The Evangelical group Christian Voice (described in a hostile Wikipedia entry as a “fundamentalist Christian pressure group”) has been dismissed by one churchman as “a disgrace”, and its claims to represent Christians as “absurd”. Well, maybe they are absurd, and maybe they aren’t (though I have to say that I find myself agreeing with Christian Voice more often than I disagree). But this month they have published a lengthy special report on what they describe as the “scandal” of the forced adoption of children seized by social workers, which I would have thought ought to be taken very seriously by anyone who cares about justice. Largely because these adoptions are carried out after child seizures have been executed on the basis of what often seems like no more than the unsupported instinct of social workers, and are imposed by secret family courts, whose doings cannot be reported on pain of contempt of court (many parents are imprisoned because they defy this monstrous law by going public), this is a problem which is hugely underestimated by public opinion. Sometimes, journalists like Christopher Booker can report what are often harrowing cases: but only when a member of Parliament has broken silence on a particular case in the House of Commons, under protection of Parliamentary privilege. Hundreds of children have been torn from their parents in this way, often in the middle of the night. They, and their parents, have no recourse to law: they cannot appeal; they are entirely in the hands of judges who behave in what sometimes seems like an entirely arbitrary way—an inevitable result, surely, of any secretly conducted judicial system. Christian Voice quotes an article by Christopher Booker published in the Sunday Telegraph in June, which I remember seeing at the time: