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July 27, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:28:14

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #706

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Loathe Seasers for today, Thursday, the 27th of July, I am your host Connor, joined today by Lois McClatchy-Miller.
	Thank you for having me here.
	Lois McClatchy-Miller, that's the one.
	Congrats on the wedding.
	Thank you.
	Kick off the introductions for our audience if you don't mind.
	Well, it's a real pleasure to be here.
	Thank you for having me on.
	I have the privilege of being a cultural commentator and also get to work for a group called ADF UK, Alliance Defending Freedom UK.
	We're a Christian group that likes to protect everybody's right to speak freely and to express their beliefs and to live according to their conscience in the UK and across the world.
	So I'm sure we've got plenty to cover and plenty to chat about as we work through the stories that are hitting the news today.
	Yes, well for those who might not be familiar with ADF, your group defended Isabel Warnsbruce, the woman that was prosecuted twice for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.
	One of the most dystopian things that's happened in Britain recently, so well done on that.
	Thank you, thank you.
	And speaking of topics, we're going to be talking about how Snow White has gone woke, Just riffing on the decaying state of our culture, I suppose.
	How Criticising Pride is a War Crime, and no, that's not an exaggeration, and Mail Order Abortions in the UK.
	It's going to be a policy-heavy one, but I think a really important one.
	So, without further ado, let's jump into today's stories.
	So there's a new Snow White film written by Barbie director Greta Gerwig.
	It looks abysmal, frankly.
	I thought we'd examine the indoctrination of children, the dissolution of marriage, all through cultural products, and how Disney is Looking to go broke as well as going woke, which is quite encouraging.
	Before we jump into it, here's one of Disney's routine dumpster fires.
	If you'd like to subscribe to our website for as little as £5 a month, you get content like this, which is Harry dragging me to see Black Panther 2.
	And we decided to review this.
	It's not good.
	We didn't expect it to be good.
	Uh, it's just as you would typical poisoning the well of racial propaganda and the story is utterly incoherent and it looks like Snow White's going to go the same way, which is a bit gutting.
	You actually drew lots of this to my attention and this has been in the headlines recently because of the clips that have resurfaced.
	I thought that the original Snow White It's, what was it, Disney's first animated film in 1937?
	I think it's one of the most successful animated films of all time.
	Adjusted for inflation, I think I wrote it down actually, it's the 12th highest grossing film of all time, so 2.36 billion.
	So proper cultural touchstone, and now they've decided in the trend of pretty much every Disney remake that they've made recently to destroy it.
	Have you watched any of the new Disney remakes?
	I watched a few of them and I think what you said about this being a cultural moment is really important because this film, made in 1937, is really about good, beauty, grace, all those kind of things.
	Light defeating darkness.
	It's about good defeating evil.
	It's a very classic tale.
	Typical of the genre at that point.
	It kind of carries some kind of Christian overtones about dealing with difficulty and strife in the world and overcoming it through togetherness and love and all the kind of things that we know of a Disney princess.
	So to take that kind of theme and to completely overturn it It is kind of marking that cultural trajectory that Disney has brought over the last, say, 80 years.
	And I think it's important to say that nobody thinks that it's bad for a woman to dream about becoming president or whatever the new Snow White does in this movie.
	No one's saying that no woman can have ambition.
	Other than waiting for her prince charming.
	But I think with this version of the original plot, what's happened now, as they've said, in fact, women should not be waiting for their prince.
	Women should not want to get married.
	And you know what?
	They're just perfect without any man.
	They don't need any help.
	And they're just going to defeat evil all by themselves.
	It's a completely different narrative and different moral to the story that Disney had, or the original author, even before Disney had intended.
	Yeah, it treats atomization as a prerequisite for female ambition and being your true self.
	And also, it's not... How do I phrase this?
	I'm going to step on a landmine, fine.
	Saying that women's aspirations should be to enter the halls of power which have been traditionally male-held, I think actually erases female forms of power.
	I mean, folks like Mary Harrington and Louise Perry have written about this.
	Traditionally, it's not that women were always oppressed by the patriarchy, it's actually that they staffed women's institutes, they Or the custodians of culture, upholding historical societies, they controlled the reputations in the communities they lived in, so they had vast amounts of social power capital.
	And also with women's work before the Industrial Revolution, the roles were not interchangeable.
	And so husbands and wives had mutual subsistence, reliance on each other.
	Otherwise, the husband wouldn't be getting clothed and fed.
	The babies wouldn't have been taken care of.
	And as well, women were paying rent to their feudal lords and chickens and things like that, because that's what they were rearing.
	There was a whole parallel economy of mutual respect there.
	And that has been dissolved both by the Industrial and the sexual revolutions.
	And it's sad to see Disney withering away and playing into this unisex presumption where all women can aspire to is being a simulacrum of maleness.
	It's something that we've really lost is that beauty of female and male distinctiveness.
	In the sexual revolution they suddenly said that not only are women equal to men, which is correct, they're equal in worth and value as equal human beings, but they're not only equal but they are the same as, and therefore they should be doing exactly the same jobs, should be exactly the same, not given any kind of Extra help because they're also taking care of children, that women should be moulded and fitted into a workplace that was designed for men, and that this workplace shouldn't be moulded and fitted around them, which would have been a better win for women, in my opinion.
	So now what we have today, and it's really kind of testified there, this movie, is we have two extremes.
	We have either extreme feminism that says women are better than men, and women don't need no help from men, and we can just do everything, and men are silly, and men don't have a role in this narrative, and that's what This film is telling little boys, by the way, is saying that.
	The prince is silly and unnecessary, and that's not true.
	We also have this other kind of extreme Red Pill take, which is very reactionary to that, which says that women are unnecessary and women are silly and women need to get out and not take on this model that you've mentioned, but rather be kind of 1950s, back in the kitchen, make me a sandwich type patriarchy, I guess.
	Both of those say that one sex is better than the other, and that's just clearly not how we were designed to be.
	There's two sexes on this planet because they work together Complimentarily and in harmony.
	Women can succeed with a successful man supporting her.
	A man can succeed in his role with a successful woman supporting him.
	It's meant to be done together.
	So it's a real shame to see things like Disney, which are such a cultural influence, just throw this away.
	Yeah, well, one of the reactionary to the radical feminism takes that I've seen fairly recently, and you can see this from Tate or even someone who shows you've been on, Pearl Davis, saying that, yeah, men, it's fine to be polygamous and go out and cheat.
	And that does treat women as not having a complementary moral role, but being a series of Commodities that you can accrue as a marker of male success, and I think that that is a kind of cope within the paradigm that has devalued marriage and the complementarity of the sexes.
	It's a Darwinian adaptation to the paradigm that feminism has set, and I don't think we're going to get out of it in that way.
	So I think it's worth jumping into exactly what the star, if we want to call her that, Rachel Zegler, has said.
	She, when she was being interviewed, I believe it was by Andrew Garford of all people, You know, the better Spider-Man.
	She said, you don't normally see Snow White's that are of Latin descent, even though Snow White is a really big deal in Spanish-speaking countries.
	Bianca Neves is a huge icon, whether you're talking about the Disney cartoon or just different iterations and the grim fairy tale and all the stories that come with it.
	But you don't particularly see people who look like me who are playing roles like that.
	When it was announced, it was a huge thing that was trending on Twitter for days because of all the people being angry at me.
	And Andrew Garfield said, ah, those people, the people we need to educate, the people we need to love into awareness.
	And Zegler concluded, we need to love them in the right direction.
	At the end of the day, I have a job to do that I'm very excited to do.
	I get to be a Latina princess.
	Love them in the right direction.
	That's a very Maoist struggle session of you, isn't it?
	I mean, I just don't like the gaslighting of the idea that if people object to the casting of a... She says she's a proud Latina.
	She recently did West Side Story, the remake there, so she can sing, fair enough.
	But if anyone else were to come in, and I know it's Hypocrisy is pointless to point out to these people because it's all about power, but if anyone else were to come in and play Pocahontas as a white woman, you know, like Elizabeth Warren, she would complain, rightly so.
	But if you come in and play a Germanic princess and European heritage people get offended, suddenly it's an issue.
	I mean, it's okay to just denigrate historically white culture, I suppose, but there you go.
	Yeah, I think for me, I'm not overly fussed about if a character is played by someone of a different race than originally was written into the book.
	I think when we read a book or have a story in our head, we all kind of imagine a different looking person anyway until we're seeing somebody on screen.
	But the thing about this is once you pick apart one part of quite a silly fairy tale, I remember this is called Snowy and the Seven Dwarfs, I mean once you start to pick about one thing and say like this is a political commentary and must be changed then you actually have to start changing everything because it's not a political commentary it's a silly fairy tale and you know what is it not problematic I think you raised this earlier that it's maybe problematic to also have seven dwarfs Oh, that's going to come up very shortly, but yes.
	So Zegler has confirmed that it's going to be politically correct.
	So she says, people are making jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it's like, yeah, it is.
	Oh, thanks for admitting it.
	Because it needed that.
	It's an 85 year old cartoon and our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a function beyond someday my prince will come.
	Now, she doesn't sound insufferable enough already from me reading the quotes.
	We have two clips that have been circulating on social media.
	Let's play the first one.
	You said you were bringing a modern edge to it on stage.
	What do you mean by that?
	I just mean that it's no longer 1937, and we absolutely wrote a Snow White.
	She's not going to be saved by the prince.
	She's not going to be saved by the prince, and she's not going to be dreaming about true love.
	She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be, and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.
	And so, it's just a really incredible story for, I think, young people everywhere to see themselves in.
	Snow White is running for president.
	I'm launching my campaign.
	So again, defining femininity and its virtues by just having and holding male power.
	Didn't they recently do this with the Aladdin remake, where Jasmine didn't aspire to choose her husband for herself rather than arrange marriage, but she just wanted to be sultan?
	She wanted to be a sultan, which I'm not sure is a perfect solution to solve the No, no.
	But that was actually the message of the Barbie film, which I know you haven't seen, but it was like, OK, well, you know, patriarchal dominance is terrible.
	If you keep people in a subordinate position with no political representation and no job, it's evil.
	But it's good if women do it.
	It's like, right, OK, well, thank you for the naked power grab if you just want to empower yourself and control everyone.
	I appreciate the honesty.
	And then there's this insufferable clip from an interview that was circulating recently.
	The cartoon was made 85 years ago, and therefore it's extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world.
	And so when we came to reimagining the actual role of Snow White, it became about the fairest of them all, meaning who is the most just and who can become a fantastic leader.
	And the reality is, you know, Snow White has to learn a lot of lessons about coming into her own power before she can come into power over her kingdom.
	Also the fact that she's not going to be saved by the prince.
	And she's the proactive one.
	Anyway, so that gives your ears a break at least.
	If we just go back to the, if you don't mind, go back to the tabs, please, John.
	So, I thought we'd move on to the dwarves bit, because you've already pre-raised this.
	There was discourse before this came out, where Peter Dinklage, when he even heard that this story was announced, and again, this is part of my issue with Zegler, if you think the cartoon's really dated, why are you wearing it as a skin suit and standing atop its successes?
	All of the work of people that have gone before you, you are capitalizing off of their creativity and then hollowing out for your own political purposes.
	Dinklage is doing the same thing here, and he's also screwing over other dwarf actors after making millions playing a dwarf on Game of Thrones.
	And I seem to remember he was in Elf in like 2002, and the entire point of his character was that he was being called an elf and got really angry about it.
	So he's living up to his name, I suppose.
	He was on Mark Maron's WTF podcast, and he said, there's a lot of hypocrisy going on.
	Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White.
	But you're still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
	Take a step back and look at what you're doing here, it makes no sense to me.
	You're progressive in one way, and you're still making that effing backward story about seven dwarves living in a cave together.
	What are you doing, man?
	Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox?
	Must have been a very large soapbox.
	I guess I'm not loud enough.
	I don't know which studio that is, but they were so proud of it.
	All of them respect the actress and all people who thought they were doing the right thing, but I'm just like, what are you doing?
	Has anyone explained to him that they're fairy tale creatures?
	Well, the thing is, once you start making a political statement about one part of the story, you can't stop.
	And that's part of the problem that's been caused by this kind of new take on Snow White.
	If you're going to update one piece because that's so problematic, then every part of it is problematic and needs also to be updated.
	But then, you know, that's kind of where woke ideology starts to fall apart is, you know, do you have representation?
	And do you do hire seven dwarf actors to play the seven dwarfs?
	Because, you know, you would never hire If it was Snow White and her seven female friends, you couldn't play male people to play those people.
	Well, it turns out you can in Barbie if you're the Doctor Barbie.
	In this day and age.
	But we're so careful these days to make sure that the That minority groups are represented, especially when they have a carved out role in a historic tale.
	But they haven't done that in this case because then, you know, it opens up other problems and other difficulties about how, you know, if that representation is fair.
	So basically, as soon as you start meddling with one part of an old story, everything's going to fall, come crashing down, and you end up with a story that's nothing like what it ever was.
	It's not a fairy tale, it's just a piece of political commentary from one side of the agenda.
	It's just acid on our ability to suspend disbelief because these aren't people with dwarfism.
	They're mythical creatures that mine diamonds and live in a hill together.
	Her finger was pricked by a wicked witch.
	I mean, there's so many elements of the story that it's not a true story.
	I wonder if they have to be reminded of this when they're doing their casting.
	Yeah.
	Also, I would say the dwarves being dwarves, an all-male group of short people trying to live in a larger world, is part of the reason why they need her because they're dependents and she takes care of them compassionately.
	So she cultivates the ability to take care of these people in order to end up being a compassionate and non-naive wife for the prince.
	And so that's kind of a female hero myth.
	And in that unisex assumption of that women should just aspire to be equitably participatory in power, we've erased the female hero myth.
	We've erased feminine virtues.
	And that's why they can't articulate quite literally what a woman is, because they don't know what she should do.
	Yeah, that's a really interesting point that you've raised.
	In saying that the fairy tale was so outdated and that the woman had no role, you erased that role that she did have.
	But it clearly shows that that's not valued by the casting today.
	It's not valued that she had this compassionate care for For those who needed help in her society and her fairytale land.
	And I wonder if that's kind of reflective or is, you know, issuing forward that thought in common day belief that a woman's role, whether that's taking care of children in the home, whether that's having, you know, a role that isn't a kind of glittering career, but instead of opting for a nine to five job and getting your fulfillment and your, Your achievement, your sense of worth from taking care of a family.
	I mean, that's been completely erased today to the expense of loads of women across the country who do live like this, but don't live in a kind of London bubble where, you know, policies are made.
	I think that does kind of impact, you know, the way that the politicians view women as well and the policies they advance to help them may not actually be speaking to their individual lives.
	Yeah, I know lots of women, Mary's made this point before, that lots of women exist that don't have careers, they have jobs.
	Exactly.
	And so they're not the privileged knowledge class like Charlotte Proudman, constantly complaining that mother care isn't unisex person care or whatever it is, who benefit from things like their companies under ESG scores sponsoring their ability to have abortions so they can get back in the office.
	Or the government paying for their childcare up from nine months.
	Exactly.
	I mean, these are the kind of policies that are advanced through Parliament, because let's be honest, while we do have a lot of female representation in Parliament these days, we don't actually have a lot of motherhood representation, or at least mothers who have currently, you know, got responsibilities to take care of children.
	So we don't actually have that representation in policy when it comes to making policies for women.
	And that's why, you know, the kind of pinnacle of the conservative kind of mother care has been getting women straight back into the workplace as soon as they've given birth, basically.
	You know, this huge emphasis on providing daycare for children so that women are able to outsource that to the state and go back to the office and, you know, do their daily nine-to-five grind that many people don't find fulfilling because many people have jobs and not careers.
	So I think this idea that a woman is, you know, now just a prototype of a man wanting to work, wanting to be away from their family and outsource that labor and diminish the value of that labor, that's had real consequences and impact for women across our country who feel ignored, left out and unsupported.
	Well, speaking of people that are being erased, have you seen what they've done with the dwarves now that Peter Dinklage has kicked up a stink?
	I've heard one or two things.
	This is quite funny.
	So these photos got leaked to the Mail.
	I mentioned this in my Barbie review the other day, but they really do have to be seen to be believed.
	Now, the Mail calls them Snow White and the Seven Politically Correct Companions.
	So if we just scroll down... Oh.
	Right.
	For our audio listeners, there's only one dwarf among the seven.
	They're very diverse.
	There's homeless Jesus in the back.
	There's a couple of guys that look like they stumbled off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean 5.
	And then a black woman, a black man, a mixed race man, and a dwarf right at the front.
	So apparently in the film, There were rumours that the dwarves were not going to be computer generated fully, but they are going to be somewhat, and they're not dwarves at all, they're shape-shifting magical fairy tale creatures, so this is just their human acceptable form.
	So that's just not Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, is it?
	It's not even remotely.
	And the guy up front there in the blue, that's the stand-in for the prince, and his name is just Jonathan.
	Oh!
	So she meets him really early on, I would assume by this scene.
	And what, is he just going to be the sort of hapless white male idiot who's led around by the strong, empowered woman like we see in pretty much every advert and film these days?
	And also, just the point on the Disney remakes, there is something you can do in animation that looks more enchanting than you can do in live action.
	And lots of the costume and set designs that they've done in the recent films, I'm thinking Cinderella and Aladdin, they just look gauche and kind of rubbish.
	This does look like an Amdram theatre production.
	I don't know who they drafted into the costume design, but it certainly wasn't as inventive as Barbie.
	Let's put it that way.
	There's also a tweet in here that Zegler had deleted.
	When she announced when she was Snow White, she says, Yes, I am Snow White.
	No, I'm not bleaching my skin for the role.
	So, very consciously race-based casting.
	Again, as you said, it's just a piece of political propaganda and it's not got any thoughts to the actual integrity of the piece.
	And because that's the case, Disney are on a very downward trend.
	So Little Mermaid came out recently.
	Didn't look very good, I'll put it that way.
	And it barely broke even at the box office.
	So you're getting some real diminishing returns here.
	Because Aladdin, the Lion King remake, and the Jungle Book, I haven't seen either of the latter two.
	Because they all looked a bit uncanny valley as well.
	Did you see the CG in those?
	I didn't see it yet.
	So they, again, it just doesn't translate over from animation, which is kind of charming and whimsical, to it looks like a bad video game.
	They crossed a billion dollars at the box office.
	Little Mermaid made $560 million worldwide, which sounds like a lot, but when you combine about a $200 to $300 billion budget and then double that for marketing... Very Disney classic.
	Yeah, not excellent.
	I mean, The Lion King made $543 million in America alone, and $1.66 billion globally.
	So, diminishing returns on the marketing here.
	I mean, the redhead erasure hasn't gone down very well, and I don't think they will with Snow White either.
	Did you see the Beauty and the Beast remake as well?
	I did see the Beauty and the Beast remake.
	Okay, what did you think?
	Beauty and the Beast is interesting.
	I was listening to a little piece about this earlier from someone who's tracked Disney through the ages.
	You know, back when Beauty and the Beast came out initially, that was seen as a real change in shift of direction for Disney.
	Because Belle, unlike her predecessors, unlike Snow White, She actually wasn't saved by the prince type, and she didn't take a tumble from grace.
	Cinderella, she was meant to be a princess, tumbled into this role where she was actually a servant, and through her grace and humility, Eventually found her way back to being graced again with riches and things like that.
	Belle was different.
	Belle was actually seen as the first feminist princess who didn't take any fall from grace with humility and instead fought her way back.
	There's still a romance element in there because it's still historic and they still had that Influence of the time.
	But it seems a change of direction.
	So it did make me smile to see that come out before Snow White and to see this kind of feminist portrayal only amplified now going back further and changing all of those narratives to fit more of this feminist icon, feminist hero.
	And turning the Prince into somebody who was, I mean, in that film he's obviously the Beast, so it gives a very different spin to what the male hero is.
	And now with the modern takes coming in, Frozen and all these other ones, the Prince character, although he's rarely like a Prince anymore, he's always a bit stupid, always a bit of a bumbler.
	Isn't the Prince in Frozen the villain?
	So Prince and Frozen is the villain and all the male characters, in my opinion, are just like, they're comic but a little bit silly.
	A little bit like your best friend who you're helping out a little bit and taking along the journey for this epic feminist movement.
	And there's nothing wrong with females having ambition and wanting to, you know, Go out and change the world for the better.
	But I think to say that it can only be done to the belittlement of men and without having that partnership that, you know, that both can flourish and strive to change the world together.
	I think we're just we're missing out on something that is not going to be helpful for young boys watching it.
	It's not even helpful for the young girls watching it either.
	So Disney have really missed a trick in the way that they're shaping the young people of today.
	I have quite a funny relationship with Beauty and the Beast because I did it as a stage play back when I was about 18.
	Oh, what character did you play?
	So I was stage managing it.
	I was not in nearly enough shape or confidence to play the real hero of the story, which is Gaston.
	I actually found Beauty and the Beast quite funny because both the adaptations, in the same way that Barbie did, got it wrong.
	Because in the revised adaptation, they cast Luke Evans to play Gaston, who's shorter and an openly gay Hollywood actor.
	And then they had Josh Gad play LeFou, who is meant to be secretly in love with Gaston the entire time.
	So it's almost like poking fun and saying, oh, if you're really macho, you're secretly gay.
	The same thing they've done with the Kens in the opening scene of Barbie, which is just a bit odd.
	But in the original, it's like, right, well, if you look at the context of the time, Gaston was actually the hero.
	Because in the town, of course, he was the noble hunter that everyone respected and he turned down all of his gaggle of sycophantic women to try and marry Belle and have lots of kids and then slay the werewolves and tragically Belle to his death.
	So Disney's been getting it wrong for a very long time.
	Justice for Gascon.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They also recently added, this was ridiculous, on Disney Plus a bunch of trigger warnings to their stuff.
	Oh really?
	Yeah, so they added one to Dumbo for the gym crows.
	Doesn't look great a few years on, but still, we've got a strong enough constitution to recognise we don't need a trigger warning before watching a cartoon elephant.
	Peter Pan about the Native Americans, and Lady and the Tramp for the Siamese cats.
	Oh, get a grip, come on, really?
	In the meantime we have, like, Drag Queen and Story Hour going to school, so no parental responsibility.
	In the meantime, as well, they then got all of the new animations, which are cultural non-entities.
	I mean, they had Soul, which nobody watched, they had Elemental, which had just come out, and then they had Onward and Lightyear, which mainly marketed themselves off of having gay characters in it.
	And it's like, nobody watched them.
	For a reason.
	You know, it wasn't just Saudi Arabia that didn't show up for that box office.
	So they've all flopped, and then Lucasfilm, they've managed to destroy Lucasfilm by contaminating their reputation.
	Indiana Jones 5, which should have been a surefire moneymaker, I mean, number 4 was dreadful, it made loads of money.
	It's only just squeaked past $300 billion.
	And I say only, because the budget was possibly $400 million plus marketing.
	So it might only make half its money back.
	Indiana Jones, a catastrophic flop.
	That's unthinkable from the original trilogy because they're excellent films.
	I think it's the, people are calling it the Phoebe Waller-Bridge effect, where they insert a brand new female protagonist who's super strong and quippy and actually denigrates the legacy of the male character.
	Like Rave from Star Wars.
	It's just battery acid on a franchise.
	And so what this has resulted in, Well, you just don't want to go to the cinema on a Friday night and be preached at.
	I mean, people want to go and see films to relax and enjoy an old classic tale, you know, good versus evil and just escape from the world for a bit.
	And instead, you've just got the same politics that you're seeing on the news.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And this has resulted in Disney hemorrhaging so much profit.
	They've been trying to sell it off, but they've just been seen as damaged goods.
	So CEO Bob Iger said he might sell some of the company's cable channels.
	This is probably after the Fox acquisition about two years ago now.
	Its stock has fallen by more than half in the past two years.
	It's fired thousands of employees and Disney Plus is losing billions of dollars annually because they lost in the last quarter, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu, 659 million and 4 million subscribers.
	So we were just sick of it.
	So my brave prediction is that Snow White is going to do really badly at the box office, and judging by Zegla's comments, it deserves to.
	Let's go to the less fun topics today, shall we?
	But I think they're very important to go through.
	John, do you mind doing the other tab, please?
	Thank you very much.
	Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, tech issues today.
	So criticizing Pride is now wartime, and no, war crime, rather.
	No, I wish I wasn't joking.
	There we go.
	Let's look at the selective application of blasphemy laws recently.
	If you want to find out about blasphemy, you can go over and subscribe to our website for as little as £5 a month, get all our premium content and watch me subject Karl to a struggle session on whether or not Jesus Christ was a socialist.
	Short version, no.
	No, he wasn't.
	No.
	In fact, Marxism is the philosophy of the devil, and I'll allow you to elaborate further on that if you want to watch that in your own time.
	But first on to the UK.
	There was recently a Conservative councillor who was kicked out of the party for tweeting that pride is not a virtue, it's a sin.
	This is King Lawal, what a name, from Northamptonshire.
	And he's suspended from the party pending an investigation involving CCHQ for tweeting, when did pride become a thing to celebrate?
	Because of pride, Satan fell as an archangel.
	Pride is not a virtue, but a sin.
	Those who have pride should repent of their sins and return to Jesus Christ.
	He can save you, alongside an image of a verse from Isaiah 3.9.
	He was forced to resign from his job in a nursing and care business as well, removed as a trustee from an organization that helps children get access to green spaces, and suspended as an academy council member for Weavers Academy, which is a secondary school.
	So, The reason for this was Councillor Jason Smithers, who's the leader of the Northamptonshire Council, again, Conservative, with conservatives like these who needs enemies.
	And he says, we're an inclusive group.
	We continue to be committed to reducing inequality within our communities and creating a fair and inclusive environment for everyone.
	We fully support our LGBTQ plus community as we support all community.
	Where does this community live?
	Who are its members?
	Who are you speaking for?
	Are you actually meant to be representing the North Northamptonshire people who elected this man in?
	And it seems that he actually represents their views, or at least the views of some of them.
	As we'll get onto later, it's actually acceptable for some religions, some Abrahamic religions, to discriminate against gay people or whatever hypothetical alphabet constituency you would like to put together, but you're not Christians.
	You're not allowed to say that the state sponsorship of something that goes against my religion is sinful.
	Turns out.
	This is what the Conservatives lose though.
	Sir Lawal, in his defence, said, As the only black councillor in the whole of Northamptonshire, I know what it's like to be in the minority, and I would never discriminate against anyone.
	Why are you using the intersectional framework?
	Be a conservative, please.
	Just say no, I affirmatively believe this and you should not be persecuting me based on my belief because it's probably constituents who agree with me.
	You don't need to also pull the victimhood card and lay it on the table because this victimhood will trump this victimhood every single time.
	They should know by now, right?
	It's just frustrating.
	But then there's another case as well, and I had the pleasure of meeting this gentleman, Ben Dabowski.
	So he was born in Poland and raised under communism, so you'd think he would be very astute to how political persecution works.
	And Ben was removed from his school because he was in a mandatory diversity training seminar, and he was asked to give his views on marriage.
	This was to root out unconscious bias.
	I only think it was because it was trying to provoke teachers who spoke common sense into being consciously biased, I suppose.
	He said that he believed marriage was between a man and a woman, that life begins at conception, and that he was opposed to some aspects of Sharia law such as the stoning of men by homosexuality.
	Very far right.
	Don't kill Gabe.
	Alright, fair enough.
	Next morning, he said he was summoned before the headmaster, Mark Belly, and then ejected from the Bishop of Llandaff Church in Wales School near Cardiff.
	Belly, the headmaster, had previously faced criticism from parents because he spent £20,000 on open, planned, gender-neutral toilets.
	That's really going to keep your female students safe, isn't it?
	I mean, you've been to the GB News studio before.
	I was there yesterday, and there were a group of female producers who were waiting for one man to stop using the toilet so they could all go in.
	Like, I don't blame women for not wanting to share a toilet with men, even those they know, because it's just a sort of private space.
	And then those they don't know, it's a genuine risk.
	So schoolgirls with things going on that they'd rather keep private, yeah, don't just use it as a Trojan horse for predators.
	We saw what happened with Loudoun County.
	We don't want to go there again, you know?
	And also, why is a Christian school hiring intersectional race activists to come into the classroom and berate their teachers on unconscious bias?
	Because this was run by a group called Diverse, and this is a Welsh word, Cymru.
	I think it's the word for Wales, isn't it?
	Well, there we go.
	The Welsh used to be the word we use for foreigners, so I'm going to use it as an excuse for not being able to pronounce it properly.
	You're Scottish, I already need subtitles.
	And the seminar was on workforce diversity practice, unconscious bias, and transgender identity and gender expression awareness.
	In a Christian school?
	I mean, I shouldn't be shocked, because obviously the Church of England is largely captured these days.
	Did you see the Holy See during Pride Month in America flew a pride flag outside their Washington embassy?
	Did they?
	I did not see that.
	That surprises me.
	But I mean, the theme that ties together in both these stories is the absolutely hypocritical use of the word inclusivity.
	To mean exclusivity, they've just rooted out people with Christian beliefs that were very common in this country until about five minutes ago and are still common amongst a great percentage of voters here.
	They've ratted them out and in the name of being inclusive have excluded them.
	That's not a diverse society.
	That's not democratic.
	A free democratic society allows everybody to have a free exchange of views and not be punished for what they believe.
	No one should be criminalized for just stating a Christian view or any other sort of religious view on this issue if you're able to have a conversation about it, which both of these people have perfectly graciously been able to offer their opinions and beliefs on a forum where they should be very much entitled to.
	So it's horrendous to see our country go this way of rooting out what's now a minority faith, according to the last census, rooting out these people and saying, because you think this, because you believe your holy book, because you believe the ideology that you have gone into, You have to be punished, you have to be excommunicated from your job and exiled from the community and punished.
	It's just a great sadness and a great irony that we pride ourselves on being a democracy and internationally would be champions of free speech but in our own country we can't sort ourselves out to include everybody.
	Well, obviously, we've had speech laws in the books for the last nearly 30 years now, so that shouldn't surprise anyone.
	But neither should the linguistic subversion of language.
	I mean, you're clearly a very compassionate and tolerant person.
	They like to parasitize the words that you would, of course, use to try to be accepting of people, even if you don't share their beliefs.
	Inclusivity simply just means we're going to practice repressive tolerance.
	Right, it's inclusive of the people who agree with the state.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We're going to ostracize any opinion that does not get us towards our progressive utopia.
	Diversity just means we're going to create a vanguard constituency of green minorities that we can raise the consciousness into to overthrow the society.
	And democracy means we act on behalf of you, because actually we have divined from the tea leaves our destination, and we have the time as a laptop class to sit around and look at Marxist literature, and you, oppressed proletariat, don't worry, we'll do it on your behalf and you'll thank us And it was these exact arguments that were used to challenge the original blasphemy laws that were in our country in order to protect the church.
	And those were wrong too, because that's not an inquisitive and free society.
	That doesn't allow the free exchange of thought and belief.
	And people rallied against that and said, no, we can't have blasphemy laws because we need to have everybody being able to exchange their views.
	We aren't a kind of archaic society.
	Everyone said, fair enough, let's get rid of the blasphemy laws.
	But what's happened now is they've just put in new blasphemy laws for a different faith.
	It's essentially a state religion, a lot of this stuff.
	They have their own kind of prophets and priests who kind of declare the ideology of the day in our celebrity culture.
	They've got rules that cannot be crossed and things that cannot be said and blasphemy that cannot be uttered, whether that's to criticize the Pride Parade, which a lot of people were very critical of this year, given Clips that came out of very provocative dancing in front of kids and other things that a lot of people who are, you know, would also describe themselves as very tolerant felt it was too far for this to be exposed on the streets of Britain.
	So, you know, saying that these things are things that you cannot say, the words that you must not utter, that is, again, dominant religion enforcing its beliefs on a minority.
	We're just right back to where we were.
	Why can we never find this balance where people are allowed to exchange their views?
	Well yeah, I think there's always going to be a religion, man always has a religious instinct, so you either worship something outside of yourself or you worship yourself.
	This is why Christianity deems pride a sin, because it's arrogance, it's Promethean, versus the pride flag, it's not a religion of gratitude, it's a religion of gratification.
	And so if there's any impediment for you getting your rocks off, well actually they're the oppressor and they have to be rooted out via the Inquisition.
	And that's what this is, it's a new inquisition in every single institution.
	Speaking of, it's actually happening in Europe as well, and this was a story that you brought my attention to.
	So this was a Finnish parliamentarian, Päivi Rassanen.
	I had to look up how to pronounce that, so I put my effort in.
	So she's a Finnish medical doctor, she's a parliamentarian, she was former Minister of the Interior and Chairman of the Christian Democrats Party.
	And in 2019, she tweeted a passage from Genesis, I believe it was 127, where it's, he made them male and female.
	And she was questioning her church's official sponsorship of the Helsinki LGBTQ Pride event.
	Now, one would think that an ideology waging war on Imago Dei would be incompatible with Christianity, but they are wearing Christianity as a skin suit.
	And after the tweet, the police investigated that and a pamphlet that she'd done for her church in 2004.
	So we're doing a fence archaeology now, titled, As Man and Woman He Created Them.
	It was about sexuality and marriage, because like Ben, she believes that marriage is only between a man and a woman.
	Because it is!
	Bishop Johanna Paola, he also stood alongside Parvi during her trial for publishing the pamphlet, so again the Inquisition is going after her.
	The Prosecutor General in Finland has levied three criminal hate speech charges against Parvi and they're being prosecuted and I can't believe when I read this for the crime of ethnic agitation under the section of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Finnish criminal code.
	Yeah.
	So they're being prosecuted for crimes against the LGBT race and it's somehow a war.
	Like, this is the hyperbolic rhetoric that we always get when we see trans genocide.
	And that is the justification for revolution, because if someone were genuinely being genocided by the state, of course they would be right to resist that and fight back and defend themselves if it's an existential threat.
	So this level of scaremongering, to accuse your opposition of committing war crimes, and also to say you need allies, which is only when you have a war, that's an escalation and a provocation that will only lead to violence.
	Right, Pivey's story is a canary in the coal mine for Britain and for the rest of the West who are all encouraging each other and increasingly putting in place these hate speech laws which, as we've just described, are absolutely oppressing and silencing and censoring those who happen to hold minority beliefs.
	I got chills down my spine when I heard about that Christian council we were describing in the UK because The tweet that he tweeted was very similar to Pivy's, and Pivy's tweet actually was never even censored by Twitter.
	Now, cast your mind back to Twitter in 2019.
	It was the Jack Dorsey days, not the Elon Musk days.
	Twitter did not find her tweet offensive enough to be censored.
	She also had a bit of a play on words with the pride, shame, She challenged her own church, she wasn't challenging anyone else, she was challenging her own church leadership as to why they had sponsored the Pride parade.
	I think it was from Romans, the verse that she quoted in that particular tweet.
	The state prosecutor found this, launched an investigation.
	She had about 13 hours being grilled by police, who by the way she used to be the head of, she was the former Home Secretary.
	And she was brought down to Felicite to explain her theology and she was put on criminal trial for three charges of hate speech and put on a stand and grilled as to her theology and whether it was okay nowadays in Finland to say, you know, the philosophy of love the sinner, hate the sin.
	That's to say, I agree with you or I, you know, I don't have any hatred towards you as a person, but I do disagree with your ideology.
	And she was actually found innocent.
	ADF International, my colleagues, were working closely on her legal team, and we were very pleased to see her found innocent of all charges and acquitted.
	However, the Finnish state does not have the principle of double jeopardy, and they have brought her back for retrial, and she'll be going through the entire ordeal again on August 22nd, just in about a month's time.
	So do remember Paivi and And keep tabs on where she ends up after the second trial.
	But I think going back to this idea of our Western culture has completely lost the erosion or distinction between being able to disagree or even viscerally disagree with an opinion.
	And still like that person.
	It's completely possible to do both.
	Hating an ideology or hating a religion is not the same as hating that person.
	And we completely eroded that and that's led to this idea that, I mean, I've seen in my own country of Scotland when we were putting in hate speech laws, we were saying that any disagreement, any idea that might offend somebody, that's an act of hate towards that person and therefore you should be criminalised and you should not be allowed out in society.
	That's not going to be a helpful idea for anybody, especially, you know, right now it's Christians who are on the front line of these types of laws, often because of a release in marriage, life from conception, all of these ideas which are seen as controversial right now.
	But, you know, these things are a slippery slope.
	Once you say that one ideology, belief or religion can be censored and put aside, you're really opening that up to whatever the next thing is as well.
	So, you know, if you're not a Christian, if you're not somebody who believes with Pivey or any of these individuals who have been censored and kicked out of their jobs for what they believe, defend them anyway, because tomorrow it might be your beliefs.
	I think that's something that we really have to take home from these stories.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And to tie back into the secular, well, religion without a metaphysics once by the state point, the reason is that this has become a wedge issue for prosecution, is the LGBT acronym only works if they have sympathy and affirmation poured upon them, because if they feel awkward in private behind closed doors, you can either wrestle with the problems of your personal lifestyle and how you feel about yourself, or you can get the whole world to affirm you.
	And so it becomes, in the same way that Hegel wrote about recognition as a means of transcending your consciences, validation for the LGBT lobby becomes their means of non-soul transcendence.
	And so if you do not affirm their lifestyle, you're a barrier to them living as their true selves.
	And so you actually have to be censored and eradicated.
	Otherwise you really are oppressing them within their own framework.
	And it is a pseudo religious framework because it can't stand up to scrutiny as well.
	Whereas the Christian principle of truth and also of forgiveness being conditional on, well, I have compassion for you, but I hope you change your lifestyle, but I'm not willing to impose that lifestyle upon you because actually by doing that, it takes away the virtue that is in the effort.
	All of that is removed from that new sexual religion, And that's why Nina Power coined the term, I think she said, she combined the term prurient and puritan.
	She called it like pruritanical.
	It's the total removal of forgiveness while also being utterly unforgiving.
	No, absolutely, and that is essentially what post-Christian Britain will be, because forgiveness is a Christian concept.
	Remember, when Christianity first came to Rome, back in the early starts of the foundation of the Church, it came to a society where infanticide was rife, treatment of women was abysmal, they were basically sex slaves for whoever owned them at the time, there was very little rule of law, and it was It was everything that we don't like about society, everything that harms women, harms minorities, harms children, was rife in Roman society at that time.
	And Christianity brought the idea of justice, of retribution, of overturning cancel culture of the time to say that there is a way to forgiveness and salvation, but there's a redemption here as well as acknowledging the human dignity of every single person.
	And they just completely turned a completely immoral and decadent society on its head and brought us the things that we know and love today, basically human rights, the structure of what real human rights are as they apply to each individual.
	If we hated Christian Britain and all the moral frame that that imposed, or at least brought into bear, we're going to hate post-Christian Britain so much more.
	Because it's all of those things, but without forgiveness, without the idea that somebody can do wrong, but there is redemption for them if they change their behaviour or seek forgiveness.
	The cancel culture has completely removed that ability to bounce back from something that's happened.
	Not valuing every human being because they're made in the image of God means that our bodies are not valued as the way that they're made, but are seen as things that can be changed, altered, mutilated.
	Children not being valued as something of their lives protected, we've already seen that, and the proliferation of abortion.
	We're seeing in Canada how now the sick, the vulnerable, disabled are now being shooed off to euthanasia.
	In the Netherlands, they've reduced the ability for their equivalent of maid euthanasia program to one year old.
	One year old.
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	And I saw a headline out only recently about the number of autistic people who are being sent for euthanasia in the Netherlands as well.
	So with the reduction of valuing each human being as, you know, made in the image of God as Christianity brought into society all those years ago, the reduction of all these principles that we have built our just society on, When we shoo Christianity at the door, we just result in chaos with no moral framework at all.
	So I think we should be very careful before saying to all these people who are bringing biblical beliefs into the public square and quoting the Bible and raising questions about whether things are helpful and causing happiness in society or whether they're harmful and we should be challenging them.
	And we should think very carefully before shooing them out of the public discussion.
	Yeah, and I raised this when I was over in the States about two weeks ago now.
	Blimey, time flies.
	I said to my friend, the reason that the United States is probably tearing itself apart is because you have a liberal legal framework built on top of Christian culture, but the Christian culture has been hollowed out.
	And so now you're squabbling over the definition of equality in the Declaration of Independence.
	And saying that all of your beliefs are self-evident, but that you've unmoored them from a creator.
	And so, well, okay, you're gonna have to make the argument that they're still self-evident without the theological foundation of God being in there.
	Good luck!
	You know, it's gonna be very difficult to do so.
	So, over in Europe, at the same time this was going on, and this is something from ADF as well, the UN Human Rights Council approved a resolution on religious hatred.
	So the UN are passing blasphemy laws But only for certain religions.
	Religions that aren't really native to the European continent, funnily enough.
	The background to this is there was an Iraqi-born protester who, in Sweden, Stockholm, tore pages from the Quran, he wiped his shoes with them, and he burned them.
	It was outside a mosque on Eid.
	So, very contentious thing to do, but we would protect his right to do so, even with the Bible, even though I disagree with it.
	And the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad was then stormed by Muslim counter-protesters.
	Iran refused to send their ambassador to Stockholm.
	Islamic Cooperation, which is a charity organisation, they condemned Sweden's government and they petitioned the UN Human Rights Council to debate the issue.
	And then Turkey had cited vile protests against the Holy Book as to why it withheld its approval of Sweden's application to join NATO.
	So it's very fraught and prurient at the time that Ukraine is going on.
	Since then, since the UN have approved the resolution, Erdogan has supported The application and the admission of Sweden into NATO.
	So that was part of the pressure that pushed this along.
	And so addressing the UN Council last week, Pakistan's foreign minister, Bilal Bhutu Zadari, said such acts were an incitement to religious hatred, discrimination and violence and occurred under government sanction and with the guise of a sense of impunity.
	Ministers from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia all echoed that view.
	So there is a Muslim voting bloc within the UN, particularly with Turkey spearheading it, a sizable amount of influence over the current conflicts in Ukraine that have been pushing for Islamic blasphemy laws.
	And so they passed the resolution, and this is from ADF UK, and the quote in here is, the UN Human Rights Council adopted the resolution that, quote, underscores the need to hold individuals responsible for blasphemy, in particular by desecrating the Quran, to account.
	The resolution was titled Countering Religious Hatred, Constituting Incitement to Discrimination, Hostility, or Violence.
	Notice how all of those things are conflated there.
	And it indicates that such penalties would, be consistent with obligations of states arising from the international human rights law.
	So they are going to punish you if any of the members of your country are not prosecuted for desecrating the Quran or presumably insulting the Prophet Muhammad or saying something as banal as a Scottish man once did, which was, Islam is questionable.
	He wrote it on his drive and was prosecuted for that by the Scottish state.
	Yes, not joking.
	So this is an official UN position.
	So it's, I mean, to backtrack a little bit, I used to actually work, I was based with ADF International at the UN Human Rights Council.
	So I have to say, these resolutions, this particular one, the UN would not be punishing individuals, but it sets a cultural tone.
	Yes.
	It's essentially what this resolution does.
	It pressures the countries that obviously want their support.
	It's pressure, exactly.
	I can imagine what the tension must have been like in the room at this point, having been there, because this is the first time that that balance between that understanding of freedom of speech as being foundational, bedrock, It's the first time that that's been really eroded and tilted away from the kind of Western understanding of free speech.
	And I will say that the US, the EU and the UK did all push back against this resolution, and they voted against it.
	But they were ultimately outnumbered.
	And I can't help but wonder, you know, in Europe, as we've seen with Pivy's story, in the UK with these stories being examined, even in the US, We're seeing a growing number of people unable to speak freely.
	When we're on the international stage, can we really still hold the credibility that we used to when it comes to free speech?
	Countries from the Islamic world, from the Middle East, from other countries with blasphemy law across Africa, when they look at us, do they see countries that are really staying true to the values of free speech that we all signed up to in the ICCPR?
	Or are they saying, well, you know what, they're bending the rules a little bit when it comes to things that offend their own sensibilities and religion, so what we're doing too isn't so bad.
	Yeah, it's consistent.
	Right, so if we want to be these leaders on the world stage that are standing up for democracy and, you know, the rights of everybody to say what they believe, we have to be practicing that at home.
	And what really matters, I can tell you from my colleagues who work across the world, we've got blasphemy cases in countries like Nigeria where we've got a Sufi Muslim musician who recorded a kind of rap that he'd written into WhatsApp and lyrics that he was playing with, and he We've got a death penalty because they deemed what he had said to be blasphemous.
	He's a Sufi Muslim and they think it was blasphemous against the majority Islamic religion of the region.
	He's sat on death row.
	We're challenging that.
	He is being retried and we're supporting his legal defense and we're hoping that that case will shine light on the danger of blasphemy laws and as a successful result we'll be able to So we know the real intensity that these blasphemy laws can look like.
	where Christians are constantly under pressure or constantly finding it very difficult to speak out about their faith for fear of being bit to death.
	So we know the real intensity that these blasphemy laws can look like.
	We know the impact that it has on individuals And this resolution, it spoke more specifically about burning the Quran, which I think we can all say is a pretty stupid thing to do.
	It's not particularly helpful, let's say.
	This is the thing though, it's stupid because of the inevitable threat of violence.
	It's stupid because of that.
	I also don't know if it's a particularly helpful way of putting one's point across.
	And like you said, if it was the Bible being burned on the streets of Britain, I would think that's terrible.
	But I don't think it should be illegal.
	I'm not going to send you a death threat, as I'm saying.
	This opens the door to allowing those further blasphemy laws down the line that we're seeing, you know, put people on death row for sending a text message.
	That opens the door and says, you know what, sometimes it's okay To say that somebody's committed a crime for saying what they believe.
	And then it's very hard then to later on say, you know what, now it's not okay to speak.
	So it is a slippery slope and we really have to hold these standards, especially at places like the UN Human Rights Council, which are so influential when it comes to interpreting human rights.
	We have to be really holding and setting that standard and saying, no, everybody, nobody should be punished for what they believe.
	Everybody should be able to speak freely, no matter if they're from a minority religion or not.
	So I really hope that this is a little bit of a lesson, at least, to those Western countries who have not been holding those principles to a high enough standard at home to really kind of give them a kick at the butt and say, oh, goodness me, we really do have to make sure that these things are equal so that we can stand on the world stage once again and have authority when we speak about freedom of speech.
	Yeah, well on those two points, so there is a quote in this article about the UK government and their dissenting to the resolution.
	It passed with 28 votes to 14, seven abstentions.
	The UK said, International human rights law provides us with narrowly defined parameters on which freedom of expression could be limited and we don't accept that by definition, attacks on religion, including on religious texts or symbols, constitute advocacy of hatred.
	Suella Braverman noted in the Times, We do not have blasphemy laws in Britain, and that must be complicit in the attempts to impose them on the country.
	There is no right not to be offended.
	But, for the conservative party, remove that councillor at the start.
	Same party, same activist.
	CCHQ are currently investigating him and they've prosecuted him.
	Abortion buffer zones, anyone?
	That's been introduced under the Conservative government.
	Section 127 of the Communications Act from Tony Blair has not been removed by the Conservative government.
	The online harms bill, they were countenancing, what was it, legal but harmful speech as to whether or not to prosecute people under, including Jimmy Carr's joke at one point before the Dean Dorries got kicked out.
	So the idea that we don't have de facto blasphemy laws in this country.
	Right.
	But we do.
	We do have blasphemy laws.
	You're absolutely right.
	And let's just dwell on one thing you said for a moment because it bears dwelling on it.
	We have put people on criminal trial for praying in their head.
	Yes.
	That's not even speaking.
	That's not provocative.
	That's not even a demonstration.
	That's not trying to upset a particular religious group.
	That is praying inside one's head and holding views about abortion, that every woman should deserve better than abortion, that every life Matters from conception, whether that's black, white, disabled, female, male, whatever it is, that life deserves protection and support, and so does their mother.
	For them to say that somebody who holds those views and is praying about it or thinking about it inside their heads on a public registry, to say that that deserves to be put on criminal trial, it's just absolutely outrageous.
	And to say that we are upholding free speech and that we should, you know, be so much better than these countries that have blasphemy laws, it really makes a mockery of ourselves.
	Yeah, and what we've done here, and I don't think any civilization, as you said with Rome earlier, will last when it begins prosecuting mourners to placate the consciences of murderers.
	I just don't think that's a good standard to uphold.
	And I don't think the UN stands on a particularly strong standard.
	I'll finish with this, because as you said, the UN has an interesting record on free speech.
	Their Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, Callum brought this to my attention quite some time ago, they had the Soviets amend this?
	So the Soviet Union proposed an amendment that would deny the right to Nazi and fascist groups.
	So this is free speech.
	Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.
	This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.
	It's well worded.
	This forced the drafters to discuss the question of how tolerant and already just society should be of intolerant groups like the Nazis.
	Taking together Articles 19 and 7, they solved the dilemma by giving everyone two rights.
	The right to free speech and the right to be protected against hate speech.
	Right, so hate speech came from a complaint by the Soviet Union for them to crack down on their dissenters and the UN is upholding that.
	If the UN ever wants to tell me that they're for human rights when they're Endorsing a state which has killed far more people than even the people they were complaining about?
	No.
	No, no, no, no.
	Not even close.
	So I suppose we'll leave that one there because we live in a country with blasphemy laws.
	Right, onto the last bit.
	I've had that sitting there the entire time.
	That's terrible.
	Very professional on this podcast, isn't it?
	Right, so the pro-abortion lobby in the UK continues to expose its inhumanity by now going on to excuse blatant cases of infanticide.
	This is something that you've written about in The Critic before, Lois, very compellingly.
	That's what prompted this segment.
	And this is going to be quite a dark one, but I think it's quite important regarding the legislation and what's coming down the pipe from a politician that I can only describe as a devouring mother figure.
	So, let's look at the recent cases.
	If you'd like to learn more about the abortion debate, you can give us £5 a month to help keep the lights on, bring fantastic guests like Lois in, and you get access to all of our premium content.
	This was something from last August, so it's nearly a year old now, but Josh and I, as part of his Contemplation series, sat down and discussed the Morality and the science of abortion.
	And Josh was a bit softer on the question.
	I think that Josh eventually will hopefully come around to my position.
	My position is just humility.
	I never know when, beyond conception, personhood is conferred.
	So I'd rather err on the side of never taking the risk of snuffing out an innocent human life.
	So I just think it's always wrong.
	But it was a very compelling discussion.
	Very good faith and Josh and I became even better friends after this.
	So, on to the first one.
	There's been a recent case in the States, and a Democrat activist, Hack, decided to tweet out, Wow, a teenager in Nebraska was sentenced to 90 days in jail for using an abortion pill.
	This is the America Republicans want.
	Republicans will not let women control their own bodies.
	According to them, teenagers are old enough to be mothers.
	It's horrifying.
	Now, I love community notes, because community notes always corrects propaganda.
	And so, you can click the story from The Guardian, but I went to a National Review summary of the case, and it turns out that no, the woman was not prosecuted for having an abortion pill.
	Her mother illegally procured abortion pills, and she quite gleefully terminated the life of her unborn child, which is pretty tragic.
	So Burgess here violated Nebraska's abortion law, which has been in effect since 2010, so this hasn't violated post-Roe v. Wade stuff at all, which banned almost all abortions later than 20 weeks of pregnancy.
	So, post-Dobbs abortion laws exempt the mother from punishment, Um, when the Dobbs leak happened, there were about 70 pro-life groups that came out and said this is pretty acceptable.
	Uh, the National Right to Life Committee, who was co-signed that letter, said, uh, these charges have nothing to do with the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision or Nebraska's abortion law passed in 2010.
	National Right to Life takes no position on the particulars of state laws regarding the handling of human remains.
	So this is purely a potential, well, purely a murder case.
	Um, it has nothing to do with, with abortion law overall.
	Um, so she was sentenced to 90 days of jail time, which is Very short, considering what happened, 50 days with good behaviour, for burning and burying the remains of a baby.
	So it wasn't for taking the abortion pills, it was for hiding the body by having an at-home abortion.
	And then the mum has also pled guilty to illegally supplying her with the pills.
	And the AP published a series of texts between the mother and Burgess about how she can't wait to get rid of the thing out of her body.
	She says, I will finally be able to wear jeans And so what ended up happening was the mother and daughter tried to hide the baby's remains, trying to burn them with apple-flavored charcoal briquettes.
	It was buried, moved, and reburied.
	And the final message they shared was, remember, we burn the evidence.
	So it's not just criminalization of abortion, it's the desecration of a corpse.
	And this is being used as a platform to stand on to say women must have unfettered abortion access.
	Yeah, five months.
	It was 20 weeks, I think you said in that story.
	A five-month-old baby, I don't know if people know this, but the average, you know, that a baby's able to live outside of the womb is now 21 weeks in a day.
	They've got a baby who's able to survive that.
	So that would have been a baby who was almost going to be able to survive on their own.
	That's, I mean, discarded in this really devastating way.
	And it's just an absolute tragedy to think that that is happening.
	Here in the UK as well, you're allowed to abort for almost any reason up to 24 weeks, long past viability.
	And also if you claim a mental health issue, you can get it even beyond that in some cases.
	Up to 24 weeks for a very expansive way of physical and mental health.
	Beyond 24 weeks, you're right, in very specific cases it could also, by the way, up to 40 weeks if the child has any form of disability.
	It could be Down syndrome, it could be cleft lip, it could be clubfoot, anything like that that will allow a child to be aborted up to 40 weeks right the day before birth.
	Yeah, and just for context for anyone who's, again, a fan of David Starkey, he's always had a club foot.
	So, for people like that, you know, incredible minds, they could well just be being snuffed out and never have a chance to live in the world, which is tragic.
	And as you said, similar things are happening in the UK, because this was the recent Carla Foster case, which has been mentioned on the podcast before, but just to underscore that There is an obfuscation of the narrative here to try and push towards the decriminalisation of all forms of abortion.
	It's not honest.
	She was a 44-year-old mother of three and she took at-home abortion drugs when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant.
	Now again, 24 weeks is the cut-off point.
	So she lied over the phone to the abortion provider.
	She said that she felt too embarrassed to see a doctor after becoming pregnant in 2019 and that she didn't know how far along she was.
	Oh yes, you just commit infanticide when you're embarrassed.
	That's a legitimate reason, of course.
	So she lied to the nurse at BPAS, we'll come back to BPAS later because they seem to be not too bothered as to whether she lied or not, on a phone call 12 days later saying that she was seven weeks pregnant and she was sent mifepritzone and misoprotal.
	Is that how I pronounce it?
	- Yeah, Mr. Brassard. - There we go.
	To her home address.
	And she took the myth for Prittstone on May the 9th and the other drug two days later.
	And then that evening she made a 999 call to say she was in labor.
	So again, deceptive.
	And she miscarried and her daughter Lily was stillborn.
	She was then sentenced to 28 months in prison with 14 months in custody and then the remainder outside on license after release.
	But the main thing that happened here was that, and you said this about your piece in The Critic, very few people were willing to say, yeah, this woman deserves prison time for lying to the abortion provider and then killing her baby, which was obviously viable.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, people are using this story to lobby for that for that law to be decriminalized, for it to essentially become legal to abort through all 40 weeks.
	So they say, look at this poor woman who was sent to prison for, you know, killing her daughter, Lily.
	And what I say to that is that law is in place to protect two people in that story.
	One is baby Lily, who was a beautiful, sentient baby able to survive outside the womb, able to feel the pain of her own death and who was She was killed by the abortion pills and then had to be delivered because she was so large and was held in her mother's arms after she had passed.
	So it's to protect baby lilies and baby lilies of the future from going through that terrible shortening of life, to protect their ability to live and grow up and to do all the things that an eight-month-old baby, which is a large, developed baby, should be allowed to do.
	But that bill is also in place to protect women like Carla, and it's easy to go to either extreme in her story, which is just absolutely a tragedy from beginning to end.
	It's easy to either call her an absolute villain or an absolute victim.
	What we know from her story is that after doing this incredibly awful deed, She's been haunted by the face of her baby.
	She has expressed deep grief and remorse to an extent that she'll never get over.
	So, you know, she's out of prison now.
	She'll always be in prison in her mind to an extent because she went through that absolute awful trauma of having aborted her own baby and having to give birth to it as a stillborn.
	The law is in place to protect women from going through that.
	It's horrendous what she's gone through, and no woman should be going through that.
	So should this law be repealed and decriminalised?
	Absolutely not.
	We need to protect women and babies like Carla and Lily.
	But there is a law that does need to change, and that is the law that got her into this mess in the first place, and that's from 2021.
	And that's a law which allows BPAS to send pills in the post to women who have simply called up and said, yeah, yeah, I'm less than 10 weeks pregnant.
	Carly never thought she was less than 10 weeks pregnant.
	When you have a baby bump of eight months, you don't think that this could possibly be less than 10 weeks.
	But because this law, which was instituted during COVID, but now lives on as a successor of COVID, because that allows BPAS to say on the phone, oh, you're less than 10 weeks, you sure?
	OK, fine, then send it in the post.
	Nobody has to come into the clinic.
	No resources are used to give a scan to give them a checkup, to give them counselling, say, are you sure?
	You're to listen to to say now, is there somebody pressuring you into this?
	What's the father got to say?
	Is he around?
	Is mum and dad going to help?
	All of these kind of things.
	They're not able to have that counselling, that safeguarding and that medical supervision.
	So they're now taking these pills at home.
	Abortion was legalised because they said it had to become safe, legal and rare.
	Safe, legal and rare.
	Taking pills at home used to be used as a kind of example of something that would happen if abortion was not legal.
	It used to be that all girls would do this in a back alley or in their bathroom and it'd be very dangerous.
	That's what they're doing now.
	They're doing it in their bathrooms now by themselves.
	16-year-old girls holed up in their own, not wanting to tell anybody.
	Taking these pills which are very, very easy to procure legally or illegally now because of the current law.
	So this law has enabled that, it's enabled it to be very, very dangerous.
	Clearly increasing numbers of cases which are illegal and it's less rare than it's ever been in the history of Britain.
	So this law has clearly failed women, clearly failed children and needs to be reformed.
	Absolutely.
	But what's actually stopping it getting reformed is, and this is an article very well written by a friend of mine, Georgia, who went on Good Morning Britain to speak about this issue, and they actually cut the part of her interview which said that BPAS has been saying that they don't send these pills out when she elucidated it.
	So this is media's capacity in covering this up.
	BPAS actually lobbied to prevent the overturning of this.
	So in March 2020, they lobbied for the mandatory in-person appointments to be scrapped.
	So no medical prescreening before you procure these pills.
	And because of COVID, this law was passed.
	Then in November 2020, the government launched a consultation on it to which 70% of respondents expressed concerns about the inaccurate gestational estimates.
	So that you weren't before 10 weeks or that people could frankly just lie.
	In February 2020, the government announced plans to reinstate the in-person appointments.
	So these were swiftly thwarted after a coalition of pro-abortion MPs, with BPASS's support, inserted an amendment into the Health and Social Care Bill to overturn the government's decision to end the pills by the post.
	So, this was smuggled into a pork barrel bill meant to be addressing the rest of the NHS, and this law has still stayed in place despite being very dangerous for the women taking it, and of course, horrific for the babies it's killing.
	And BPAS doesn't care about that, and it also doesn't care about when women access it, or how, or if they lie to do so.
	Because, and George has got the links in here, BPAS is on record urging for the legalization of abortion up to birth for any reason.
	In England and Wales, decriminalization of abortion would require the repeal of both sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act and the Infant Life Preservation Act.
	Doing this would make the Abortion Act in 1967 redundant, thus scrapping the existing 24-week term limit for abortion, making the procedure available on demand for any reason up to birth.
	And this would leave the baby with zero rights akin to China and North Korea.
	Yeah.
	So I actually, when I was at university, I went to an abortion debate that had Anne Faraday, who's the head of BPAS, for anyone who doesn't know.
	She was, yeah.
	Yeah, was, I didn't, yeah.
	So when we went, she was arguing for that exact position on stage, and I said, okay, well, what about the baby, if you're arguing for the position of sentience, it's not sentient until it's outside the womb, which is an insane proposition.
	I said, what about when there was a form of Planned Parenthood Nurse, who has now gone over, I think, Abby Johnson, it might well be.
	She saw on an ultrasound a baby fighting for its life during abortion, and it gave her such a shock that she repented.
	I said, well, what about that?
	When the baby demonstrates that it can feel pain, its nervous system has been developed, and it actively resists the abortion equipment, doesn't that not demonstrate a level of human sentience there, and that it's suffering?
	And she said, I just don't accept that it's suffering.
	It's no different to an animal.
	I was thinking, wow, that is a level of callousness I haven't encountered before.
	So of course they're okay with women lying down the phone because their goal isn't to help women or to have reasonable restrictions on abortion.
	Not that I think they can exist.
	Their goal is just, you should be able to kill a child at any point.
	Yeah, I think, you know, forget labels, pro-choice, pro-life, pro-abortion, whatever it is.
	If you care about women, you do not want them being subjected to abortion, especially late-term abortion, especially any.
	I mean, not only are these pills that post things very dangerous, one in 17 women who took them, according to an FOI request, ended up being hospitalized anyway because they're that dangerous.
	So not only do you not care about women's health if you're promoting these things, but also no little girl grows up wanting to have an abortion.
	It's not an ideal.
	It's the symptom of a culture where women are told that they have to sacrifice their children to succeed at life.
	It's a symptom of our culture where they're told that men don't care about taking care of their children and they're going to be left and abandoned on their own and they have to abort because they can't do it by themselves.
	Abortion is a symptom of a failed culture for women.
	So if you care about women, we should all be challenging this narrative and challenging the idea that abortion is the best that we can really do for female empowerment.
	It's actually a sick joke to say that.
	Killing children and undergoing a traumatic procedure, which has a very difficult impact on mental health and other aspects of women's lives.
	To say that that is feminism is just a slap in the face to all women.
	Well, yeah, it's the perverse thing of, as we were talking about earlier, the elimination of dependent relationships as the precondition for female autonomy and success.
	That was Michelle Williams getting up at the Oscars and said, if I didn't have an abortion, I wouldn't have this statue right now.
	It's like, well, Having a living baby might be better for you and your soul, frankly.
	But yeah, as you said, it's not safe in the safe, legal and rare formulation.
	There was a FOI request.
	There were 85 NHS trusts that were asked about this.
	And they found that 10,000 women needed hospital treatment because they took these pills.
	So that's more than 1 in 17 women, that's 20 a day.
	The findings also expose that abortion providers and the DHSC weren't reporting medical abortion treatment failures as a complication, even though at least 5.9% of women using abortion pills needed hospital treatment because of this failure.
	Around half of these, or 3% in total, required surgical treatment to complete the abortion.
	So, likely because they'd lied about when they procured them and took them too late.
	Much like with Carla's case, Baby Lily needed to be delivered.
	There's also, GB News found about this, they gave freedom of information requests to six ambulance trusts in England, and they found that since the pandemic, since this law was passed, abortion pill-related ambulance requests had risen by 64%.
	So, there is an epidemic going on here in the UK because of this law.
	And so, thankfully, there's been two parliamentary responses to it.
	One has been very good.
	Probably the best MP in Parliament, about the only trustworthy and good one at this point, Miriam Cates.
	She's led the fight on getting rid of this because she is a committed Christian and she's willing to take on the hard issues that no one else will care about.
	But then you have Stella Creasy.
	And I call Stella Creasy the ultimate devouring mother, because about a year before this, she brought her baby into Parliament, despite there being a parliamentary crash.
	I mean, frankly, good, don't put him in daycare.
	But she brought it in as a publicity statement, and then makes putting abortion without regulations up until birth into the British Bill of Rights her soapbox issue.
	So, I just don't understand how you can countenance that cognitive dissonance.
	Maybe it's because leftism has made abortion a sacrament to try and alienate you from yourself at this point, but to have this dependent child in your arms that you supposedly love and then say, but if this child was still inside me I should be able to It's devastating because Stella Creasy had an opportunity there to challenge a narrative that says, you know, if women have kids, they can't do anything else.
	Yes, exactly.
	You have a beautiful platform to be able to say, look, I'm a mum, I'm taking care of my child.
	I'm also a competent MP who's able to run my constituency and raise the issues that they bring to me in Parliament.
	And that would have been female empowerment.
	If that had been her message, it says, look, women, you know, you can, if you are called to do both, both are possible.
	That's what empowerment is for those women who do want a career as well as to be a mother.
	But instead she's completely contradicted herself in that message and saying actually no, we do need abortion because women want to have queers and glittering appearances and that there is no way for a woman to succeed unless she kills her children.
	So it's just such a wasted opportunity from someone who probably calls themselves a feminist.
	It's devastating to see.
	But that's the kind of freedom, autonomy, maximizing feminism that has won out over the 19th century, we're going to valorize motherhood and homemaking feminism that Harrington's written about before.
	And this comes back, and I suppose it's worth finishing on this point, this comes back to what we were talking about in the first segment, which is that the female hero myth has been stripped of its dependent parts that help form your character.
	And so what kind of narrative are you telling women when they need to sacrifice their child to get ahead?
	It's robbing them of the sex specific virtues that embody and embed them in the world and help form your character and make you someone worthy of being taken care of and caring for someone else.
	And I think you're going to find a hell of a lot more meaning in a family than generating capital for a company that ultimately just doesn't care about you.
	That's right, yeah.
	No, we've completely lost that and I think especially this narrative of my body, my choice, that's actually been detrimental to female and male relationships and to the empowerment of women because that, you know, it came in with the sexual revolution and it used to be before that if a boy got a girl pregnant, they would likely get married.
	Some of these marriages don't work out except A lot of them do.
	A lot of them, that's how life works out.
	They have a few more kids, they raise them together, they take on that challenge together because it takes two to tangle, and that's the responsibility that each adult had in making that decision, and they raise the child.
	Now, with My Body, My Choice, that allows men to say, Oh, you're pregnant?
	Oh, well, your body, your choice, your issue.
	I'm out.
	You do what you want.
	So women don't have that safety net to fall back and say, like, you know, take to a partner and say, like, we've got ourselves into this situation.
	How are we going to therefore go on, make ourselves able to care and support this child, able to help each other to flourish whilst being parents, being able to carry out the missions that we personally have to.
	Abortion has completely disrupted this narrative that male and female together can have a huge great impact on kids, on society and on life for each other generally.
	And now we just have this thought that women can do whatever they want by themselves.
	We don't need no man.
	We don't need no kids.
	All of these things are just holding us back.
	And if only the world didn't have kids and men, we would all be better for it.
	And that's not helped anybody.
	So, yeah, I would challenge Disney on that and call them to make, you know, a great movie that empowers families and empowers women who want to make that choice for marriage and kids and, you know, maybe that would be the next blockbuster that might get them out of this mess.
	Yeah, it turns out that the pills we have women give dire consequences for both the sanctity of infant lives and our relationships, so worth examining that at a legislative level.
	Right, have we got any video comments today, John?
	No?
	None today?
	Okay, right, we'll just go to the written comments on the website then.
	Fantastic.
	So for the first segment, Ru The Day, can we just recast Lois to be Snow White so it's all believable in terms of her being comparable aesthetic to Gal Gadot?
	Oh my goodness!
	There you go, you've got simp in the comments.
	Wonderful.
	She's a married woman, be careful!
	George Happ.
	The cultural vandals of Hollywood love destroying both the US and European culture and mythology, because this is what postmodernists do.
	Subvert that which is good.
	It's funny how they desecrated the two most symbolic Disney movies in quick succession, both representing an era of success and prosperity.
	Yeah, I've heard that they're developing my favourite one into a live action.
	They're gonna do Hercules.
	And I can see it now.
	Lizzo's gonna be one of the muses.
	It's gonna be hell.
	Oh gosh.
	Yeah.
	Watch this space.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Ewan Baker.
	Oh dear, that's a bit spicy.
	Maybe not, maybe not.
	Maybe don't put that one in next time.
	Terry Wharton.
	The actress was talking about Snow White as if it was a Disney creation.
	I wonder if she's even aware that it's a German folktale by the Brothers Grimm, which is over 200 years old.
	Do you expect her to have read anything?
	Actors are incredibly vapid.
	Other than Ryan Gosling, he's literally me.
	Fuzzy Toaster.
	These people are incapable of writing a good character on purpose.
	Snow White, skin as fair as the driven snow, not the same shade as coffee with two creams.
	Well, yeah, sure, whatever.
	Omar Awad.
	The most insulting aspect of Disney's latest foray into live action is that we're expected to believe the evil queen, Gal Gadot, is supposed to be jealous of Snow Brown.
	Blimey, guys, calm down.
	They want to disbelieve our lying eyes and pretend she's of unparalleled beauty.
	There are seven lights.
	Yeah, isn't that a reference to Star Trek that Tim Poole keeps making?
	It's a ripoff of 1984.
	Yes, two and two does indeed make five.
	Athelstan, there's so much ingratitude in the young today.
	That's actually a very good point.
	This comes back to our pride as gratification versus... I think national pride is almost the wrong word.
	I think patriotism does work better, but at least with national pride, You're looking to a flag because you're grateful for something you've inherited and you pay it all, whereas the pride flag is just all about what can I accrue to myself and what can I make myself in order to get a form of validation, solicit it from everyone else.
	This girl has a cultural icon handed down to her, and instead of appreciating that she stands on the shoulders of giants, she takes the chance to criticize and slam those who lay the path she walks on.
	Yeah, and kind of offend a lot of women who would describe to, you know, more of a Snow White aspect of dreaming for their prince to come.
	You know, there's nothing wrong with that for little girls to, like, dream of marriage and princes and that kind of thing.
	Well, it's just why, again, I don't understand.
	I do if you're just a sort of resentful person that just wants to grab power to make yourself feel better.
	But to denigrate relationships as somehow an impediment rather than something which is conducive to a meaningful life is just frustrating.
	Well, it's classic Hollywood elite being completely out of touch with what goes on in regular people's lives.
	Oh, yeah, particularly with their marriage rates.
	I mean, blimey, they can't keep a relationship together, can they?
	So on the second segment, pride is just kink with better PR.
	Yeah, that's actually correct.
	I mean, as I've said before, these people need to have a megaphone for their desires because their consciences just fill their heads with screaming the entire time, so they need to make you feel better about themselves.
	Derek Power, Christ also affirmed marriage is between a man and a woman, thus he would definitely be crucified now with the sign patriarchal bigot above his head.
	Yeah, and he was also against no full divorce, so that's also something that needs to be adjusted.
	Robert Longshaw, if I was to download a copy of the Quran to my phone and then delete it, is that blasphemy according to Islam?
	And IRL, how is that any different to burning a book?
	That's actually a very good question.
	I would be interested to see if there's a test case that comes about.
	That is interesting.
	Because there was recently a... I know in Scotland the amendments to the Hate Speech Bill has criminalised it if you have a meme on your phone that you didn't even necessarily share that's offensive.
	Oh my goodness.
	Yeah, I've heard that about the Irish law as well.
	They're currently debating a hate crime, hate speech law.
	It wouldn't surprise me if that was true about Scott, and I can't remember the specifics, but... Well, WhatsApp auto-downloads images unless you turn the setting off, so what happens if the police kick your door down and go, you got any offensive memes on?
	To be honest, Connor, if they're policing the thoughts in your head, it's hardly surprising that they're policing the memes on your phone!
	Fair point!
	Well, mate, there's too many things to get outraged about!
	Sophie Liv!
	What really gets to me is that the LGBT's big argument has been, and always still is, why do you care about what I do in my own bedroom?
	And I'm just like, okay, fine, as long as you're both consensual adults, whatever!
	We'll get to that in a moment.
	But then your end of the bargain has to be to keep it in your bedroom.
	We won't care about what you do in the bedroom and you keep it in your bedroom.
	But these people clearly don't do that.
	They go out their way to do their thing in public and rub it in people's faces.
	Like a group of children deliberately trying to annoy their parents to test boundaries.
	Which means, yes, we should act like parents and go, nope, you're not allowed, no discussion, go to your room.
	Okay, that's very eloquently put.
	The issue is, and when I went on Timcast recently, great show, do watch it, because all my co-hosts were much more insightful than I was.
	Seamus Coghlan, who was guest hosting at the time, Irish Catholic, good man, he said, well, the point about what goes on in your bedroom doesn't affect you is actually a really bad point, because your bedroom is not some sort of magical portal.
	Um, which transmogrifies how you feel about yourself at the time, just when you step through it.
	So what you continually do actually forms your character.
	It builds up how you think about yourself.
	So if you're in a conversation with someone and it goes to a taboo topic, you're going to be dancing around the landmines of hoping you never admit whatever you're into behind a closed door.
	And so it affects how confident and authentic you are in social interactions.
	That's why there's the perverse incentive there to mainstream and normalize your perverse desires so that you're never worried about someone shaming you if it comes up.
	And so, behind closed doors doesn't really work.
	Like, Britain can tolerate its eccentrics, but we do want to have a sort of shaming culture that says, maybe you should practice some healthier norms.
	You know, getting married, being normal, not the worst thing in the world.
	Working on it, I'll do my best.
	Marriage is radical now.
	Yeah.
	That's interesting as well.
	This is something that you were bringing up earlier about the stratification among social classes of certain policies, like the daycare one or the getting straight back to work.
	It's only the rich women getting married.
	Yeah, mainly the marriage rates are really high among the upper echelons of earners, but the lower echelons is really bad.
	Yeah, Matthew Goodwin's written quite well about this, and Rakeeb Hassan, who I'll hopefully be talking to soon.
	Rakeeb dug into it, and I think it was the Children's Commissioner who found this, that about 50% of children now in the UK are living between two households.
	And it's either because their parents never got married, or their parents got married and divorced.
	Right, or cohabited first.
	I remember seeing that in Matthew Goodwin's paper.
	The majority of kids who are living with two houses is because there was cohabitation before marriage and marriage has become this taboo thing that's so weird and conservative.
	But actually, you know, all the evidence and data points to the fact that it's great for kids, it's great for society, and it builds this kind of strong bond of expectation of something permanent.
	In our generation we often, especially millennials like myself, are moving from job to job, career to career, house to house, to city to city.
	We don't have a lot of permanence in our lives, we don't expect a lot of permanence.
	Marriage offers a respite from that and says, you know, no matter You know, what changes in our lives, what else happens to you, to me, to whatever, that's for the long haul.
	It provides a huge sense of stability for yourself, for your kids, for the community around you.
	So, I mean, it's such a great thing.
	It should be far more incentivized and encouraged, especially by this conservative government, but there's a lot they should be doing that they're not doing.
	Well, yeah, they're fundamentally not very conservative at all.
	I will say, as well, the cohabitation point, this is purely an anecdotal thing, but I know people that didn't live together before they got married, and then people that did.
	And I've lived with girlfriends in the past, and the common wisdom now, I think, is a bit of cope, just because most people really just want to live together because it's cheaper.
	Yeah.
	I feel like you need to live together for a while and work out if you can live together.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Just, just, just commit and make it work.
	You've got commitment codified.
	Otherwise it feels like you're good enough to live with now, but I'm not fully committed.
	Yeah.
	We'll see about in a couple of years how you're looking then.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And it's just, it's just sort of acid on commitment, which isn't, it's not very encouraging.
	Rose, I'll be able to wear jeans again, excuse me while I'm violently sick.
	Fair enough.
	Yeah, that as a justification.
	It comes back to the vanity and the self-gratification culture that says that abortion is the prerequisite for you to being your true self.
	It's just gross.
	Sophie, remember when Lena Dunham said that she never had an abortion but wished she did just so she'd be part of the movement?
	Yeah.
	She also, Lena Dunham made a very strange jumping on the Me Too bandwagon claim, saying that she knows she was sexually assaulted because she woke up the next morning and found a condom in her plant pot.
	And it's like, but you were boasting about having one night stands.
	And also, if you're affirming the sexual revolution, it's like, what's the bulwark against that?
	If anyone said, you know, maybe wait until you're married or have more conservative mores about how you sleep around with, you'd call them a fascist.
	So you've kind of set up a bad environment here.
	Oh yeah, speaking of Barbie, they've just announced that Mattel have hired her to do a Polly Pocket Movie.
	It's like, right, you just keep appointing feminists as filmmakers of girls' beloved toys.
	But I think, I mean, to go back to this quote, like to say that she wished she had an abortion, it just shows that abortion, we were told initially that this was for rare cases, for, you know, really heartbreaking stories.
	And those stories do exist and those wouldn't do matter.
	I don't think that abortion erases trauma.
	If, you know, if that's how a baby has been conceived, I think we can love and support that woman and help her.
	And I don't think abortion is doing that.
	But What we see from the movement today with these people who want to have abortion so they can be part of the club, it shows that this isn't about rare cases, this isn't about exceptions, this is about just having the bodily autonomy and the power to do what you want with the child that you've created.
	It is devastating that the humanity of a little baby is just completely thrown out the window and this is seen as just a flag to wave.
	To be a feminist you have to be pro-abortion, this procedure which ends the life of one and deeply harms another.
	I couldn't put a bet myself, and I think that's probably the perfect and sad but very meaningful note to end on.
	Lois, I've brought up your Twitter, so hopefully people can go and follow you there.
	On the point of marriage, actually, it doesn't stop you having a career, because both you and your husband have done television stints together.
	We have, yeah!
	Anyway, we've started our own TikTok now, if anyone's on TikTok, we're called Tradical.
	Oh blimey!
	So we both do a lot of kind of commentary on these kind of topics.
	Calum is a medical doctor who has a lot of insight on abortion and abortion ethics and finding better solutions for women and children so you know he's got a lot of good content on that but you can find us both there on Twitter and you know if you're interested in
	ADF cases that we have around the world, we've mentioned some of them today, but we are often fighting for the freedom of people to be able to speak about what they believe, to be able to express their faith, or you know, we have cases, really fascinating cases around the world now to do with people who are unable to Give compelled speech and to say something's true that isn't true.
	So do look us up.
	ADF UK is our branch here in London.
	We also have an international global entity called ADF International where you can find stories around the world.
	So do check us out.
	We're on Twitter as well.
	So give us a follow.
	Wonderful.
	And thank you very much for coming and being a guest today.
	Really appreciate it.
	Thank you so much.
	I really appreciate you having me on.
	Yeah.
	Wonderful.
	Well, thanks very much for watching, everyone.
	We'll be back tomorrow at one o'clock.

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