Scotland’s Safe Access Zone Law Proves JD Vance Was Right

J.D. Vance was castigated by the British media in March this year for comments he made in Munich to the effect that legislation enacted in Scotland to establish “safe access zones” around abortion clinics, intended to safeguard women using such clinics, could criminalise private prayer in the home. As Mr Vance’s trip to Scotland begins, the Scottish Greens have dubbed him an “agent of toxic misinformation”.

I was dismayed by the media’s initial reaction to Mr Vance’s comments some five months ago but am surprised to see them refurbished for his visit to the UK. People seemed adamant that his claim was untrue because he said it and that to endorse his statement of the law was to endorse his political beliefs. In a bygone era this kind of schoolboy sophistry would be recognised for what it is: the fallacy of guilt by association.

The politician responsible for the legislation, Gillian Mackay, told the BBC in March that Mr Vance had been “misinformed”. A few days after his comments her party, the Scottish Greens, by that point drunk on their modicum of fame, demanded an apology from the White House.

Yet he was not wrong. Though the situation is contrived, a person living in a “safe access zone” could be praying at their window, upset a passer-by and be guilty of an offence. That this is unlikely to occur is no excuse for passing illiberal law. Asked on a podcast about this very situation, Ms Mackay made the eccentric observation that it “depends on who’s passing the window…” Well yes, crimes require victims. She also said she did not know anyone who could pray “loudly or performatively enough to be seen from outside their own house”. She may be surprised to learn that sight does not rely on sound and that it is perfectly conceivable a passer-by’s glance could fall on someone praying. All her floundering does, of course, is concede the point that Mr Vance was right. Obstinate in her failure to understand her own law, Ms Mackay has now condemned the Vice President anew, saying with trademark Green hysteria and hyperbole that he “made false claims on an international stage about Scotland’s buffer zones law” and that his “toxic misinformation” is a “threat to democracy and freedom around the world”. But what about the threat such gibberish poses to sense-making?

The de facto national mission of Scotland, which culturally and politically has been in the throes of madness for some time now, is to be on the “right side of history”, to use the shibboleth beloved of so-called progressives. To that end it has fallen prey to the conceit that it can legislate its way towards utopia. The late American conservative genius Russell Kirk, who was fond of Scotland and may well have written these words as a doctoral student in St Andrews, lamented “the incessant alteration of positive law” by those who, “the farther their affairs fall into confusion, the more enthusiastic they become for some legislative panacea which promises to cut all knots in Gordian fashion” and which – he may have added – can only fray our society.

Kapil Summan is a legal journalist based in Edinburgh.