Registered: Aug 2000
Location: In a Blue, Blue State
Posts: 13114

TV Joan faces jail for gay poem

Moralists accuse Bakewell of blasphemy

Ben Summerskill, society editor
Sunday March 3, 2002
The Observer

It could be an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey. In the dock of the Central Criminal Court will stand Joan Bakewell, the TV presenter beloved of a generation as the 'thinking man's crumpet'.
Leading a constellation of supporters will be Sir John Mortimer, the QC and playwright, and BBC director-general Greg Dyke. Bakewell faces a prison sentence if she is found guilty.

Across the courtroom, the Director of Public Prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith QC, will present a charge of blasphemous libel referred to him by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, who is a leading evangelical Christian.

Bakewell's first rebellion against Britain's morality laws, the DPP will remind the court solemnly, was in the early Sixties when she smuggled a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover through Customs in her underwear.

Alarmingly for Bakewell, 68, this is not a chapter from the fictional Rumpole saga created by Mortimer himself.

Stevens's officers disclosed this weekend that they may charge Bakewell with blasphemous libel after she recited on TV part of an erotic poem about a Roman centurion's affection for Jesus.

The poem, which few argue has any outstanding literary merit, is The Love That Dares to Speak its Name. When last published, in 1976, the man responsible was given a nine-month suspended jail sentence and told he had come close to serving it.

If Bakewell is prosecuted, it will be a major test of Britain's controversial blasphemy laws which protect only Christians. They were introduced in the seventeenth century, when questioning the existence of the state religion was akin to treason. They have remained unamended ever since.

'I was making a point,' said Bakewell of her BBC series Taboo, broadcast last December. 'You need to show people how sensibilities are offended. It was the very fact that it was to do with Jesus and the disciples that shocked religious people. If you're going to say, "This is a tacky poem", you have to show it.'

A police spokesman confirmed that their inquiries follow a referral from the DPP: 'Officers have viewed tapes of the programme in relation to an alleged offence of blasphemy. The matter is under consideration.'

Taboo was reported to the DPP by the National Viewers and Listeners Association, newly-renamed Mediawatch, which funded a private prosecution against Gay News and its editor, Denis Lemon.

'I couldn't believe what was being said on my TV set,' said Mediawatch director John Beyer. 'It is unthinkable that the BBC should have repeated part of a poem already found by a jury to be a blasphemous libel.'

The poem, by Professor James Kirkup, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, portrays Jesus as a sexually active gay man. It was Mortimer who defended Lemon.

Mortimer said: 'I'm horrified. Not only is it monstrous there is no defence of literary merit available, but it's idiotic that the police should spend time on this.'

A BBC spokeswoman insisted: 'There was a serious purpose to this programme.' She declined to say whether lawyers had approved it.
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Blasphemous libel? Now that's a crock of shit and an affront to free speech. Whatever in the world possessed the Brits to keep an outmoded law like that on the books in this modern day and age? And then to actually charge someone with it?

In Nebraska, if a child burps during church, his parent may be arrested (courtsey of http://thatwasrandom.com/law.php). Could you imagine the outcry in this country if this happened? There are many old useless laws still on the books in this country, but they are rarely, if ever, enforced. There may be a reason long ago why some of these laws were passed, but times have changed so greatly that there are no need for them anymore. But why would a country like Great Brittain actually use a ridiculous law from the 1600's to prosecute someone, especially one that is so contrary to the concept of a free society? I'm suprised that there isn't a firestorm of protest ringing out about this over there (or is there? Maybe Sp00ky or Smug could enlighten us Colonials on the public reaction).

There was a great deal of controversy about "Piss Christ" here years ago, as well as the picture of the Madonna painted with elephant dung back in 1999. I can understand the debate about whether public money should be used to sponsor or exhibit such art, but no one suggested a law against this kind of art being created - such an idea would go against everything our constitution stands for: the right to do (within certain limits, of course) or say anything you please as long as you harm no one or maliciously defame someone with a lie (i.e. libel). Why has the British public allowed such a nonsense law to be used by their government?

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Registered: Dec 2000
Location: NZ
Posts: 877

Fortunately, some of the defences to a charge of blasphemous libel are if it was obviously a parody, meant with humour, not supposed to be representative of fact. I doubt this case will result in successful prosecution.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: seattle-ish
Posts: 11410

quote:

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and BBC director-general Greg Dyke.

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sorry. i had to point it out. Ill leave now.

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Registered: Dec 2001
Location: Baton Rouge
Posts: 1575

/devil's advocate on
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't BBC the state media in the UK? State owned and operated and all that? That would make anything they show government sponsored, no?
/devil's advocate off

What a farce. You can't prove the poem's libelous anyway... maybe Jesus was gay. Brotherly love and all that. Who knows? A law from the 1700s, jeez. I hate religious extremists... they're so petty.

Leakynips.

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