Over the past 48 hours, a TikTok video has gone viral showing a distressed girl from Leeds being manhandled and taken away by police. In the clip, the child’s mother, who filmed and released the video, is heard arguing with the officers who have entered her home, pleading with them to leave her daughter alone, who she says is both autistic and suffers with scoliosis.

The mother claims that her daughter said to one of the officers, a blonde woman with short hair, that she ‘looked like her lesbian nana’. ‘You’re going to remove her for what, she said the word lesbian? Her nana is a lesbian, she’s married to a woman. She’s not homophobic’, the mother says in the clip.

She tries, in vain, to explain the distress this is all causing her daughter, who is hiding under the stairs, screaming and hitting herself. ‘She’s autistic’, the mother repeats, to which the allegedly offended cop responds: ‘I don’t care.’ A male officer intervenes, insisting the child made a ‘homophobic’ comment towards his colleague. The girl is then taken away, screaming and crying. She was released on bail without charge the next day.

[It’s not in the US — at least for now. If we follow the UK in criminalizing expression through “hate speech” criminal codes, it might become one, at least until the federal judiciary gets involved. And don’t just brush off that potential either. This kind of comment has achieved quasi-criminal status in places where speech codes get enforced, such as Academia. — Ed]