A street preacher who was arrested for preaching in Canterbury, England, while an LGBT pride event was being held is calling on Christians “not to back down and bow before” the LGBT movement.
In an interview with The Christian Post, Ryan Schiavo, an American-born street preacher who typically spends about half the year in the United Kingdom, discussed his June 10 arrest.
Schiavo told CP that he and a friend “went to Canterbury just to evangelize” as they often do, insisting that he was unaware that an LGBT pride event was taking place: “It was not until we arrived and …
were headed into the city that we realized that there was an actual pride event going on and it was quite oppressive. I mean, there were rainbow flags, rainbow signage, a lot of people dressed in rainbow [colors] and rainbows painted on faces.”
“There was a band performing somewhere with what appeared to be LGBT singers, and musicians and it was very much in your face,” he added.
As Schiavo shared Romans 1:18-32, which he summarized as discussing “God judging society because of wickedness” and “sexual immorality and homosexual behavior,” a crowd started to form around him.
According to Schiavo, “There were two hecklers in particular that were making it really difficult for me, one was a guy and one was a girl.”
Schiavo described how “the guy, in particular, started following me around and literally circling me, following and screaming and cursing so that people could not hear me.”
Eventually, Schiavo began having a one-on-one conversation with a girl who identified as a lesbian. As the two engaged in what he characterized as a “very productive, respectful dialogue,” he recalled that “five police officers came onto the scene at one time.”
“I saw two security guards who were actually set up and positioned before I even said a word. I saw them in the distance because they saw me with my Bible and speaker.
It was almost like they were just prepared, waiting for me to say something because it was a pride event. And so, when the police came, three officers came to me at separate times.”
He noted that one of the officers was “quite aggressive, unhappy, demanding, trying to incriminate me with the questions that he was asking and wanted to know exactly what I said.”
The officer asked Schiavo if he said anything that “may have caused people to be offended” and expressed sympathy with the LGBT activists by asking, “Can’t you let them have their day?”
“They have a whole month,” Schiavo replied. Acknowledging that the officer did not appear to appreciate the response, Schiavo detailed how the officer he sparred with and others began interviewing “supposed witnesses” before returning and asking,
“Are you going to go somewhere else? Are you going to stop doing this?” When Schiavo responded by declaring, “I don’t know if I’ll stop, but the Word has to be preached,” Schiavo said the officer “went into a rage.”
“I think he already had the handcuffs on him. He was prepared, and he just very quickly threw my hands behind my back, crisscrossed them, and threw the cuffs on me very, very tight to the point where I had marks on my wrists from the handcuffs 50 hours afterward, into the third day, that’s how hard he cuffed me,” Schiavo recounted. “He and one of his colleagues took me down the street.”
Video footage provided to CP of the moments following the arrest shows that when Schiavo’s friend requested that the officers provide a reason for the arrest, one of them accused the street preacher of violating a “hate-related public order” law that bars “discrimination.” Schiavo told CP that the police “don’t know anything that I said” but are “just going solely off of what people are telling them on the ground.” (READ MORE)
