Fry storm in a teacup shows how blasphemy laws have been stirred
LET me say again, if the chance comes to repeal the blasphemy provision in the Constitution, I’ll be voting yes, and I suspect a few bishops, Catholic and Church of Ireland, will do likewise. At the same time, the fake outrage over the would-be blasphemy case against Stephen Fry was just that, fake. And if it wasn’t fake, it was pathetic.
The charge was never going to stick because the law is written in such a way as to make it almost impossible to stick. You have to show that there was intention to cause outrage and there must have been outrage “among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion”.
What would fit the bill? I daresay the pornographic cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, carried by ‘Charlie Hebdo’ in France, would. It would be extremely hard to argue that they were not designed to cause outrage and they certainly outraged a lot of people, so much so that several staff of the magazine were murdered in cold blood.
What else might result in a prosecution? Quite possibly the cartoon of a Mohammed-like figure with a bomb-shaped turban on his head that was carried by a Danish magazine in 2005. That caused riots in the Muslim world and Denmark suffered trade losses. So, yes, there was outrage there as well, and again it would be hard to argue that the intention was not to cause offence.
But notice something here; in both of the examples I’ve given the religion targeted, and the adherents of which rose up in outrage, was Islam.
When is the last time an outrageous cartoon or statement about Christianity caused this kind of outrage among Christians? You’d be doing well to think of anything in our lifetimes in this part of the world.
The people in our part of the world who spend most of their time outraged at offences against their numerous ever-so-carefully-refined sensibilities are the politically correct, some of whom actually rioted when Donald Trump was elected and believe in booting off university campuses anyone they dislike, and they dislike a lot of people.
A former government minister told me that the blasphemy law introduced by former justice minister Dermot Ahern in 2009 was partly prompted by the Danish cartoon controversy.
Imagine if a newspaper columnist here wrote something that Muslims found incredibly offensive. Suppose that it caused riots in the Middle East or made us a target for terrorism. Imagine that a big beef contract to some Middle Eastern country was cancelled as a result?
Do you think any government would want any of that? Just about the only religion you could offend that would rise up in indignation these days is Islam. It is very hard to believe that the blasphemy law of 2009 was not written with Islam mostly in mind. It hits back. Christians barely write indignant letters to the papers these days.
The would-be blasphemy case against Fry for insulting God got all the publicity you could shake a stick at. The international media reported it. Ireland had ‘embarrassed’ itself again.
But I don’t remember too much embarrassment, or coverage, when a self-professed humanist (read atheist) tried to have Bishop Philip Boyce charged with incitement to hatred in 2012.
The hapless bishop had said in an address that the Church was under attack from “the arrows of a Godless and secular culture”.
The man behind the complaint, John Colgan, was a former Fine Gael candidate and a leader in the ‘Campaign to Separate Church and State’, which doesn’t like our blasphemy law but obviously likes our ‘incitement to hatred’ legislation.
The complaint went nowhere in the end, just like the complaint against Fry went nowhere. But I don’t remember anyone demanding that we abolish or water down our incitement to hatred legislation because of the ‘chilling effect’ on free speech.
The organisation that made the biggest song and dance about the complaint against Fry was Atheist Ireland. But back in 2012, Atheist Ireland complained to Hibernia College that Fr Vincent Twomey, a former lecturer in moral theology, was teaching in his course at Hibernia that some atheistic ideologies were guilty of atrocities.
Atheist Ireland didn’t like this claim one bit. It asked the college to immediately remove “the untrue statements about atheism and the defamatory allegations about atheists”.
To put it another way, Fr Twomey had committed a blasphemy of sorts against atheists and this could not stand. And it didn’t stand. Hibernia College caved in.
I don’t remember too many journalists or presenters putting this to Atheist Ireland representatives over the last week.
This would have gone against the narrative that atheists are against all blasphemy laws when in actual fact some don’t like being ‘blasphemed’ against themselves one bit.
Health Minister Simon Harris said he is all in favour of holding a referendum to repeal the blasphemy provision, in the name of free speech.
This is the same minister who, a few months ago, delivered a talk in which he defended political correctness precisely on the grounds that it effectively forbids certain types of speech, that is whatever is deemed ‘offensive’ to minorities.
You see, the commandment ‘Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain’, has been replaced by a new one which says ‘Do not take the name of a minority in vain’. This new commandment is policed to the utmost extent by ‘incitement to hatred’ laws and the awesome force of social stigma which is often brought down on people’s heads by our media.
The biggest irony is that the same people who campaign most strongly against the old concept of blasphemy, are often the ones who campaign most strongly in favour of the new form of ‘blasphemy’.
The people here who spend most of their time outraged are the politically correct