In the current political climate, I tend to have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone raises topics that don’t address the Big Issue. That said, this issue is one that has always been close to my heart, given that I am on record as being intolerant of intolerance and fundamentally, almost viscerally, opposed to fundamentalism. So I want to stick my couple of cents’ worth into a debate that ignores, completely, Panama, reshuffles and trust(s).
Bill 113, currently before the House, proposes to decriminalise the vilification of religion, obscenity and blasphemy. Readers will forgive me for eschewing the temptation, to which all lawyers are prone to succumb, to split legal hairs and discuss the number of angels that can waltz on a pinhead.
Suffice it to say that, essentially, the Bill will, if passed, serve to protect artists and performers from the clear and present danger of prosecution if they dare to cast aspersions on anyone’s choice of which belief system to hold dear to their hearts.
This is because the law against blasphemy has anyway always been observed more in the breach than in the observance, except when the police want to add another line to the list of charges being served on some miscreant who is alleged to have disturbed the public peace and tranquility by showing what a ‘bully’ (in the Maltese sense) he or, less often, she is.
In the age of the internet, does anyone seriously think that obscenity is a realistically prosecutable offence? Strangely, the only contretemps of recent vintage that arose was one relating to a publication that appears to have been deemed obscene because of its “local colour”, which is a moderately strange form of reasoning, when you think about it.
As a country, we’ve grown up quite a bit since the days when foreign magazines used to have the “naughty bits” blacked out. We’re way more liberal than we used to be and the general trend is that unless something is abusive of the vulnerable, or too accessible by minors, it will not raise any hackles and life will go on.
There is no reason, then,for there to be any special law protecting religion per se
This does not mean, sadly, that under the law as it stands, we won’t ever get someone trying to drag us back into the dark days of intolerant fundamentalism, with (classic) plays with scenes that require a crucifix to be kicked across the stage being messed about with by the righteous simply because of their zeal to protect “their” religion.
Don’t get me wrong: it is unacceptable that anyone should seek to provoke, incense and generally vilify anyone else because of the belief system they espouse. I abhor, for instance, the ugly racism that raises its head every time a Muslim – or group thereof – dares to worship, or even try to, in public.
Equally, I abhor the pious insistence with which many faithful impose their mode of worship on others. The solution, to my mind, lies in all of us taking a step back from assuming that our chosen religion – or lack thereof – is the only form of public demonstrativeness that is acceptable.
Religion, because of the potential that its public manifestations have to raise the temperature, needs to be practised sensitively, and no one should be allowed to ram their chanting, processing, praying or whatever down anyone else’s throat.
The right to freedom of association and expression is one that is enshrined in our Constitution, and this includes the right to associate to express religious beliefs, but this right stops at the point where it becomes an imposition on my own right to live my life the way I want to.
Equally, I have no right to push that border back by being provocative or whatever to the people who choose to express themselves in a way that might be annoying to me, but the law relating to the preservation of public peace caters for this, perfectly adequately.
There is no reason, then, for there to be any special law protecting religion per se.
Nor is there any reason to remove the reference to Roman Catholicism from the Constitution, for that matter, because that would be messing with history. The Americans, after all, are still, at least last time I looked, “one nation under God”, and no one seriously thinks that the US is anything but a secular state.
Bill 113 needs to pass, perhaps with some tweaking to ensure that no one will then see the revised legal landscape as giving free licence to act like a boor towards anyone else. Politicians should remember that they represent all of us: all the Catholics, the Buddhists, the Muslims, the atheists, the Jedi knights and whoever else makes up the population.
In our turn, We the People need to remember that if our chosen religion (or lack thereof) is so weak that it needs some form of special protection under the law, then, hey, it’s not much of a belief-system, is it?