In Depth:  Christian Concern / EN

Core Issues Trust (CIT), a counselling service that offers help to people who voluntarily come to talk about their same-sex attraction, has been told by Barclays they are withdrawing its banking services in mid-September.

Led by Mike Davidson, the group received abusive calls and messages, and has been dropped by multiple service providers, including Paypal and Mailchimp since being targeted through a social media campaign.

The teacher behind the ‘No Outsiders’ curriculum which caused protests outside his Birmingham school in 2019, said in April that he now doesn’t expect people to celebrate LGBT lifestyles.

He said he received a letter of praise for the curriculum from a Church of England vicar who suggested that tolerating LGBT was realistic and celebrating it all was not. Andrew Moffat said that: ‘…stuck in my throat. My initial response was to accuse him of being homophobic and of asking me to accept his homophobia.’

Schools will apparently be issued with guidelines on transgender pupils in March.

They are being drafted by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (ECHR) and are likely to suggest that pupils should be allowed to change gender ‘at any time’, and that parents and pupils should refer to children by their ‘preferred pronoun’. It is reported that cross-dressing should be allowed and that a pupil’s chosen gender may be kept confidential from the child’s parents.

A Christian magistrate has been removed from office by the Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, in March after sharing his conviction in a media interview that there is not enough evidence to show that placing children in the care of same sex couples is in their best interest.

Richard Page, who for 15 years was a magistrate and sat on the Family Panel of the Kent Central Magistrates Court, had less than a month to run as a Justice of the Peace. It is ironic that the interview for which he was dismissed occurred as part of a TV debate about Christians being squeezed out of public life.

A BBC Three Counties radio presenter, Ian Lee, repeatedly referred to the Bible and Christian Barry Trayhorn’s views on biblical standards for sexual relationships as hateful, and called him ‘obnoxious’ in an interview on 3 November.

Barry, who is a Pentecostal church minister, was being interviewed after having been forced to resign from his job at Littlehay prison, one of eight exclusive sex offender jails in the UK. He had begun work there as a gardener and then been asked by the chaplain to undertake some preaching work in the prison chapel. He had read some verses from 1 Corinthians 6 and had not singled out the section concerning gay sex, but had rather focused on repentance and forgiveness. A complaint had been made sometime after the service and the harassment Trayhorn experienced after this made it untenable for him to continue his work.

A Christian nursery nurse, who was sacked after airing her views on homosexuality and marriage in answer to a question from a homosexual colleague, won a discrimination claim against her former employer on 4 June.

Sarah Mbuyi was fired from her job at a nursery in West London after having a conversation with a homosexual colleague in which she explained the biblical position on homosexuality and marriage.

Two Christian street preachers have been cleared of all charges.

This was after they were arrested by the police in Basildon and Hereford respectively, it was reported in late May.

In a dramatic intervention on 13 March, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) informed lawyers representing Aisling Hubert that it will take over and drop the private prosecutions brought by Miss Hubert against doctors who were prepared to offer abortions on gender grounds.

A letter states that ‘on the current evidence before the court, there is insufficient evidence to form a realistic prospect of conviction’ and ‘the public interest considerations in not pursuing a prosecution outweigh those in favour, as concluded and set out in 2013’.