New law on blasphemy is against all religion
Date Published: {J}
WELL, I messed up big time last week, didn't I? I forgot completely which part of the Constitution requires us to have blasphemy law.
Naively I assumed it would be Article 44, the one on religion. What a fool I was. The relevant text appears under the section that describes our personal freedom. As an exception, of course.
40.6.1° The State guarantees liberty for the exercise of the following rights, subject to public order and morality:
i. The right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions.
The education of public opinion being, however, a matter of such grave import to the common good, the State shall endeavour to ensure that organs of public opinion, such as the radio, the press, the cinema, while preserving their rightful liberty of expression, including criticism of Government policy, shall not be used to undermine public order or morality or the authority of the State.
The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.
All right, I can understand the necessity of the State having laws against sedition. That's armed opposition to legitimate government. But indecency and blasphemy? In the same sentence? The word indecency seems faintly ridiculous today – I'm not even sure if it's technically possible to be indecent without wearing a monocle – so it's hard to imagine what counted back in 1937. Naughty What The Butler Saw film reels I suppose. And the works of James Joyce.
Today we still have laws about what is and is not legal to broadcast or publish, but in place of a concept as vague as indecency they use clear-cut exceptions to the general principle of freedom. That does not seem to conflict with the Constitution.
So if I could manage to fool myself considerably, I could pretend the new law was an honest effort to clearly define blasphemy. But this is not what it does. For a start, it defines it in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with what the framers of the Constitution meant by the term. They understood blasphemy to be speech offensive to God; the new law redefines it as speech that anyone is offended by on religious grounds. The upshot is that, far from making the concept more clear, it makes it completely open-ended.
Take this example: One of the fastest-growing religions in the country is Wicca, a mixture of the little we really know about druidism and witchcraft, helped along with a good pinch of just-made-up. Now already I have offended some Wiccans. You could offend even more by suggesting they were Satanists. Are Wiccans defended from my offensive suggestions of Satanism by this law? Apparently.
So what about other faiths? It is a matter of fundamental Christian doctrine that the Jews saw and yet rejected the Messiah, which is an insanely offensive concept to Jewish people. Islam denies that Christ was divine, effectively accusing all Christians of worshipping a man. Some Protestants claim that the Pope is the Antichrist. In short, it is a fundamental fact of religion that what is sacred to one person is ‘grossly abusive or insulting’ to someone else. Bizarrely therefore, this is really a law against all religion.
And about time too.