{"id":233172,"date":"2021-04-30T06:44:17","date_gmt":"2021-04-30T06:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=233172"},"modified":"2021-05-01T05:30:37","modified_gmt":"2021-05-01T05:30:37","slug":"christian-pastor-arrested-for-making-homophobic-statements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=233172","title":{"rendered":"Christian pastor arrested for making &#8216;homophobic statements&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><strong>Women heard shouting &#8216;this is a Christian country&#8217; as the preacher is led away<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Police said they had received complaints about his &#8216;homophobic comments&#8217;<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Preacher arrested under Public Order Act before being released without charge<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Katie Feehan, Rory Tingle and Vanessa Allen &#8212; Daily Mail.com Apr 28, 2021<\/h1>\n<h5>A Christian pastor who was arrested after he preached from the Bible said yesterday he had been treated &#8216;shamefully&#8217;.<\/h5>\n<h5>John Sherwood, 71, was led away in handcuffs, questioned in a police station and held overnight after being accused of making homophobic comments outside Uxbridge Station in west London.<\/h5>\n<h5>The grandfather claimed he was left bruised after police pulled him from a mini-stepladder he was using and cuffed his hands behind his back.<\/h5>\n<h5>Police said they had received complaints the man had been making &#8216;allegedly homophobic comments&#8217; and arrested him under the Public Order Act, which can be used under the vague proviso that someone is using &#8216;abusive or insulting words&#8217; that cause &#8216;harm&#8217; to someone else.\u00a0 He was later released without charge.<\/h5>\n<h5>Mr Sherwood, a pastor for 35 years, said: &#8216;I wasn&#8217;t making any homophobic comments, I was just defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. I was only saying what the Bible says \u2013 I wasn&#8217;t wanting to hurt anyone or cause offence.<\/h5>\n<h5>&#8216;I was doing what my job description says, which is to preach the gospel in open air as well as in a church building.<\/h5>\n<h5>&#8216;When the police approached me, I explained that I was exercising my religious liberty and my conscience. I was forcibly pulled down from the steps and suffered some injury to my wrist and to my elbow. I do believe I was treated shamefully. It should never have happened.&#8217;<\/h5>\n<h5>Mr Sherwood, who preaches at an independent evangelical church in north London, was arrested under the Public Order Act for allegedly causing alarm or distress. He was released without charge but a file has now been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service for review.<\/h5>\n<h5>The Metropolitan Police said a member of the public flagged down patrol officers and alleged Mr Sherwood had made homophobic comments.<\/h5>\n<h5>Mobile phone footage of Friday&#8217;s arrest shows Mr Sherwood standing on the stepladder with a Bible in his hand outside a Tube station in Uxbridge, west London. Officers can be heard telling him to get off his steps before they appear to grasp his hands and pull him down.<\/h5>\n<h5>Onlookers can be heard shouting, &#8216;He&#8217;s an elderly man \u2013 take it easy with him&#8217;, before officers put Mr Sherwood in handcuffs and take him to a police car.<\/h5>\n<h5>Mr Sherwood said officers grilled him over his attitude to gay people. He was even asked what he would do if his children were gay. The married father-of-two said: &#8216;The question was irrelevant to the allegation against me. I said I would seek to bring them to Christ, but of course I would love them no matter what, because they&#8217;re my children.&#8217;<\/h5>\n<h5>Andrea Williams, of campaign group Christian Concern, said police needed greater understanding of the law surrounding freedom of speech and religion.<\/h5>\n<h5>She added: &#8216;There is an idea that if people are offended you should arrest someone, but in this country we also have freedom of speech.&#8217;<\/h5>\n<h5>A Met Police spokesman said its directorate of professional standards had assessed video footage of Mr Sherwood&#8217;s arrest and had found no evidence of misconduct by officers.<\/h5>\n<h5>A statement posted to a Christian Facebook his supporters read: &#8216;Whilst he was preaching, he expounded the final verses of Genesis 1, declaring that God&#8217;s purpose in creating mankind was to set human beings in families, headed by a father and a mother, not by two fathers, or by two mothers.<\/h5>\n<h5>&#8216;The distinction within mankind of just two genders, male and female, made in the image of God, constitutes the essence of God&#8217;s created order.&#8217;<\/h5>\n<h5><\/h5>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-9521123\/Moment-police-arrest-elderly-preacher-71-street-quoting-homophobic-statements-Bible.html\">Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>71-year-old pastor arrested, led away in handcuffs and detained overnight, allegedly for making \u201chomophobic statements\u201d while he preached<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":233174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-controlling-the-news-andor-the-free-exchange-of-ideas-and-information","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=233172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233173,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233172\/revisions\/233173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/233174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=233172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=233172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}