Christian Artist Reported to Police and Banned From Own Exhibition Over Gender-Critical Views
Christian artist Victoria Culf was reported to the police and banned from her own exhibition because of her gender-critical beliefs in the latest example of free speech in peril in Britain. The Telegraph has the story.
Mrs Culf launched legal action against Watford Borough Council last year on nine grounds, including breach of contract, discrimination and harassment.
The 44 year-old, who has been an artist for 20 years, had been setting up her independently funded exhibition at Watford Museum when she became engaged in a conversation with a council worker about transgender issues.
While making a cup of tea, the council official revealed that her child was “socially transitioning” and that they had tried to get puberty blockers from the Tavistock gender identity clinic.
Mrs Culf claims to have politely said that owing to her Christian beliefs and her experience working with children and young people, she believed transitioning to be harmful.
The artist claims to have also said the Tavistock clinic should be shut down, reasoning that “children are too young to properly assess risk”.
“I wouldn’t be being true to myself if I agreed with you,” she claims to have said.
While Mrs Culf believed the conversation to have ended “calmly and amicably”, she later received a call from the council informing her of “harassment” allegations and decreeing that she must give 24 hours’ notice before entering her exhibition.
Worth reading in full.
In a press release, Christian Concern says the council official lied about police investigating the incident, even making up an incident number and passing it on to the council:
Despite the conversation appearing to end amicably, the colleague later posted on social media accusing Mrs Culf of a “transphobic rant”.
This led to the council restricting her access to the exhibition and informing her that she was under police investigation for a hate crime, claims that have since been proven to be false.
The council official claimed police were investigating the incident, but police records confirm they did not log it as a crime and described Mrs Culf’s comments as protected free speech. …
The police logbook has revealed that the day after receiving the report, the police emphatically said they were not recording it as an incident or investigating it and described what Victoria had said as “free speech”.
The police log records the accuser to be “upset” after being told her report would not be taken forward.
Despite the police refusing to act, the official maintained the pretence that Mrs Culf was under police investigation, and emailed her boss at the Council to say: “The Hate Crime Officer called me. It has been logged as an incident with the number HC-08062023-0528”.
Over the following three months, Watford Borough Council continued to encourage and pressurise Be Creative to investigate Mrs Culf, treat her like a criminal and terminate her contract, which they subsequently did.
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😔 😔 oh my!
Who is this council official? False accusers should not get anonymity, especially when they’ve shown themselves to be shameless liars.
Bullying is characterised by cowardice. Question is, what the Devil gets into these people?
You said it…
The claim should name the employee individually for damages. Seems lies were told and corrupt inventions passed off as fact.
Lies and child abuse.
Mrs Culf, for the record, I agree with you.
You cannot change your gender. It is a biological reality.
“Transitioning” is impossible: all you can achieve is some form of chemical or surgical castration or neutering. The effects of these are of course harmful.
Doing this to teenagers is evil.
What you said is therefore true; however as a Christian you are probably aware of the existence of evil, not just as some abstract concept but an objective, active force that influences people and acts by deception.
The biological reality is called sex and gender is a property of nouns in certain languages, eg, in German der Tisch (table) gender masculinum/ male, das Mädchen (girl) neuter and die Sache (thing) femininum/ female.
Some people also use gender to refer to certain stereotypical social roles other people are – in their opinion – just playacting. In particular, they claim that sex either doesn’t exist at all or is completely irrelevant and that terms like man and woman thus don’t or must not denote the sex of a person but a role this person has chosen to play.
Except that they’re not really claiming that: What the do claim is that supposedly socially constructed gender roles are really being both innate and socially constructed. That’s obviously a contradiction but contradictions don’t usually bother people that much when fighting for some cause they believe to be good.
Surely this is clearly a hate crime against Mrs Culf for her Christian beliefs? Or does being a Christian makes you automatically guilty of a hate crime?
Yes.
There will be a time when being a Christian will be criminalized again.
Nothing new.
The communists did it too and the same forces are at the heart of woke and communism.
(BTW: I was baptized in secret: in the eastern block back in the 60’s it was considered anti-government activity to have your child baptized.)
Was the council worker a set-up to try to entrap an honest Christian woman.
Just another deranged victim of evil forces.
Woke is dead?
The positive aspect of this story is that the police did their job successfully, with nothing being recorded against her.
Daily Telegraph disallowed comments under the article. I wonder why.
I suppose the council official wasn’t named in order to protect the identity of their unfortunate child; you have to wonder whether they are some kind of activist enabling this nonsense.
Her unfortunate child, not “their”. Don’t play their game.
Not intentional; I hadn’t clocked the sex of the official.
I urge everyone to join the excellent Free Speech Union. It’s not much money, and you might very well need their legal team one day with this government.