30 July 2009

Blasphemy Made a Crime in Ireland

.... Now I oppose this law, for the obvious reasons, which I won’t repeat here. The Irish Constitution does expressly calls for the punishment of blasphemy — “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law” — so the absence of a blasphemy law until now (an earlier law was struck down for not defining “blasphemy”) has itself been unconstitutional.

But it seems to me that Irish legislators should have tried to amend the constitution via referendum rather than enacting this sort of ban. [International Free Press Society] Read more