December 21, 2004

The right to blasphemy?

Posted by Daniel

With the disgraceful scenes in Birmingham1, coming hot on the heels of the blow-up over incitement to religious hatred, it is wonderfuly ironic to ponder the following legal hypothetical.

Apostate Sikhs are very definitely a group defined by their religious views. As are apostate Muslims and heretics or blasphemers in general. The Home Office
FAQ doesn’t mention blasphemers specifically, but it does reassure the atheists and says that the proposed Bill “will also protect people targeted because of their lack of religious beliefs or because they do not share the religious beliefs of the perpetrator”.

It is hard for me to see how the people in Birmingham’s gurdwaras who stirred up these crowds could have done so without taking steps which would at least prima facie have given rise to a case that they had incited hatred against the play’s author. I doubt that specific acts of violence could be laid at their door, but this crowd did not assemble spontaneously, nor did its members become enraged entirely as a result of their independent theological scrutiny of the theatre listings.

Therefore, in rank defiance of almost every newspaper editorial this morning, I submit that the Bezhti affair is weak evidence in favour of the draft legislation, as it seems to me that some Sikh elders in Birmingham have behaved in a highly socially destructive and reprehensible way, that they have most likely not committed any offence under current UK law in doing so, but that their behaviour would have been illegal under the proposed legislation. This doesn’t make me a supporter of the Bill itself, but it’s worth thinking about.

Footnote:
1Actually, they’re not really that disgraceful. The theatre has a right to put on an offensive play, anyone who is offended with it has the right to stage a demonstration, and the rozzers have the right to protect the public if that demonstration turns rowdy, which they have declared themselves willing and able to do. The only real failure of the system here was that either theatregoers or theatre managements decided to go all namby about a “riot” in which nobody was hurt and only three arrests were made, all for public order offences. Gawd help us if the Premier League decides to adopt this standard of “safety”. However, the playwright has apparently now received death threats, which are genuinely disgraceful whether or not the people making them have the ability or intention to carry them out.

Posted on December 21, 2004 12:51 PM UTC
Comments

I suspect they’ve gone namby pamby because there’s a panto on right now at the Rep, and you don’t want even a small riot at a theatre crammed with kids and their parents. I think the Sikh ‘community’ has behaved disgracefully on this one, and hopefully the play will indeed be produced, to teach these clowns a lesson in freedom of speech. Still, tactically it would have been a bit smarter to have put it on at a time when it wasn’t sharing top billing with Puss in Boots or whatever.

Posted by Dan Hardie · December 21, 2004 01:25 PM

A superior heading would be:

“The Right to Blaspheme?”

Posted by Gruffles · December 21, 2004 01:26 PM

As far as I can see, they’ve got a production of “The Witches” by Roald Dahl but no proper panto, joyless bastards.

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 01:30 PM

So what you’re saying is, each party would be able to cite the law against the other.

Isn’t that self-cancelling effect an argument against the law? If it doesn’t limit itself to protecting the rights of victims of majority-on-minority hate speech, it seems to me that it just creates noise.

Posted by Amardeep · December 21, 2004 02:24 PM

So what you’re saying is, each party would be able to cite the law against the other.

No; one side would not be able to use the incitement to religious hatred law against this play because the play does not incite hatred (unless it does; I haven’t seen the play so I suppose there is some chance that it ends with a rousing call to kill Sikhs, though if it did I suspect that the Birmingham Rep wouldn’t have put it on unless they have had a fairly radical change of policy).

“Incitement to hatred” means what it says under UK case law; you really have to push the envelope to get your collar felt. Stirring up a mob would probably count, but simply calling the Sikhs a bunch of rapists and murderers doesn’t (the proof of the pudding is that Sikhs are protected as an ethnic group under the existing incitement to racial hatred laws, so there would have been a prosecution already if this play constituted incitement to hatred).

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 02:38 PM

Minor legal factoid:

The Licensing Act 2003 singles out plays for special protection (section 22) and councils may not refuse to license them on grounds of content.

See here for Bristol City Council’s request that people not make applications to ban plays on grounds of content, since the council has no such power. (And ditto Birmingham).

[I don’t know if the Sikh protesters wanted the play banned by the council, but the council couldn’t have done so even if it had wanted to.]

Posted by Chris Bertram · December 21, 2004 02:57 PM

According to the FAQ, all you need to do is to phrase your incitement to [anti-]religious hatred in the form of a joke.

What do you call slaughter of an atheist? A good start. Hey, it’s just a joke, do you mind?

Posted by abb1 · December 21, 2004 02:59 PM

To be honest, it’s pretty difficult to see how Nazism would have off the ground if they had phrased everything in the form of jokes. It would also have robbed many of Osama bin Laden’s pronouncements of a certain gravitas. Quite apart from anything, it would be hard to tell whether or not they were actually joking.

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 03:06 PM

I note from Chris’s link that local councils are able to exercise content-related bans on “striptease-style entertainment”, which I suspect means bad news for the UK tour of my “Osama and the 72 Virgins Burlesque Spectacular”

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 03:13 PM

What the FAQ actually says is:

Of themselves, the following would not be caught by the offence:
[…]
? telling jokes about religions;
[…] Of themselves these activities do not meet the criteria of the offences. However if a person were to use threatening, abusive or insulting words, actions or material with the intent or likely effect that hatred would be stirred up whilst undertaking the actions listed above, then by definition, they could rightly fall into the scope of the offence.

(Emphasis added by me.)

Posted by des von bladet · December 21, 2004 03:14 PM

“To be honest, it’s pretty difficult to see how Nazism would have off the ground if they had phrased everything in the form of jokes. It would also have robbed many of Osama bin Laden’s pronouncements of a certain gravitas.”

Well if all the incitements to religious hatred were couched in jokes, you could argue that the happiness of humanity would significantly increase. Mine certainly did, just considering the possibility. :)

Posted by Matthew · December 21, 2004 03:59 PM

Jokes are so three psots ago. I am currently idly daydreaming what it would be like if, in order to get round incitement to religious and/or racial hatred laws, they had attempted to structure the Nuremberg rallies as a series of “striptease style entertainments”. Which would, in accordance with Bristol City Council1 guidance, be restricted as to their containing full nudity.

[1]Come on, how obvious was it that “Bristol City” was going to be a topless-only jurisdiction?

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 04:07 PM

I think the legislation covers hatred against groups. The Sikhs were protesting against a playwright - not playrighters as a religious group. so I cant see how they’re not covered.

Anyway the protests could have been done under s5 of riot act (?) if there was the will. There wasn’t.

Bottom line as this thread suggests is that the only winners are likely to be the lawyers.

Posted by Giles · December 21, 2004 04:13 PM

“disgraceful scenes”

Now that’s a phrase both sides of the debate can agree with - and in your opening sentence, no less. Well done, Daniel.

Posted by reuben · December 21, 2004 04:15 PM

How about phrasing everything in the form of a song. I believe that the reason Britain has such a fine tradition of comic (and indecent) song is that whereas the Lord Chamberlain’s department had the power to censor every word spoken in a theater (no adlibs), it had no power over the words that were song and accompanied by an instrument.

Someone is sure to correct me, and I suspect I have the story only half-right. But it would be great if religious hatred (and racial hatred) was legal only when sung to the accompaniment of a tinny piano.

Posted by harry · December 21, 2004 04:40 PM

I thought it was the Lord Chamberlain’s office that bleu pencilled a Marie Lloyd song with the line “She sits among the cabbages and peas”, prompting her to replace it with “She sits among the cabbages and leeks”. But I’m probably wrong. Music hall was certainly more lightly regulated.

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 04:59 PM

des von bladet,
it is odd how they say ‘jokes are excluded’ and then ‘no, actually, not at all’. Because this clause: …to use threatening, abusive or insulting words, actions or material with the intent or likely effect that hatred would be stirred… makes you wonder why they bothered to list these bogus exceptions in the first place.

Posted by abb1 · December 21, 2004 05:30 PM

Abb1: They weren’t especially excluding jokes so much as pointing out, for the benefit of outraged but misguided humouristes, that jokes which really were actually jokes and not thinly-veiled incitements to religious hatred were not going to invoke the wrath of the Crown or its agents.

You might reasonably think that everyone would have been able to spot that for themselves, but Rowan Atkinson, for one, has been doing his level best to disabuse anyone suffering from such optimisme.

Posted by des von bladet · December 21, 2004 05:54 PM

The Home Office is, however, strangely silent on the subject of racially and/or religiously themed “striptease type entertainments”. They don’t exactly say that a striptease version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be in the clear, but they don’t rule it out either and nor do Bristol Council. I think this might be a loophole.

Posted by dsquared · December 21, 2004 08:20 PM

OK, somehow I missed the whole Atkinson controversy, but now I’m up to date, more or less.

So, do ‘Life of Brian’ and ‘Meaning of Life’ (with ‘every sperm is sacred’ ‘n stuff) constitute an activity that’s insulting and either is intended to or likely to stir up hatred? Or is it merely ridicule, prejudice, dislike, contempt, anger or offence?

Plenty of ridicule there for sure, and it’s sure is insulting, but is it intended to or likely to stir up?

A Resurrected Anti-Passion: Python’s Sunday-School Travesty

Brian, rated R and opening the same week as Apocalypse Now, scored a perfect trifecta—denounced as blasphemy by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the Lutheran Council (“a disgraceful assault”), and the Rabbinical Alliance of America (“foul, disgusting”).

Assault, huh? Sounds worse than just ‘hatred’. It sure did stir something up.

Posted by abb1 · December 21, 2004 09:50 PM

The Guardian article on the protests says that “protestors smashed the front entrance and backstage equipment on Saturday night,” causing “thousands of pounds worth of damage.”

It strikes me as more of a disgrace than three public order offences. I know the Guardian tends to “sex things up” but it seems to have been a lot rowdier than the Telegraph lets on. Furthermore, the Sikh “community leaders” haven’t condemned the violence.

Posted by anand sarwate · December 22, 2004 12:16 AM

If you put a brick through a plate glass window, you’ve caused “thousands of pounds” worth of damage. It’s not like I’m some kind of Biffa Bacon character, but I do regard the violence that went down at this theatre as rather more “Saturday night” than “Brixton riots” and so do the local fuzz.

Posted by dsquared · December 22, 2004 01:08 AM

I’d like more information on the backstage equipment. Having done a fair bit of theatre myself, the idea of a mob, however unruly, mucking around backstage in the theatre is highly disturbing to say the least.

I think it’s a bit ridiculous to call the management namby when the security of the backstage equipment, sets, etc cannot be guaranteed. If nothing else it’s a safety hazard that violates the actors’ contracts, most likely. Calling it “namby” makes it seem like it’s akin to crossing a picket line, but if you found a strike during which the business’ windows were smashed, I’m sure there’d be more of a hue and cry.

Posted by anand sarwate · December 22, 2004 03:10 AM

On Newsnight, the theatre management said that one of the main causes why they cancelled the run, was because they couldn’t guarantee the safety of the large numbers of kids that were also coming to see the performance of the Witches, and who had to run the gauntlet of protestors. It seems bit of an overreaction to me, but a laudable motive. There were three days of non-violent protests before the disturbances, which should be noted and of which those who wanted to prevent that play from showing can claim credit for; unfortunately the leaders of the community who opposed the play have been disingenuous to a degree in condemning and taking responsibility for those who indulged in less non-violent forms of protest. Churning out garbage like ‘hurt sentiments of the community’ here sounds suspiciously like a desire to prevent any open criticism within the public sphere. I believe another theatre in Birmingham has now offered to put the play on, if the Rep can’t; which is good news.

The most depressing thing about this whole affair is that it sends out the message that if any particular community or group doesn’t like something produced for public consumption about their religion/beliefs etc. that by creating a violent disturbance, they can effectively practise a form of censorship that has no backing in the law or by the state. The implications of this can be quite serious and is being noted by other religions, it was less than reassuring to hear that the archdeacon of the Catholic church in the locality support the move to either ban or make certain changes in the play so as to remove/alter the scenes that take place within the gurdwara; saying that places of worship should be exempt from any depiction that could said to be derogatory. By this one can only understand that, the term ‘derogatary’ will be subject to the most wide and conservative application held within that community group. Not a good sign of things to come.

Posted by Conrad Barwa · December 22, 2004 11:50 AM

The most depressing thing about this whole affair is that it sends out the message that if any particular community or group doesn’t like something produced for public consumption about their religion/beliefs etc. that by creating a violent disturbance, they can effectively practise a form of censorship that has no backing in the law or by the state

Conrad, this particular fact has been known to anyone with eyes in their head for the last three thousand years. I seem to remember that the Ancient Greeks used to have riots about plays they didn’t like so it seems a bit rough to blame it on any particularities of Birmingham.

Posted by dsquared · December 22, 2004 12:27 PM

I seem to remember that the Ancient Greeks used to have riots about plays they didn’t like so it seems a bit rough to blame it on any particularities of Birmingham.

I can’t see the bit where ‘blamed’ any particularities of Birmingham here (apart from anything else I actually quite like the city and living there), in fact I am not sure that the selection of the city has this kind of importance at all. The point is not whether people cause a disturbance or not after a public performance of any sort – I remember a showing of the Blair Witch project a few years back in Dundee that got a bit out of hand at the end, as people felt cheated by the experience and of their money – but what is the intention behind it, the result it leads to and the reactions from various groups and actors involved in the dispute. In this case, I think it does set a troubling precedence in a number of different ways; the most obvious being the ability to put on such a performance in the first place, but also the limits to which some people, particularly those who follow a certain interpretation of their religious tradition (and by no means is this limited to any specific religion) feel can be allowed in giving freedom for certain things to be said and depicted. The ‘hurt sentiments of the community’ approach is one that I have heard several times put forward as a reason for banning or circumscribing various things by irate or offended Muslims, Hindus and Christians and it is one which I think is based on faulty assumptions and deeply flawed. In the end what I am less interested in and what is of greater importance, is not the fact that some people rock the boat over whatever excises them in this way; but what the reactions of the state authorities and the response of general opinion across the communities is. This has important implications for how the public sphere is policed and organised.

Posted by Conrad Barwa · December 22, 2004 11:54 PM

Religious belief, in the main, can’t take a backseat to secular concerns without diminishing its reason for being. Non-believers see it as a perfectly reasonable request, sensible and in the best interest of the common good; but what’s behind the request to conform is a tacit rejection of religious claims, specifically and generally.
The public sphere can be policed and organised by secularists or religionists, but not both without serious compromise. The watered-down versions of religion of the recent past that made ecumenical co-operation possible, and still do, are just that - watered-down versions, Sunday religion. The real tenets of faith in all the great religions are exclusionary and insistently superior to secular law. Jeopardizing eternity for a comfortable few years earthside is a bad deal, to the saved. This idea is to most non-believers an eccentric and absurd bit of nonsense, and it seems eminently rational to ask these odd people to respect the laws and rules that make social living possible. But to the believers it’s just an obstacle on the way to eventual triumph.
It’s like having a democracy, and then having within that democracy a stridently vocal minority of adamant monarchists. They can participate, but they can’t get an electoral majority without endangering the democratic system itself.

Posted by Bucky · December 23, 2004 06:05 AM
Followups

→ Put the fear of god in the common man.
Excerpt: This post on Crooked Timber on The right to blaspheme reminded me of this post in Dutch here on this site in the category quotes. Like part of the Read more at Idealistic but not naive, realistic but not cynical

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.