A Christian Doctor from Toowoomba, Queensland is reportedly being investigated by the prosecutorial extension of the Medical Board of Australia for merely retweeting tweets that criticized the “radical gender indoctrination” of children.
Dr. David van Gend is a general practitioner in Australia, who merely retweeted posts by the Conservative Party Senate candidate Lyle Shelton. Furthermore, the posts which the doctor retweeted are from a few months ago.
In addition, another set of tweets which have placed the doctor in hot water are in regards to an event in Brisbane with Ryan Anderson, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and a prominent opponent of the transgender ideology.
Months after the tweets were sent, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency notified the doctor that his conduct was under investigation. AHPRA, which can allegedly place criminal sanctions on doctors, informed van Gend that he was being investigated for violating board policies.
AHPRA alleged that the doctor might be guilty of “discriminatory conduct” because of his retweets.
“Van Gend, a conservative Christian, retweeted these tweets without comment. That is the sum total of his offending,” Devine wrote on Saturday in the Daily Telegraph.
The AHPRA stated in the notification that while van Gend has presented himself as a medical practitioner, he has provided information that is “clearly not medically, psychologically, not scientifically based.”
“The practitioner has ‘retweeted’ Mr. Lyle Shelton’s tweets promoting books that ‘push back on radical gender indoctrination of children,’ and an article titled ‘SSM has led exactly where we warned it would,'” the complaint reads.
According to the complaint, Van Gend must explain in writing by Thursday whether his retweets promote the “health of the community” and if his retweets “advance the health and well-being of individual patients.”
While this case is against only one doctor, it has enormous ramifications for free speech and for the rights of Christians and conservatives. Shelton came to the doctor’s defense and released a statement;
“If the Medical Board can punish a medical professional for questioning that children’s gender is fluid, God help the parents who try and protect their kids from being indoctrinated at school,” Shelton said in a statement. “If the Medical Board is so confident that children’s gender is fluid, why doesn’t it allow discussion and debate? Why must it use its power to crush even the questioning of contested science? It is much easier to shut people up than to have a proper discussion but sadly free speech is not the way of modern politically correct elites.”
Van Gend is not the only individual subject to similar restrictions; instead, many across the world are dealing with their local governments attempting to silence free speech.
Canada has also made it illegal to challenge the ‘gender theory’ and as a result is increasingly becoming a tyrannical place for Christians to live and work. Will Australia become the same?