UK bishops warn against Parliament bill that would criminalize counseling on gender identity

The British bishops are warning against a proposed parliamentary bill that they say would criminalize counseling that helps people identify with their biological sex rather than an opposite-sex “gender.”

The draft conversion practices bill, proposed earlier this year in Parliament, seeks to “fill the gaps in criminal law to target conversion practices.”

“Conversion therapy” has long been defined as the practice of counseling homosexual people to adopt heterosexual sexual attraction. LGBT advocates have argued that such counseling is impossible and potentially harmful.

In recent years, the term has been applied to therapeutic services that attempt to steer people away from self-identified “gender” identities in order to accept their objective biological sex. The proposed U.K. bill would criminalize what the government calls “conversion practices” involving gender identity.

In a Nov. 10 statement, Liverpool Archbishop John Sherrington, who chairs the social justice department of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, expressed “serious concern” about the bill, which he described as “very broad in scope.”

He noted that the bill purports to outlaw “abusive” counseling, which he affirmed the Catholic Church already “opposes … in all circumstances.” But current law already outlaws such practices, he argued.

The new bill “proposes to extend the legal definition of abusive practices in ways that threaten a person’s fundamental rights, including freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression,” he said.

The legislation “will also create uncertainty around lawful pastoral care by the Church, family life and open conversations that can take place in a range of social settings.”

The legislation could further hamper the Catholic Church’s ability to “proclaim an authentic understanding of the human person with clarity, simplicity, love and respect,” he said.

He urged British politicians to “abandon” the bill and focus instead on existing legal protections for those facing abuse.

A similar dispute played out in the U.S. recently, one that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court in March striking down a Colorado ban on “conversion therapy.”

“The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth,” the court said when it issued the ruling.

Alternately, Catholic bishops in Switzerland in May endorsed a national legal ban on so-called conversion measures aimed at people who identify as LGBT, though they argued that legitimate pastoral care, counseling, and psychotherapy be expressly shielded from any prohibition.