New law revives Medieval criminalization of religious belief
Despite the outcry of human rights campaigners, popular entertainers like Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean), churchmen and ordinary people, a new law on religious expression has gone into effect in the United Kingdom.
The Orwellian-named Racial and Religious Hatred Act is a major step backward in the history of UK religious freedom, a history which is marked by the torture and murder of religious dissidents for their views, and which led to the imprisonment of dissenters as late as 1921. Yet the new law paints its Medieval origins in the language of political correctness, creating a “new” offence of “intentionally stirring up religious hatred against people on religious grounds.”
The measure is widely seen as a stop-gap to appease the growing Islamic population of the UK, which, seeing the weakness of the government and the white population, is militant in claiming “offence” at anything it http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1512, the act expands on earlier thought crimes legislation that was used to enforce the unworkable racial policies of the regime.
Such laws give the government power to pick and choose who they will prosecute, since the definition of “religious hatred” is easily manipulated to suit the purposes of the government and its agenda. And while the new act makes noises about how it will carefully protect freedom of religion, anyone who has followed the course of other speech laws knows that this is another area where the people of the UK must behave at the government’s sufferance. It also sets the stage for increased and expanded legislation and enforcement. The very fact that such a law was even considered shows the paternalistic contempt the government of the UK holds for the people.In fact, in the United Kingdom the issue is already overlegislated. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 added “hate crime” racial and religious enhancements for crimes like assault, criminal damage, public order offences and harassment, but not to language: the new act, which recieved Royal Assent in 2006 but came into force on October 1, 2007, tightens up the law to make simple speech itself a crime. Racial speech was largely curtailed with a series of acts beginning with the Race Relations Act 1965. (Many civil rights proponents warned that when Anti-Defamation League-inspired racial “hate” laws were instigated in the United States that faith-based speech would eventually become a target, as happened with the recent Senate amendment).
While the politically correct crowd likes to pretend it is carrying out enlightened policies, many of its repressive measures are firmly rooted in the Middle Ages, whose legacy of censorship was overcome after centuries of determined sacrifice by Western people. In the UK especially, where an official union of church and state still formally persists, the lessons of the past — and threats of the future — remain grim, for non-believers and the faithful alike. The history of religious speech marks the development of the UK into a modern state.
Prisons in the UK have long known the heretic, blasphemer and dissenter. Blasphemy only became a civil offence in the 1600s — the church itself had had the right to try and punish people before. Laws on religion were directly linked to political freedoms. With the coming of the Reformation and the English independence brought with it, King Edward VI repealed some blasphemy laws, only for the English to see them restored by “Bloody Mary” who used them in the burning alive of heretics. Such “defence of religion” — or as we moderns might call it, laws against “hate speech” — resulted in acts which seem horrific today: in 1656 James Nayler faced execution, but was “reprieved” with having the letter “B” (for “blashpemer) branded on his forehead, his tongue pierced with a hot iron, and two years’ imprisonment at hard labor. His crime? Quakerism. (While “Bloody Mary” carried out her persecutions as a Catholic against Protestants — even the Archbishop of Canterbury was burned at the stake — it is a mistake to claim that such persecution was solely a Catholic province. Many Protestant leaders also carried out religious persecution: Nayler himself was toremented by the radical Protestant Cromwell. And the later Catholic King James II legalized many forms of “dissenting” faith, a move formalized by the man who overthrew him, the Protestant William III).
Again, religious faith and expression had (and have) political implications. William III’s Act of Toleration, while granting many religious rights won through two hard and bloody revolutions, still denied office holding, some legal rights, and even some property ownership for people holding some forms of religious belief. The last of the “Test Acts” was only repealed by the Catholic Relief Act of 1829.
US history is closely linked to the political and religious history of the United Kingdom. The political effect of the UK’s history of religious freedom resounded in America, where separation of church and state was a pillar of the Revolution and tests of religion were banned by Article VI of the Constitution. America has, of course, to thank religious intolerance for a portion of her historical founding: while the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=741 colonies were founded by faithful state-church Anglicans, the Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusetts had been cast out of England for religious reasons. And the state of Pennsylvania was founded as a refuge for Naylor’s co-religionists, the Quakers, who had suffered mutilation, banishment, murder, fines and beatings for their faith. Ironically, some of these persecutions came at the hands of the descendants of the Pilgrims. Similarly, Maryland, named for the Virgin Mary, was founded by Catholics loyal to the English crown. Rhode Island was the only colony founded on the principle of religious pluralism. The Founders of 1776 were mindful of these precedents in determining that America should never go down the road of religious legislation.
While England had had two earlier revolutions (1642–1651 and 1688) closely linked to religion, both came before the Enlightenment, and so many earlier ideas persisted. Politics was the reason behind the 1841 prosecution of publisher Edward Moxon (publishers are special targets of political correctness, no matter what age they live in). Moxon was found guilty of “blasphemy” for printing a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley which upheld French Revolutionary political ideals, but a religious charge was pursued to hide the political color of the censorship. (“Monarchs and conquerors there/Proud o’er prostrate millions trod -/The earthquakes of the human race;/Like them, forgotten when the ruin/That marks their shock is past.”)
Such intolerance provided impetus for many campaigns for social change. G. W. Foote, jailed for blashemy in the late 1800s, wrote of an earlier case from “1857, when Thomas Pooley, a poor Cornish well-sinker, was sentenced by the late Mr. Justice Coleridge to twenty months’ imprisonment for chalking some “blasphemous” words on a gate-post.” Luckily, the Enlightenment had by then shone into the UK, and led to protests from intellectuals and common men alike: “Fortunately this monstrous punishment excited public indignation. [John Stuart Mill, [Henry Buckle, and other eminent men, interested themselves in the case, and Pooley was released after undergoing a quarter of his sentence.”
The Racial and Religious Hatred Act opens up for prosecution anyone who, out of their interpretation of holy writ, says pretty much anything which the government finds offensive to its multiculturalist policies. Given the agenda in Westminster, what this will mean in practice is that Christians, especially, who carry out their religious commands to preach to the uncoverted may become liable to imprisonment. But such laws are necessary if the destruction of the West through “multiculturalism” is to work — dissent in any form is a threat to dictatorship, and the politically correct in the UK are boasting that the new act closes a dangerous “loophole” by criminalizing religious speech.
If you are in church this Sunday, imagine the condition of the faithful in “Darkest England.” Who among the parishioners might report the priest or minister to the police for politically incorrect speech (as was recently done in Sweden)? How would your church fare if its sermons were subject to a political censor? How would your church weather a campaign from a powerful, militant extremist group who didn’t like the message? Why would anyone in the West have to even think about such things in 2007?
In the United Kingdom, as everywhere in the West, public calls for “diversity” and “tolerance” have led to less, not more diversity and tolerance. Luckily, the people of the UK have an advocacy organization, the Christian Council of Great Britain, which fights to protect what religious and conscientious freedoms they have left.
http://www.christiancouncil.org.uk/index.htm