A retired British police officer goes to the Crown Court on Friday to fight a criminal conviction for sharing a meme about bacon.

Stephen Gray, 65, spent nearly three decades with Cleveland Police and lives in Darlington, County Durham. On April 30, Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court found him guilty of sending a “grossly offensive” message under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. The fines and costs came to more than £1,000, and he now has a criminal record.

Canadians should take note. Parliament has stripped the Criminal Code of a decades-old defence for anyone who, in good faith, expressed an opinion on a religious subject or one based on a religious text. Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, removes it.

The bill got through the House of Commons 186–137 on March 25 after the Liberals won Bloc Québécois support by agreeing to remove that religious exemption from the hate speech law. The Senate passed it on June 4. As we reported at the time, the Justice Centre, the Democracy Fund and the Free Speech Union of Canada all warned senators against removing that defence.

Gray isn’t the only one in Britain, either. Last week we reported that women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen has been charged under the same section over an X post about Islam.

The meme wasn’t even Gray’s. It had been shared thousands of times on Facebook before he reposted it. It showed a rasher of bacon beside a man in a turban, captioned, “Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

The joke refers to the Hadith, which says Aisha was six when she married Muhammad and nine when the marriage was consummated. Gray said it was satire meant to spark debate about child marriage in parts of the Muslim world.

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“I made a joke, an ironic joke, about Islam,” he told The Telegraph.

District Judge Steven Hood decided the meme was about religion, not politics, and that it was grossly offensive. Gray had also been charged over a second repost, this one calling for mass deportation, and on that the judge cleared him because immigration is a political issue debated in Parliament.

According to the Free Speech Union, the judge ruled the post couldn’t be making a serious point because it was light-hearted, and that convicting Gray was not a disproportionate limit on his free expression.

So in England a joke about deporting migrants is legal. A joke about the prophet’s marriage gets you a record.

How did it get to court at all? The complaint came from a neighbour who had fallen out with Gray over something unrelated. The Crown Prosecution Service first declined to prosecute, seeing no realistic prospect of conviction, then reversed course after the neighbour challenged that decision under the Victims’ Right to Review scheme.

Gray says a complaint like this would have gone nowhere when he was in uniform. “It wouldn’t have got past the front door of the police station,” he told the paper.

The Free Speech Union is paying for the appeal and has hired John Beggs KC.

“No one making a similar joke about Jesus would face prosecution,” Lord Young of Acton, the union’s general secretary, told The Telegraph in August.

Parliament abolished the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales in 2008. The union’s fundraiser for Gray is titled “Stop blasphemy law by the back door.”

It has won a case like this before. Hamit Coskun was convicted for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Southwark Crown Court overturned that on appeal, and the High Court later threw out the prosecutors’ challenge.

Gray’s appeal is listed for Friday, November 13.