The coming ban on pope jokes

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Polly Toynbee

The thought police are back, said Polly Toynbee in the London Guardian. The government has just resubmitted a twice-failed bill that would ban “incitement to religious hatred.” This “misbegotten bill” is meant as payback for all those Muslim voters who supported the Labor Party in its recent narrow parliamentary victory. What it will do, though, is kill free speech. Under such a law, I wouldn’t be able to say that anyone who believes in the Virgin Birth, or doesn’t believe in evolution, was “intellectually feebleminded.” Such comments may be offensive, but, then, much interesting debate is rude. Some of the funniest humor—comedian Rowan Atkinson’s mockery of clergy, for example—is especially rude. Yet under the proposed law, the London Telegraph columnist who called Muhammad a pedophile for marrying a 9-year-old girl (a fact, if indelicately phrased) could be jailed for up to seven years. The irony is that such legislation will inspire more, not less, religious hatred. “Extreme Jews, Muslims, Hindus, papists, and Paisleyites will all challenge each other” in court—and all on the basis of “thought crimes.”