Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 116
116 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi Canada found blasphemy in a pamphlet virulently attacking the Roman Catholic Church and, in another case, imprisoned and deported the editor of an agnostic journal for his facetious refer- ences to the ‘frenzied megalomaniac boastings’ of a ‘touchy Jehovah whom deluded superstitionists claim to be the creator of the whole universe. ’ (Canadian Bar Rev. , V, May 1927). It will be interesting to note that in the Canadian ‘Jehovah’ case, the trial judge, when charging the jury, observed that because ‘noth- ing is more sacred to us than our religion,’ any disrespectful lan- guage or writing that God-fearing people resent is blasphemy. Even in Great Britain, a country that values freedom of ex- pression so highly, Christianity is still part of the law of the land. However, Judaism and non-Christian beliefs cannot be blasphemed against. In 1978 a court of appeals sustained a conviction for blas- phemy. The culprit was James Kirkup, the editor of an obscure homosexual fortnightly magazine, called Gay News, in which he published a poem (The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name) that reads as if it were written by the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross. In the poem, the centurion and Jesus are homosexuals, and the intercourse between them is explicit and undoubtedly shocking to believers. Surprisingly, James Kirkup has been called a respectable man of letters by ‘distinguished’ critics and writers. The prosecutor at the trial, however, was no bigot and he urged an updated version of Lord Coleridge’s 1883 test : ‘You can say Christ was a fraud or deceiver or Christ may have been a homosexual, provided you say it in a. . . decent way. ’ (The same certainly applies to Rushdie). The prosecutor thought the poem’s manner ‘so vile that it would be hard for even the most perverted imagination to conjure up anything worse. ’ It is also interesting to note that the trial judge at the Old Bailey refused to permit the introduction of professional testimony on the literary merit of the poem or its author and praised the jury’s verdict of guilty and imposed fines of £1,000 on the paper and £500 on its editor; the judge also sentenced the editor to nine months in