’s exactly what happened when Lois McLatchie Miller and her colleague “Billboard Chris” (Chris Elston) when they went together to Brussels in Belgium to conduct some pavement interviews about gender dysphoria and puberty blockers.
Lois works for the ADF, an organisation that defends people when progressive political factions try to silence them or take away their freedom of action and expression. She’s married to a very well-known Christian activist doctor called Callum Miller. In fact Dr Miller was featured on the Merely Catholic podcast a number of months ago, where his articulate critique of the issues surrounding the legislation governing abortion moved a great many of our listeners.
For those of us who follow Dr Miller, it was his Twitter feed that sent the alarm bells ringing recently. He let the world know that his wife had been suddenly arrested by the police on the streets of Brussels and carted off to prison without any further information being made available.
“My wife has been arrested in Belgium simply for holding a sign saying ‘children are never born in the wrong body’ and having conversations about gender in a public place. I cannot get hold of her. Please retweet. Free speech in Europe is dead.”
Billboard Chris also tried to get the attention of the public, tweeting: “If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I’ve been arrested, arrested along with @LoisMcmatch.”
Thanks to Dr Miller and ADF, within a very short period of time lawyers were asking pressing questions of the Belgian police.
Lois and Chris were finally released from custody without charge, but they had been driven off the streets by threats from the “woke mob”, and silenced.
So what exactly had they been doing?
However we try to understand the rise of gender dysphoria, the conflict it represents in the mind of the sufferer is one that pitches the imagination against reality. This can be a disastrous conflict. In the world of drug abuse, people high on the more powerful hallucinogenic substances have believed they could fly. And putting to the test their inner conviction against biology had gravity have thrown themselves to their deaths.
Gender dysphoria is not a hallucinogenic drug, but it has taken the form of social psychological contagion. Where only a few years ago it was extremely rare, afflicting less than 0.01 per cent of the population, the numbers have now exploded.
Billboard Chris says the situation is so grave that he has taken to the streets to protest against the abuse of children in the name of trans activism.
He said: “I’m a father of two girls and I decided to take a stand against gender ideology. Children should be free to be who they are — not indoctrinated to believe they were born in the wrong body.
Puberty blockers are the first step in a medical pathway that brings physical harm to children. We are lied to about the effects of these drugs, and the cross-sex hormones which almost always follow. As the High Court of England laid out, children cannot give informed consent to these harmful, life-altering drugs. Our politicians refuse to listen, and our media refuse to report, so I’m having conversations across North America, one person at a time.”
In the face of the capture of the medical establishment by this social contagion, Chris, wearing a billboard with a simple message on it, invites passersby into conversation, and then films their interaction to use on the internet to highlight the issues. The results are both fascinating and moving. What becomes clear very quickly is that people have no definition or explanation of what it means to be “born into the wrong body”, and show no horror of the growing numbers of children who are sterilised and then subjected to amputation.
There can be few gentler or more effective ways to expose the danger and irrationality of this new sociological cult. And the fact that in Brussels of all places, the attempt to have such voluntary conversations should end up with the police arresting Chris and Lois should be deeply shocking.
Needless to say, both Chris and Lois are often harassed by trans activists who want to close the conversations down.
And this is what happened in Brussels. A particularly aggressive activist called for back-up from his local associates who turned out in force and began to harass the pair. Their threats became so aggressive that Chris and Lois called the police to protect them from physical harassment. The police responded quickly with about a dozen officers. They assessed the situation and then told Chris and Lois they had to remove the signs. The signs said, “You can’t be born into the wrong body” and “children cannot consent to puberty blockers”.
The police decided that the signs were controversial and the cause of the disturbance, and required them to be removed from public display. When it was put to them that freedom of speech and expression allowed such sentiments to be made publicly, and that the law was being broken by counter-demonstrators threatening violence, and the law allowed and in fact protected Chris and Lois, the police, having given the matter a little thought, preferred pragmatism to principle and insisted the signs be removed. Failure to do comply with their orders would lead to them being arrested. They refused to comply and were arrested, and their phones taken away from them with the signs.
It was at this point that Dr Miller raised the alarm.
As so often when Christians and other advocates for freedom of speech cone into conflicts with the police, the first reaction is to arrest them rather than those who are threatening, and after no criminal charges are laid against them (because they have not broken the law), to release them sometimes with an apology, usually without.
Such conflicts with the police in either Brussels or the cities of the UK follow similar patterns. Organisations like ADF and Christian Concern spend a great deal of time and energy confronting the authorities when they apply cultural norms against Christians protesting in the name of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. But we find ourselves in a time of cultural, political and philosophical crisis, when the law gives way either to the mob, or to the zeitgeist. We are engaging in a moment of civilisational crisis where even the rule of law is giving way.
<em>(Photo courtesy of ADF International)</em>
