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It’s a strange thing indeed that Australian state governments have taken a sudden interest in the prayers of citizens.

The NSW Government recently followed Victoria’s lead and made it illegal to pray for a gay or gender confused person – even at that person’s request.

Outlawing prayer, as the state’s Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 does, naturally begs the question: Why?

What are they afraid of?

Are our politicians suggesting that prayers might have some kind of otherworldly, transforming power?

Is the prohibition against prayer an acknowledgment that prayer actually works?

But if, as I suspect, they do not believe in the efficacy of prayer, then why ban it?

If prayer is nothing more than empty words spoken into the ether to a make-believe Sky Daddy, what’s the problem?

Will they criminalise putting out milk and cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve next?

It’s curious that our government is not against prayer per se. It only finds certain prayers problematic.

It’s not illegal to pray that your neighbour drops dead. But it is illegal to pray that your gay neighbour starts being attracted to the opposite sex.

(I’m not suggesting it’s appropriate to pray for people to die. I’m just making the point that, unlike praying for a gay person to suppress their urges, it’s not against the law.)

And what’s really strange is that the ban on prayer applies even if your gay neighbour asks for it!

Follow the logic…

If my straight neighbour asks for prayer to control his urges, I’m perfectly entitled to pray for him.

But if my gay neighbour asks for prayer to control his urges, I must discriminate against him on the grounds of his sexuality!

The Left doesn’t hate bigotry after all!

Explain to me how this works…

It’s not illegal for my gay friend to ask me to ask God to help him be straight. But it is illegal for me to pass the message on, you know, to God.

And is it not passing strange that the conversion practices ban only works one way?

It’s not illegal to pray for a gender confused person to be granted access to puberty blockers for a sex change.

But it is illegal to pray for that same gender confused person to feel comfortable in the body God gave them.

The government will let me pray that you receive help from doctors to change your body into a different sex, but not that you will have the grace to accept the body you’re in.

If a straight friend decided he wanted to be gay and asked me to pray that he would find other men attractive, I could do so without fear of prosecution.

But if a gay friend decided he wanted to be straight, I’d be risking prosecution by clasping my hands in prayer.

So you can pray for gays and gender confused people, but you cannot pray “Thy will be done”. You must pray only “Thy Rainbow will be done”.

Speaking of the Rainbow lobby, they argue that the ban on prayer is because it is harmful to suggest that gay or trans people are somehow “broken”.

I’d counter that we are all broken. But I digress.

Anna Brown from the Human Rights Law Centre said…

“We need to look to a world where lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans people of faith can be embraced as whole and human by the faith communities they love.”

It amuses me that the Human Rights Law Centre is now telling “faith communities” around the “world” how they must believe and what they must “embrace”.

So… that’s Communist China, North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran… and the Human Rights Law Centre who just don’t do freedom of religion.

Or freedom of conscience.

Or freedom of association.

Or freedom of speech.

Which only leaves… nope… that’s your basic freedoms all gone.

People should be free to believe whatever they like about sexuality and gender. That’s the beauty of a free society.

But when you insist you have the power to police the prayers of strangers to a God you are sure does not exist, you have become the very thing you claim to detest.

That said, Nebuchadnezzar would approve.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report.

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