Prometheus 6

Perhaps it's a plague spread by linguistic contagion... 

Quote of note:

Precisely because religious beliefs purport to deal with the most important realities, one would think that the public discussion of competing faiths should be, in the words of the Supreme Court in a famous 1st Amendment case, "uninhibited, robust and wide open."

But Tony Blair apparently doesn't believe that, and neither do a lot of Americans.

The right to revile religion
MICHAEL MCGOUGH
November 7, 2005

IN BRITAIN, WHERE I just spent a busman's holiday, civil libertarians, religious leaders and even the comedian Rowan Atkinson are savaging Prime Minister Tony Blair for proposing to criminalize "incitement to religious hatred."

The Blair proposal, a consolation prize for British Muslims who are offended by the Labor government's anti-terrorist measures, says this: "A person who uses threatening words or behavior, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offense if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred."

Critics argue that the language of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is sweeping. Matthew Parris, a gay columnist for the Times of London and a former member of Parliament, made the additional point that the law might prevent him from criticizing the pope for excluding homosexuals from the priesthood. "To what kind of philosophical shambles can our Government have been reduced, when it promotes laws to criminalize me if I encourage hatred of such a Pope, yet looks away when such a Pope encourages hatred of me?"

There's a deeper argument to make against the measure. Why shouldn't the truth, falsity or absurdity of a religion be up for grabs in British public debate?

...Blasphemy laws, though now a dead letter, are part of the American as well as the British legal tradition. And they aren't the only examples of laws criminalizing the mockery of other people's religious beliefs.

In 1989, a menorah erected on the steps of the City-County Building in Pittsburgh during what the Supreme Court has called "the winter holiday season" was vandalized when someone spray-painted "PLO" on an accompanying sign reading "Salute to Liberty." A police officer told the press that, if captured, the vandal might be prosecuted under a state law making it a crime to "desecrate a venerated object."

Like blasphemy laws, this infraction probably wouldn't survive a challenge in the high court, which after all has struck down laws against desecrating that most venerated of objects, the American flag. But the existence of the Pennsylvania law is proof that legislators in America aren't that different from those in Britain.