Tom Hunt A Kiwi shot at blasphemy
The charge of blasphemy was laid. Now, they just had to figure out what blasphemy was, reports.
Siegfried Sassoon knew the bloody and Godless trenches of war. The World War I veteran and pacifist poet’s dislike of war stretched, in 1918, to these fateful lines: ‘‘O Jesus, send me a wound to-day, And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine, And get my bloody old sins washed white.’’ Four years on, on the other side of the world, those lines would be pored over at the Wellington Supreme Court, where New Zealand’s last-known case of blasphemy was tried. That same charge has found itself back in the news this week, as British comedian Stephen Fry faces the charge of blasphemy for his answer to what he would say if he met God outside the pearly gates. ‘‘I would say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?,’’ Fry replied. ‘‘How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right. ‘‘It’s utterly, utterly evil. ‘‘Why should I respect a capricious, meanminded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’’ ‘‘That’s what I’d say.’’ Fry described ‘‘the God who created this universe, if it was created by God’’ as ‘‘quite clearly a maniac’’.
It was February, 1922, when Maoriland Worker publisher John Glover, a former Wellington City councillor, pleaded not guilty to the charge of blasphemous libel after his newspaper published Sassoon’s poem Stand-to: Good Friday Morning.
The stakes were high – Glover stood to be jailed for up to a year – but the first matter of business was figuring out what blasphemy actually was.
According to defence lawyer Sir John Findlay, reported in The Truth newspaper, it was the wilful intent to injure the feelings of the community.
The judge jumped in: ‘‘I think it is to speak contemptuously, not in the sense of argument, but to speak so as to show pleasure in the insult intended.
The Oxford definition these days describes it as the act of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things, or profane talk.
That day in court, Sir John argued: ‘‘It is no blasphemy in England to say, ‘I am an atheist. I believe there is no God’, but if one writes or speaks in a way to provoke violence, then it becomes blasphemy.’’
Newspaper reports did not clarify whether the riddle was solved, but proceedings evidently got under way, presumably with some idea of what they were arguing about.
It was a constable by the name Edward Tongue – who had also served at the front – who had picked up the copy of the Maoriland Worker and seemingly taken offence to the poem’s final lines.
Arguments went back and forth. Was it a worthwhile poem? The Times Literary Supplement thought so when it wrote Sassoon achieved what ‘‘no other poet of the war has’’.
What did the word ‘‘bloody’’ mean? According to the defence it could mean anything ranging from an abbreviation of ‘‘by our Lady’’
‘‘Why should I respect a capricious, meanminded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’’ Stephen Fry
to an expression for a form of drunkenness.
But as he summed up, the judge told the jury to ignore various definitions and use its everyday use ‘‘and they did not want to be told what that was’’, Truth reported.
It took just one hour for the jury to return with a not guilty verdict, but it was not a complete win as it added a rider: Publication of books ‘‘such as Sassoon’s poems’’ should be discouraged, the jury said.
The Maoriland Worker –a famously socialist paper – was clearly in no mood to back down.
A month after the court date and acquittal, it would describe – as well as anther Sassoon poem it published – as works which showed the ‘‘grim and- terrible in war’’.
‘‘And on that account [it] conveyed ideas which accorded with the attitude The Worker has always taken towards armed strife between the nations.’’
While 1922 was the last time the charge of blasphemous libel reached the courts of New Zealand, later attempts were made.
In 1998 there was an attempt to prosecute Te Papa for an art work named Virgin in a Condom, then in 2006 a ‘‘Bloody Mary’’ episode of the cartoon South Park almost landed a media company in court.
The Solicitor-General blocked them both.