by Andrew Doyle
‘O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,
And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,
And get my bloody old sins washed white!’
These are the closing lines of Siegfried Sassoon’s war poem Stand-To: Good Friday Morning (1916). The soldier despises life at the front, and makes a deal to accept Christianity so long as Jesus arranges an injury that will get him invalided out of the trenches. It’s cynical and transactional, but unlikely to offend modern readers.
This was not the case in New Zealand in 1922, when John Glover was prosecuted under the law of ‘blasphemous libel’ for publishing Sassoon’s poem in his socialist newspaper The Maoriland Worker. The combination of religion and profanity was apparently too much. To those who wished to impose a narrow reading of the poem, it seemed to be parodying the very notion of Christian repentance and redemption. Glover faced one year in prison but was eventually acquitted. He has the distinction of being the only person ever prosecuted under this law from its inception in 1893 to its repeal in 2019.
The New Zealand chapter of the Free Speech Union is currently warning that there are moves afoot to reintroduce blasphemy law by the back door. We have seen it happen in the UK. Former police officer Stephen Gray was recently found guilty of an offence under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for reposting a joke about Islam on Facebook. The image was of a man in a turban and a rasher of bacon along with the caption: ‘Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a nine-year-old!’
Gray testified in court that he was one of thousands who had shared the post, and that it was a joke concerning the marriage of the Prophet Mohammed and Aisha. According to Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the most authoritative collections of hadith in Sunni Islam, Aisha was six when the marriage took place and nine when it was consummated. Remarkably, the judge ruled that Gray’s reposting of a meme on this subject was not within the bounds of acceptable free expression. So while Islamic blasphemy codes are not officially on the statute books in the UK, they may as well be.