Across the world, Christians are being silenced

Last week, a 75-year-old Christian grandmother was bundled into the back of a police van outside a Glasgow hospital. Her alleged crime? Conversation.

Rose Docherty wasn’t spray-painting walls or blocking doorways. She wasn’t shouting or shoving leaflets into anyone’s hands. She simply held a sign offering a listening ear: ‘Coercion is a crime. Here to talk, only if you want.’ In the eyes of the state, this made her a criminal.

Under Scotland’s new ‘buffer zone’ laws, even the possibility of ‘influencing’ a passerby outside an abortion facility is treated as criminal behaviour. Rose wasn’t standing with an influential message. She was giving people the choice: walk on or stop and chat. But choice, it seems, now belongs only to the abortion lobby. Rose, with two hip replacements, was dragg