Hannah left Islam for Christianity 15 years ago. The daughter of an imam, she has been on the run ever since, fleeing from the Quranic sentence of death for apostates and surviving only through police protection. But this isn’t the Middle East - this is the UK. Ruth Gledhill of The Times reports that Hannah has been forced to move 45 times since a gang armed with knives, axes and hammers attacked her home in 1994. The article also notes a Policy Exchange study that found that 36 per cent of British Muslims aged between 16 and 24 believed those who converted to another religion should be punished by death.

Hal Colebatch reports this morning in The American Spectator about recent recommendations by a think tank closely associated with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to strip away Christian cultural traditions and institutions in favor of more multi-cultural programs to promote “British-ness”. Proposals include taking Christmas celebrations off the calendar and replacing church christenings with civil “birth ceremonies”.

Is the trend to de-Christianize Britain a reflection of historically low church attendance, or an aggressive effort to accelerate the process through government intervention? Hasn’t this de-Christianizing program been tried before in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany?

The government across the Pond proposed a new law last week to criminalize hate speech directed at gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender Britons.

“[W]e are now appalled by hatred and invective directed at people on the basis of their sexuality,” British Justice Secretary Jack Straw said, giving Parliament the law’s raison d’être. “It is time for the law to recognize this.”

Most British Christians indeed recognize that, but few want a law that does it as well — and threatens jail time for holding religious convictions. Legally, others wonder why the Single Equality Bill, as it’s called, is even necessary; criminal laws already punish violence, harassment and threats against homosexuals.

Further concern rises from the proposed max sentence of seven years in prison. The average sentence for a rape conviction in England is also seven years, as it turns out.

The Church of England has denounced the law, suggesting it would permit homosexuals to sue the church if clergy condemned homosexuality as sinful.

“A homophobic hatred law would be used by those with an axe to grind against Christians to silence them,” Colin Hart, director of England’s Christian Institute, tells The Times. He adds it would not be the first time police interfered with free speech and religious liberty vis-à-vis sexual ethics. And police, it was announced, would be the final arbiters of who has “crossed the line” into this “atmosphere or climate” of hatred.

But no worries, the gay lobby assures Christians: “It will not apply to those who temperately express religious views,” one gay rights campaigner said. Another explained everything’s hunky-dory so long as Christians voice disagreement in a “temperate” and “polite” manner — drawing the line, apparently, at rude free speech.

“‘Polite’ and ‘temperate’ are words homosexual activists should consider,” Rodger Harper, a Texas missionary in London’s Docklands neighborhood who has ministered to the city’s gays, told WOW. “Not only is the homosexual agenda a minority position, it is always hostile, radically hostile, to Christianity. There’s nothing ‘temperate’ or ‘polite’ about it.”

But given the rape stats, the law could put lesbians — staunchly feminist, as a group — in the unenviable position of explaining how slurs to one’s sexuality are on par with brutal acts of misogyny.