BLASPHEMY AND ITS LAWS

Shlomoh Sherman  4 years ago 2016 · Shared with His friends on Facebook [notice I capitalize like the Deity]

The article below reminds me of the case of Lenny Bruce.  For those too young to remember, Bruce was a standup comic in the 1950s and 1960s. Most known for breaking the language barrier in comedy, he was hounded by Law Enforcement until the day he died in the mid-1960s of a heroin overdose. At the time he was performing, he was considered one of the cleverest comedians of his time. he was offered his own TV show by one of the networks which he turned down because he said TV would cramp his comedy style. What he meant was that TV would not allow him to speak on subjects which were and still are politically incorrect. Bruce used Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" in his nightclub act, and these got him into deep trouble so that he was arrested and put on trial in NewYork, Chicago, and Los Angeles, his trials running concurrently. In his 1963 New York trial, the prosecutor, Richard H. Kuh, told the jury that Mr Bruce has used this filthy speech in the presence of "mixed company". Imagine, Bruce actually dropped the F-Bomb in front of women [Kuh may have said ["ladies"]. We all know that women, like children, will shatter if they hear naughty words. In fact, Kuh was equating women with children which was our society did before the 1960s. Kuh's statement may have elicited sympathy from that 1963 jury but they ultimately came back to haunt him. In 1973, Kuh ran for district attorney in NYC. A lot had happened in those 10 years regarding how our society looked upon women. In the election campaign, Kuh's opponent for DA repeatedly reminded New Yorkers that Kuh had insulted women with his "mixed company" remark. No matter what Kuh did, he could not live down his words. He tried to say that 1963 was a different time and that we looked at women differently then.HIs opponent said yes, that's right; you looked at them as though they did not have the intestinal fortitude that men do, - as though they needed men's protection against sexual speech, especially expressed in old Anglo-Saxon words, some of the most ancient words in our language, words which were in common use until the 1600s. What does this all have to do with the article below which says, "blasphemy laws are very much a part of the contemporary human experience"? Just this.

Bruce's club appearances were attended by local police, back then many of whom were good Irish Catholic boys. Bruce broke with social convention and he did what no comic had done before. he lampooned everything, INCLUDING RELIGION. He made fun, one way or another, of the absurdities, preached by Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. He made fun of popular, prominent Catholic clergy of the day.

Of course, the good old church going boys in blue hated him for this. But what could they do? Making fun of religion is a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Hurting the feelings of religious people is a right in the Constitution. There are not supposed to be blasphemy laws here in the USA, and there aren't. BUT THERE ARE OBSCENITY LAWS. If the cops couldn't get him for his comedy routines about Cardinal Spellman, they could get him for use of the forbidden words. You may have read in the paper that Bruce was on trial for obscenity but it really was for blasphemy. Goodness. he made fun of religion in mixed company. Who knows? Maybe a nun had been present. Oh no!

Hounded by the law, becoming a social outcast, losing all his money, Bruce dies in poverty and misery. And for what. FOR FAR LESS THAN WHAT HAS BEEN SAID IN PUBLIC BY GEORGE CARLIN, CHRIS ROCK, HOWARD STERN, LOUIS C.K., AND BILL MAHER.

Blasphemy may not actually be on the books but religious favoritism is, and especially seems to be growing in this current Republican Administration.

In 1966, Harvey Cox, a well known Protestant theologian, wrote a book called THE SECULAR CITY which predicted that religious power to control people was on the way out and that governments would be guided by secular humanism. A decade ago, he wrote a retraction, acknowledging that the Christian religion has overtaken the mind of America, after which he converted to Judaism.

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Cause & Effect - The Center for Inquiry Newsletter
Issue #81 — May 17, 2017
The Global Madness of Blasphemy Laws

For most of those who are reading this, laws against blasphemy seem like anachronistic, vestigial restrictions on free expression that no longer apply in our modern world. Recent months have reminded us, however, that blasphemy laws are very much a part of the contemporary human experience, and the consequences of violating them can range from absurd to horrifying. Several secularists and dissidents have met grisly ends this year, including Pakistani student Mashal Khan, beaten to death last month by a mob of fellow students who were angry over allegations of blasphemy, and Indian student H. Farook, murdered by a gang of militants over postings to social media about atheism.
The Center for Inquiry has made combatting blasphemy laws around the world a central part of our mission. We even have a special program dedicated to rescuing secular writers and activists in need of escape from imminent threats to their lives. In recent weeks, we have taken on the crisis on several fronts.

1549751494524276483.pngBlasphemy is the focus of the latest issue of Free Inquiry, CFI´s magazine of secular humanist thought. Making its way to newsstands and subscribers now, this issue features a powerful and sobering cover piece by someone who knows a thing or two about the consequences of blasphemy restrictions: Flemming Rose of Denmark´s Jyllands-Posten, which ran the “Danish cartoons’ of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, which were deemed such an offense to religious sentiments that they sparked violent protests across the Muslim world. Rose warns about the international threat of states´ blasphemy laws and how governments are stirring up rage among the people, inciting them to carry out acts of murder such as those that took the lives of Khan and Farook.

The issue also includes an important report by Mirjam van Schaik on the machinations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the diplomatic body that seeks to push blasphemy laws beyond borders and into international law.

Blasphemy also became a topic of concern in the west, when beloved actor and humorist Stephen Fry, a longtime advocate of secular causes, became the subject of an investigation by Irish authorities for allegedly committing blasphemy in 2015, when he said some unpleasant things on television about the biblical God´s psychotic behavior. Eventually, the investigation of Fry was dropped, with Irish police citing a lack of outraged victims of Fry´s blasphemy.

DawkinsCFI - Board Member Richard Dawkins cleverly stepped into the fracas by reiterating his own “blasphemy’ to an Irish newspaper, and dared the authorities to arrest him over it when he next came into the country. He later explained, “I wanted to increase the pressure to repeal this law – partly because the existence of a blasphemy law in a civilised western country like Ireland is taken as an encouraging precedent by some of those countries in the Middle East and Africa, where they have a blasphemy law and it really is enforced.’

Of course, CFI´s diplomatic and international advocacy efforts never stop. For example, CFI President and CEO Robyn Blumner and our public policy director Michael De Dora are signatories on a new petition from the Index on Censorship calling on Denmark to scrap its blasphemy law. Whether these affronts to human rights emerge in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ireland, or Denmark, and whether they are enforced by the state or by the rage of the mob, we will continue to fight for free expression, for the simple idea that ideas don´t need rights. People do.