Laws that bring out the bigot in me
Laws that constrain free speech bring out the childish bigot in me
An alarming increase in legislation that constrains free speech
The excellent Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall, has said look, don’t worry, this new legislation will not apply if opposition to gay lifestyles or sexual practices are rendered in a polite and mildly expressed form. Trouble is, I don’t think Ben is wholly au fait with Mohammed’s hadiths on homosexuality. ‘Kill the one who is doing it and the one to whom it is being done’ strikes me as being singularly impolite. Indeed, if you were to construct a sentence designed precisely to fall foul of Jack Straw’s legislation, that would be it. Not that the Christian Bible is much more lenient on the matter. Leviticus xx 13 and the proclamation ‘They shall surely be put to death’ also lacks something in terms of mildness and has the whiff of the impolite about it. So now we are in a position where simply quoting from the Bible, or one of Islam’s hadiths, is technically against the law.
But then, it has been for some time. Indeed, the rather bigoted Christian evangelist Stephen Green was arrested a year or so ago for having handed out leaflets in Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, with precisely this quote written on the bottom. The stuff from Leviticus was the reason he was arrested. And this brings another salient question: if there was legislation in place one year ago to arrest Stephen Green for allegedly whipping up homophobic hatred, why does Jack Straw feel it necessary to put another law on the statute book now? You will remember, too, that the then boss of the perfectly foul Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, got a visit from the rozzers when he expressed the view — very mildly and with great politeness and understanding — that homosexuality ran counter to the aims and objectives of civil society. No sooner had he said these words, on the BBC PM programme, than the anti-hate police were on his trail. If they felt able to investigate him then, why is new legislation deemed to be necessary now?
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Lewis Reich
October 10th, 2007 8:37pm"According to a friend of mine, a school in south London recently attempted to counter incipient homophobia among its students by instituting severe penalties for anyone heard using the word ‘gay’ in a derogatory manner. So the kids stopped screaming ‘gay’ at one another. Now they shout out ‘Jew’ instead." I imagine it remains to be seen whether there will be any attempt to counter incipient antisemitism.