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WillowOne's Positions

Blasphemy

My Positions

  1. Blasphemy should not be a crime anywhere, and "religious offence" should never be a ground for restricting speech.
  2. The right to criticise, mock and reject a religion is the same right as the right to practise it. A state that protects one against the other has taken a side.
  3. Criticism of a religion is not hatred of its adherents. Words such as "Islamophobia" are routinely used to conflate the two. I oppose the second and insist on the first.

Notes

  1. The law in Britain. The common-law offence of blasphemous libel protected the Church of England only. Its last successful use was in 1977, when the editor of Gay News was convicted for publishing a poem about a centurion's love for the crucified Christ (Whitehouse v Lemon). The offence was abolished in England and Wales in 2008, in Scotland in 2021, and Ireland removed it from its constitution by referendum in 2018. These were late and correct. The remaining pressure comes from the other direction: the demand, since the Danish cartoons of 2005 (see Atheism), for a new protection against offending Islam, dressed as a hate-crime measure.
  2. The law elsewhere. Blasphemy or apostasy carries the death penalty in around a dozen states. Pakistan's section 295-C mandates death for insulting the Prophet; a Christian farm labourer, Asia Bibi, spent eight years on death row over an argument about a cup of water, and the governor who defended her was shot by his own bodyguard, who is now venerated. A student, Mashal Khan, was beaten to death by a mob on his university campus in 2017 on a rumour. The accused under these laws are overwhelmingly Christians, Ahmadis and Muslims denounced by neighbours in property disputes. A blasphemy law is always, in practice, a weapon of the majority against the minority and of the mob against the individual.
  3. The law by murder. Where the state will not enforce blasphemy, some will enforce it themselves. Salman Rushdie lived under a death sentence from 1989 and was stabbed on a stage in 2022. Theo van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam in 2004; the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015; Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher who showed cartoons in a lesson on free expression, was beheaded in 2020. A teacher at Batley Grammar School who did the same in 2021 is still in hiding. Every concession to "sensitivity" after such an act is a payment to the people who made it, and tells the next one that it works.
  4. Why there should be no such law. Religions are ideas, and ideas have no rights; people do (Free Speech). Offence is not harm. The believer offended by a cartoon has suffered exactly what I suffer when told I will burn for eternity, which is nothing that the law should notice. Every religion is blasphemy to every other: the Christian creed denies the Prophet, the Shahada denies the Trinity, and the atheist denies both. A law against offending religion is a law against religious disagreement, which is a law against religion.
  5. The "punching down" objection. It is said that mocking Islam in Europe targets a vulnerable minority. The individuals may be vulnerable; the idea is not. A faith of two billion people, with states, armies and legal codes behind it, is not "down", and treating its doctrines as too fragile to be laughed at is a form of condescension that Muslim reformers and ex-Muslims, who bear the actual cost of these laws, have been the first to point out. The person most endangered by a blasphemy norm is the Muslim who wants to leave.
  6. The United Nations. Between 1999 and 2010 the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation secured a series of resolutions against the "defamation of religions". In 2011 these were replaced by Resolution 16/18, which protects people from incitement rather than religions from criticism. That is the right distinction, and it is the whole of my position in a sentence.

Sources

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