… by a majority of 72 this time.
Labour MP Ann Cryer rebelled against her party:
I am simply not convinced that legislation which encourages further segregation, however well-intentioned, will provide the protection it aims to deliver.
MediaWatchWatch was set up in January 2005 in reaction to the religious campaign against the BBC's broadcasting of Jerry Springer: the Opera.
We keep an eye on those groups and individuals who, in order to protect their beliefs from offence, seek to limit freedom of expression. And we make fun of them.
If you have any information, email The Monitor.
Quite seriously, I wonder when Blair goes (and I wish he’d hurry up and do so) if we’ll get a more level-headed primeminister who thinks of freedom of expression in terms of human freedoms and is not deluded by the great sky fairy, his wife or Jesus’s right-hand man… Without an idiot Xian at the helm, there’s no way this ill-considered crap could have gotten this close to being passed into law.
By its very nature, all religion is wide-open to critique; any free-thinker can see that. The way things are looking we won’t even be able to make fun of Satanists, Scientologists or anyone else with a passing fancy that they believe without an ounce of proof to be unerringly correct.
What worries me more is that while we’re worrying about RHIL, the City Academies are getting taken over by creationists like Peter Vardy (and others).
Peter Vardy and Tom Cruise have one thing in common (apart from being unfeasibly rich): each believes the other to be wrong; and by any measurable values, *both* of them believe in things so far-fetched it surpasses the sublime and overtakes ridicule at light speed.
Start getting your ridicule and contempt sharpened up and published right now.
The more riducule and contempt is published, the harder it will be to bring a succesful prosecution.
Alernatively, if it does finally get passes by both houses – very unlikely in my opinion, then we will need to snow the attorney-general under with (lets face it) malicious attempts to bring prosecutions.
Since any religion is automatically blasphemous to all other religions, this should not be too difficult!
Hey, where were you guys at the demo? I counted 99% Christians and one (suspected) Muslim. No-one admitting to being a humanist. Comedians? That’s a ‘laugh’….
Give them a hard time, you have my full backing.
I knew there was a demo going on, but I didn’t know the day or time.
When was it?
INdex on Censorship has a handy page of collected articles concerning this nonsense at http://www.indexonline.org/en/specialreports/uk-plan-to-criminalise-incitement-to-religio.shtml.
The demo was Monday afternoon – plus a long queue to lobby MPs and simply to listen to the debate. Alas for a Labour voter like me, the word was that some of the Labour contributions to the debate were stereotyping/cliched & showed insufficient awareness of the issues. But we’ll have to await Hansard.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2005-07-11.602.0
Bugger me backwards! Looks like Charles Hendry has a shitload to learn about the Scientologists. That bunch are arguably rather *more* dangerous to the common man than the Satanists – who bizarrely are a creation of Christianity! Not a cult indeed – for once I have to admit Shell has a point, the politicians really don’t understand the issues.
Why shouldn’t someone believe in and worship poor old Stan? He has a bad rap from the Xians as it is; they invented him to show their own guys in a good light. At least Satanists keep themselves to themselves: they don’t try to take over schools, don’t openly criticise gay people and haven’t even tried to take over the world (except in the movies).
The even spend spend a lot of time with naked young girls. You know, I’m finding their ideas quite appealing…. 😉
Thanks for that, Monitor. The MPs seem well-informed enough to me.
The problem lies with the various important issues they dont touch on. E.g. the fact that the Bill did not define ‘religion’, which is surely a pretty vague word. This underlying problem was what led to all the proposed exception clauses.
I couldn’t get out of work on Monday afternoon. Shame. Still, it wouldn’t’ve made any difference, with so many labour MPs convinced that (small c) conservative muslim leaders can ‘deliver’ them the ‘muslim vote’, they’ll happily do this to pander to them. It seems that politics in mosques is OK, as long as it’s ‘our’ politics.
Ann Cryer only rebelled by supporting an amendment. She abstained on the final vote. Only 4 Labour MPs actually voted against the bill.
Christopher, where did you hear about the demo? Is there another one planned for the Lords reading?
I hope so! Via an internal work email.