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Blasphemy
The present legal concept of the offence of blasphemy is based on centuries-old court rulings concerning what was considered to be offensive and hostile to the tenets and beliefs of the Church of England and therefore threatening to society.
There is also an offence of blasphemous libel prohibiting publication of material that is deemed to be offensive to Christianity. The law is now little used and was last successfully employed in 1979 (Whitehouse v Lemon 1979) when the House of Lords upheld a conviction against the publisher of Gay News magazine for the publication of a poem by James Kirkup.
More recently, there was an attempt to prosecute Salman Rushdie for blasphemy after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. This failed, however, because the law does not protect religious faiths other than Christianity (and possibly only Christianity in the Church of England form).
For this reason, and because of concerns about freedom of expression, there have been calls to amend or repeal the law on blasphemy. However, there are no immediate plans to do either. The Government says that the law will be kept under review while new legislation tackling incitement to religious hatred comes into effect.
