Bloody Bible ad investigation to go ahead

gpa ad
Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Campbell, head of the domestic violence and hate crime unit, has revealed in a letter to Anne Widdecombe that a criminal investigation has been started into the Gay Police Association “bloody Bible” ad.

The original advertisement has been recorded as a religiously aggravated hate crime incident following a crime allegation by a member of the public.

This crime is now the subject of a proportionate effective and objective criminal investigation. The police senior investigating officer is in consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service. Any decision to prosecute is the sole decision of the CPS.

It seems the GPA are getting cold feet, judging from the words of Bernard McEldowney, deputy chairman of the association:

In hindsight maybe we should not have used the Bible but we wanted to highlight serious homophobic incidents on the grounds and justification of religious belief.


9 Responses to “Bloody Bible ad investigation to go ahead”

  1. Marc Draco says:

    Ironically, this rather proves the whole dumb point.

    I hope if a prosecution does go ahead, a secular agdenda will arise and win they day. Christians and others have long enjoyed the protection of their holy books to discriminate against people who don’t fit into their narrow vistas.

  2. Will says:

    So have the police, as this letter applies, officially said it’s a crime before investigating it?

    And how can it be a relgiously-aggravated hate crime incident? Surely the religious part is the entire incident, rather than an aggravating factor?

  3. Andy A says:

    Stupid wording, anyway. If something is ‘religiously aggravated’, surely it’s something that is aggravated by religion. But it does look as if the GPA are getting cold feet, and shame on ’em! Yet, presumably, if they are prosecuted they can claim whatever in this case is the equivalent of ‘fair comment’ in a libel case, i.e. the claim the GPA made was true, factual, provable. I bloody hope so, anyway.

  4. Hm, hate crime against hate crime. Seems that the category should be abolished, and crimes judged for what they are.

    If speech is hate crime, then the bible itself is hate crime. It says we should kill witches and anyone who evangelizes other religions, or non-belief. So which is a worse hate crime?

  5. sconzey says:

    @alleee

    Arguably only from a superficial reading of the text, and ignorance of the context. Such superficial readings could, for instance, lead someone to conclude that Shakespeare thought God was an angry man with a metal face…

    “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
    And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; “

  6. tom p says:

    will: to be fair to the pigs (something I’m not often found to be doing), I think that they launch enquiries into what they think a crime has been even before it’s certain that a crime has been committed. For example, if there’s someone found dead in a house at the bottom of the stairs then they’ll launch a murder enquiry, even though the person may have fallen

  7. sconzey: while that may be true about a lot of the supposed hate in the bible, it first of all isn’t true for all of it, and second, a great many christians lack the education necessary to properly understand the text. Which is why, for example, so many of them think that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because GAWD hates fags, when a better reading of the text is that they were destroyed for being inhospitable to strangers

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