The latest follow up on the essay Freedom of Atheist Expression at “Liverpool’s John Lennon airport prayer room”??? is that the The National Secular Society is spinning like a top. They are attempting to paint the culprit as a martyr of persecution.
Fifty nine year old Harry Taylor found no other way in which to go about “simply challenging the views of others” than to leave “rude images in Liverpool Airport’s prayer room…images of important religious figures in sexual poses.”1
The National Secular Society decries the fact that he was released on bail and will be sentenced on 23 April as “draconian” because they claim that Taylor is being persecuted via a blasphemy law.
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said the prosecution had brought blasphemy laws “in through the back door…This is a disgraceful verdict, but an inevitable one under this pernicious law. It seems incredible in the 21st Century that you might be sent to prison because someone is ‘offended’ by your views on their religion. The blasphemy law was abolished three years ago, but it lives on under the guise of religiously aggravated offences and is several times more dangerous. Mr Taylor struck me as slightly eccentric and he acted in a provocative way…In a multicultural society, none of us should have the legal right not to be offended. This law needs to be re-examined urgently.
The BBC did not actually specify under which law he is being charged. One may imagine that it had something to do with posting pornographic images in public. Note that Sanderson referenced his opinion—perhaps his desperate grasping at straws—that the blasphemy law was being brought in through the back door. It seems like a case of we have nothing to argue so we will imagine a problem so as to turn a childishly malicious atheist into a martyr.
“The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it treated each case on an individual basis. A spokeswoman said: “All we can do is to look at each on its merits.”