Michigan’s House of Representatives has passed a hate speech bill making it a criminal offence to misgender an individual.
Under the new bill, known as HB 4474, offenders will face up to five years in prison or a $10,000 fine if found to be guilty of “intimidation” by “terrorizing, frightening, or threatening” someone with the use of wrong gender pronouns.
According to the bill, “’Intimidate’ means a wilful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.”
Critics have slammed the bill as an assault on free speech, warning the definition of “harassment” is ambiguous and open to subjective interpretation.
“If passed, penalties would be based on how the supposed victim and court ‘feel’ about a particular matter,” the Daily Mail reported.
“What constitutes as being deemed ‘intimidation and harassment’ would be up to the interpretation of the listener and the local prosecutor.”
Professor Emeritus William Wagner, former federal judge and legal counsel in the U.S. Senate said those championing the legislation intent on using it as a weapon against conservatives.
“Make no mistake about it,” he told The Daily Wire. “Those advocating for this legislation will wield these policies as a weapon capable of destroying conservative expression or viewpoints grounded in the sacred.
“One merely needs to look at the scores of cases brought against schools, churches, businesses, and individuals around our country. Proponents use these laws to silence and financially cripple those who dare to adhere to a different viewpoint and oppose their agenda.”
Once again, laws brought in under the guise of “anti-intimidation” will be used to intimidate, terrorize, frighten, and threaten anyone who rejects the new state religion with its new moral law code.
One only needs to look at how such laws are wielded against conservatives and Christians in other Western nations in an effort to enforce ideological compliance through lawfare intimidation.
Recently, a Christian maths teacher in New Zealand was fired for “serious misconduct” after refusing to use a female student’s preferred male name and pronoun.
Similarly, in the United Kingdom, a young Christian father was banned from teaching for saying “Well done, girls,” to a group of students, one of whom preferred male pronouns.
Meanwhile, in Australia, there is a growing number of LGBTQ lawfare cases targeting Christians for conscientious objection, as Rod Lampard recently noted.
Legislation of this sort targets anyone and everyone not willing to live by lies. Christians committed to acting consistently in all areas of life according to a Christian worldview are being told to abandon their faith or else face the consequences.
To quote G.K. Chesterton, truly these are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
