You shouldn’t be arrested for …

Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him

‘If a man has sexual relations with a man, as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’
Leviticus xx 13

Britain’s most energetic and entertaining bigot, Stephen Green of Christian Voice, has at last managed to get himself arrested. His crime was to hand out leaflets, which quoted the above passage from the Bible, in a park in Cardiff. Stephen believes that Leviticus got it right about homosexuality, although perhaps it does not go far enough, all things considered. He will, if you press him, tell you that homosexuality is an abomination and wicked and evil and so on. It’s all in his book The Sexual Dead-End.

Anyway, what happened in Cardiff was this, Stephen told me. ‘We were there handing out these leaflets when a couple of coppers turned up, wearing fluorescent jackets with “Minority Support Unit” on the back. One of them came up to me and said, “stop handing out those leaflets.” I asked why I should stop and he said that if I didn’t, he’d do me for littering. I told him I had no intention of stopping and handed a leaflet to the next person who passed by, at which point the copper said, “right, you’re nicked,” and carted me off to Cardiff police station where I spent four hours in the cells.’

Stephen, with some justification, finds all of this very funny indeed and we had to break off our conversation for a while because he couldn’t stop giggling about the policeman ‘prancing around in his fluorescent jacket’.