It’s shameful that an army veteran was convicted over a prayer for his dead son

Adam Smith-Connor was this week convicted of a heinous offence, slapped with a conditional discharge and a costs order for £9,000. The actual crime in question? The 51-year-old army veteran was praying silently, on his own, for the soul of a child which he had, now much to his regret, aborted many years earlier. The reason this affair reached Poole Magistrates’ Court was that he had been doing this near a Bournemouth abortion clinic, and that clinic was the subject of a buffer zone order.

This episode should worry all of us, pro-life or pro-choice, if we believe in the idea of liberty. The by-law Smith-Connor was convicted under (not strictly a by-law, but it has a similar effect) effectively bans the expression of moral opinions that are entirely lawful and quite widely-held from within a sizeable chunk of suburban Bournemouth. But this conviction is particularly chilling for other reasons too.

Aside from the conditional discharge and whoppingly high costs order, Smith-Connor now has a criminal record – not for doing something bad, but simply for thinking the wrong thoughts.