Fox News reports:

A charity volunteer was arrested after she told police she ‘might’ be praying silently when they asked why she was standing on a public street near an abortion facility, according to a report from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) UK.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the Director of the UK March for Life, was standing near the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham in an area ADF UK called a ‘censorship zone,’ when police approached her after an onlooker complained she might be praying outside the abortion facility the report said. Birmingham’s authorities established a buffer zone around abortion clinics, which makes it illegal for an individual to engage in any act or attempted act of approval or disapproval as it relates to abortion and includes ‘verbal or written means’ like ‘prayer or counseling.’

‘It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind,’ Vaughan-Spruce said following her arrest. ‘I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion, inside the privacy of my own mind. Nobody should be criminalised for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK.’

The Worst Tyranny on Earth … Great Britain?

Let’s think of some places where silent prayer by Christians in public places is not illegal. Just off the top of my head, these include:

• The Islamic Republic of Iran.
• The Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea.
• Putin’s Russia.
• The People’s Republic of China.
• The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
• Communist Cuba.
• Afghanistan under the Taliban.

In fact, if we look back at history, we’d be hard-pressed to find any regime so intolerant, so fanatically committed to micromanaging and brainwashing its citizens, that it punished silent, unobtrusive, mental prayer. Not the ISIS “caliphate.” Not Stalin’s Soviet Union. Not Hitler’s Germany. Not Cambodia under the murderous Khmer Rouge.

You really need to look to places like the leftist cult compound of the Rev. Jim Jones in Guyana — where believers were forced to desecrate bibles and finally poison their children to prove their loyalty to their atheist, socialist “reverend” — to find an abuse quite like what we’re seeing in the officially Anglican United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

ISIS Is Tolerant by Comparison

Now for the second time in a month, I feel compelled to publicly admit that I’ve been wrong about something important. For more than a decade, I’ve argued that secularists want to impose on Christians their own version of dhimmitude.

That’s the Jim Crow, third-class citizenship which sharia Muslim regimes allot to Christians. As monotheists, we’re permitted discreet public worship. But we’re forbidden to obey Jesus’ command to preach the Gospel. We can’t ring church bells, hold public processions, accept converts from Islam, or compete as legal equals with Muslims. Our testimony is typically discounted in court. We can’t build new churches or make repairs to old ones.

That was the fate which I’ve long thought that secularists and leftist Christians had in mind for orthodox believers. But I see from this news story and the vicious legal crackdowns on pro-lifers by the Biden regime (and the Vatican) that I was being too sunny, too optimistic. Sharia dhimmitude, however inhumane, isn’t quite so totalitarian. Orthodox Muslims are content to sneer at and mistreat Christians. They don’t wish to brainwash them, and punish them for their unspoken, private thoughts.

The Most Intolerant False Religion in History

That special kind of madness is reserved for the Woke cult, the most rapaciously power-hungry, self-righteous, bigoted false religion in history. That’s one reason why I call it the “religion of Antichrist.” That, and because like a cancer cell in one’s colon, it steals the DNA of healthy tissue and uses it as a disguise so it can replicate and ravage the Body of Christ. The Woke cult counterfeits Christian compassion, concern for victims, and hunger for justice. But it morphs these good things into tumors that freeze the heart and rot the brain.

The Woke cult demands that we accept the reality of 47 genders, and allow people to switch sexes and demand the opposite sex’s proper privileges. Girls must welcome bearded boys into their locker rooms and restrooms. Female prisoners must put up with male rapists sharing their cells. Our words themselves are censored if we dare to “misgender” some fetishist who has decided (after careful study of thousands of hours of pornography) that he is a “male Lesbian.”

Woke cultists will even denounce people for refusing to pursue sexual relationships with “trans” partners who’ve surgically and chemically mutilated their bodies. That’s “transphobia,” you see, and it’s a sin.

The Woke cult just passed — thanks to worthless GOP cowards in Congress — the “Respect” for “Marriage” Act, which punishes citizens for holding to their rational, conscience-driven insistence on natural marriage, equating that with racist intolerance of unions between blacks and whites.

Thought Crimes Require Thought Police

Now Woke Britain is punishing silent prayer by pro-lifers near abortion mills. It’s tempting to wonder how such a bill could be enforced. If I were Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, I’d be tempted to defend myself using deception. Authorities who wish to punish you for praying have no right to the truth, any more than SS soldiers trying to hunt down Jews in Poland. You have every right to tell them whatever you want to stop them from imprisoning you for your own private thoughts.

So in Vaughan-Spruce’s shoes, facing prison time for thinking pro-life thoughts in the sacred precincts of a killing center, I might well deflect the State’s nonsense with some of my own. “Oh, I wasn’t praying, officer. I was having steamy fantasies about a soap opera actor.” Or perhaps I’d have some fun tacitly mocking the priests of Baal: “I was meditating on Systemic Racism and the threat posed to our Climate by carbon emissions.” And so on.

How would British authorities prove my statements untrue?

Be Careful What You Sneer At

To accomplish that, they’d have to take the next logical step toward demonic theocracy, and I don’t put it past them. Pro-choicers who gladly accept support from the Temple of Satan and welcome witches to cast spells against Donald Trump might start posting their clergy at the doors of abortion mills. They could sense the spiritual power of a genuine Christian prayer, in the same way Darth Vader senses a “disturbance in the Force.” Then they could testify to it in court as “expert witnesses” for the Crown.

But I really should stop writing satire. It gives the left ideas. In March 2020, I joked that people who wanted drag queens to spread gender dysphoria to children might as well bring COVID patients into nursing homes. Mere weeks later, blue state governors started doing exactly that. Clearly leftists are reading my satire columns, and mining them for policy proposals.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”