Blasphemy is dead! Long live Blasphemy - Brendan O Neill

Last week, secularists and rationalists around the UK raised a collective glass of champagne and let off some party poppers after the House of Lords agreed to add an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill abolishing the blasphemy laws. ‘It is disgraceful that such a relic of religious savagery has survived into the twenty-first century’, said Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society (1). Quite right, too. Good riddance to the ‘savage’ laws which, in erecting a forcefield of offence-detection around God, his baby Jesus and the people who worship them, were an affront to freedom of speech.

Yet this week, not seven days later, a tiny group of Christians – one might even call them a ‘sect of Christians’ – managed to get a series of adverts banned on the basis that it was offensive to Christianity.