{"id":2261,"date":"2002-08-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-08-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/08\/06\/2002-08-06-support-grows-for-scrapping-britain-s-blasphemy-law\/"},"modified":"2002-08-06T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-08-06T12:00:00","slug":"2002-08-06-support-grows-for-scrapping-britain-s-blasphemy-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/08\/06\/2002-08-06-support-grows-for-scrapping-britain-s-blasphemy-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Support Grows for Scrapping Britain&#8217;s Blasphemy Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Religion News Service<\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>LONDON, ENGLAND, August 6, 2002: Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have announced their support for scrapping the English law against blasphemy and replacing it with a more generalized law against incitement to religious hatred. The present blasphemy law only covers material denying the truth of Christianity, the Bible or the Church of England&#8217;s Book of Common Prayer. Because it does not apply to non-Christian religions, for example, an effort in 1991 to bring Salman Rushdie&#8217;s controversial novel &#8220;The Satanic Verses&#8221; before the courts as a blasphemy to Islam failed. Prosecutions under the current law have been rare. In 1922 a publisher was successfully prosecuted for publishing a pamphlet comparing Jesus&#8217; entry into Jerusalem with &#8220;a circus clown on a donkey.&#8221; Since then, the only other prosecution was in 1977 when the editor and publisher of Gay News were successfully prosecuted for publishing a poem suggesting Jesus had been an active homosexual. On appeal, the blasphemy convictions were upheld but the jail sentence was lifted. A committee of the House of Lords is currently considering whether the law should be replaced by a new statute aimed at making &#8220;incitement to religious hatred&#8221; illegal. The same law, part of English Common Law, is in effect in Trinidad, and possibly other former British colonies, and protects only Christianity.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Religion News Service LONDON, ENGLAND, August 6, 2002: Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}