Blasphemy – The Fire This Time, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #389 | @MDWorld

January 26, 2015 Mike Gold 3 Comments

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. • Mark Twain

Since we’ve been on the subject of free speech vs. religious zeal, I would like you to read the following paragraph out loud, in front of other people, preferably in a public place. Yeah, I know, I ask for a lot. Ready?

“Jesus Christ is a fraud and Mary was a slut. Moses was a floater; they never should have pulled him out of the brine. Muhammad has really rotten body odor. The Buddha looks like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Man without his wig.”

Oh, damn. Did I mention you shouldn’t say that in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wyoming? I am really sorry. Blasphemy is illegal in those states – not to mention many individual counties, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project. You can be fined, incarcerated, or, I dunno, put in a pillory or something. Maybe even flogged.

Of course, as we’ve recently seen in places such as Boston and Paris, blasphemy also has the nasty habit of attracting the wrath of religious fanatics with pressure cookers and guns.

According to the Jewish Daily Forward, “In Massachusetts, the law makes it a crime to blaspheme ‘god by denying, cursing or (insulting) his creation, government or final judging… Jesus Christ… the Holy Ghost… or exposing to contempt and ridicule the holy scriptures.” You can be tossed in the clinker for a year and fined $300.00.

And Massachusetts is supposed to be America’s bastion of liberal thought and practice. Well, maybe it is.

In 2007 a Pennsylvania filmmaker wanted to register his company under the name “I Choose Hell Productions LLC.” He was informed he was in breech of state anti-blasphemy laws, and the state refused the registration. This brave freedom fighter sued in federal court and got that law rendered impotent, but it wasn’t until 2014 that the law was actually stricken from the books.

The French government did not kill the folks at Charlie Hebdo, nor did that government incarcerate these satirists. But the French ran fast in the opposite direction, jailing people who were exercising their incorrectly perceived right to free speech – that which is ridiculously called “hate speech.” These folks were saying things that annoyed some Jews. Today, Judaism in France is something of a fad. In the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus back at the turn of the last century… well, not so much.

America loves to paint itself as the land of religious freedom.

This is a lie.

600 years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we’ve advanced. • John Cleese

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Michael Davis and Martha Thomases as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.