The Clockwork Chartophylax

The Dermot Ahern 14th century nostalgia tour amendment made an appearance on RTE’s (highly original and not at all lifted wholesale from the BBC) Questions and Answers programme last night. It was fairly remarkable that the only people trying to defend Ahern’s pet project were his ministerial colleague Mary Harney (who spent the entire show hunched and scowling, looking as if at any moment she might unhook her lower jaw and attempt to swallow Alan Shatter whole) and some IDA flack who relies on the good graces of the government to keep him in air miles. Even self-described religious people in the audience were against the law. One of the best religious arguments against it was that Jesus was condemned to death on a blasphemy law (of course, if you’re religious, there’s a flaw to this argument, since Jesus needed to die to fulfil his convoluted plan to convince himself to forgive humanity of the sins that he had arbitrarily decided they’d committed).

Mary Harney unconvincingly touted the party line – it’s in the Constitution, there has to be a law, the Defamation bill is the place to do it, the Ahern amendment is watering down the punishment listed in the 1961 Act etcetc. She also said that the Supreme Court demanded a definition for blasphemy in the 1999 case vs Independent Newspapers. This is, AFAIK (and IANAL), untrue. The Supreme Court said that as there was no legal definition for blasphemy, it could not rule on the case.  I don’t recall them explicitly asking that a definition be added to the statute books (but I’ll stand corrected if they did).

One of the main flaws in the Ahern amendment is that it provides a definition for blasphemy, so that, while the punishments would be watered down and all cases would have to be OKed by the DPP, courts would have a legal definition to use in making a judgement. And it’s a lousy definition at that – wide open for abuse and interpretation. As several speakers on Q&A noted – it encourages demonstrations of religious outrage. It also makes no definition as to what does and does not constitute a religion. By placing the metric of  “a substantial number of the adherents of  [any] religion”, it actually seems to favour smaller fringe cults – since the smaller the faith, the easier it is to offend a substantial number of adherents.

The IDA flack made much of the fact that the definition requires that a person has to intend to cause offence before they can be found guilty of blasphemy, as if this was a good thing. Since when has intent to cause offence been a crime? AFAIK (and again IANAL), there is now other class of opinion or knowledge that is protected from intent to cause offence in this way.  Why the special protection for religious opinion? No one on the Q&A panel really got that point.

Elsewhere, the Athiest Ireland have set up a site campaigning against the Ahern amendment. I’ve taken to calling it that, as Dermot Ahern needs to be aware that blame for this will hang firmly around his neck.

I also think that the opponents of this stupid law should use the local and European elections as leverage. Buttonhole candidates on their position on the law. Tell them that if their party colleagues in the Dail vote for the Ahern amendment, they’ll lose votes on June 6th. Write to the members of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women’s Rights and tell them the same thing. According to commenters at Cearta.ie, the Ahern amendment is due to be discussed on May 20th. Make it clear that blasphemy is politically toxic and this amendment will die a quiet death in committee. If we’re really lucky, we may even get a referendum to amend Article 40 to remove the language about blasphemy altogether.

Posted on May 12th, 2009 under Ireland, atheism, politics, religion • Tags: ahern amendment, blasphemy, dermot ahern, Ireland, questions and answers, rte. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback