On Trial for Blasphemy

The Book of Leviticus declares that anyone who commits the sin of blasphemy should be stoned to death. In Britain, where blasphemy was still punishable by death until the 18th century, the last actual prosecution occurred in 1921, when John William Gott was sentenced to nine months at hard labor for writing that Christ looked like a circus clown as he rode into Jerusalem.

Last week, however, blasphemy was once again at issue in the oak-paneled Court No. 8 at London's Old Bailey. The defendants: Gay News (circulation: 20,000), a fortnightly newspaper for homosexuals, and Denis Lemon, 32, editor of the periodical, who came to court with a button saying GAY NEWS FIGHTS ON in the lapel of his conservative three-piece gray suit. The offense: publishing a poem by James Kirkup, in which a Roman centurion describes his sexual relations with the body of the crucified Christ. Prosecutor John J. Smyth called the verses "so vile that it would be hard for even the most perverted imagination to conjure up anything worse."

Judge Alan King-Hamilton, 72, refused to permit the defense to provide professional testimony on the merit of the poem or its author, a professor of literature and winner of numerous prizes, among them the Rockefeller Foundation's Atlantic Award. The judge did permit Drama Critic Bernard Levin of the Sunday Times and Novelist Margaret Drabble (The Realms of Gold) to testify as character witnesses. This led to some odd exchanges about Gay News--e.g., its publication of pictures from a sex manual for homosexuals.

Judge King-Hamilton: What I don't understand is why homosexuals need help in this way.

Levin: They need it neither more nor less than heterosexuals.

Judge: This is all beyond me.

Defense Counsel Geoffrey Robertson defended Kirkup's poem as "a genuine expression of how one man came to love God . . . a devotional poem by a gifted poet," but the jury was not impressed. By a vote of 10 to 2, it convicted both Lemon and Gay News. The judge praised the jury for its "moral courage" and imposed fines of $1,700 on the paper and $850 on the editor.

The National Council for Civil Liberties promptly denounced the judgment as "a dangerous new form of censorship." Several newspapers agreed. The Guardian, for one, expressed doubt whether "blasphemy as a criminal charge is germane to contemporary arguments." A Labor M.P., Brian Sedge-more, joined in with an appeal that Britain's 279-year-old blasphemy statute be abolished by Parliament. The odds on such a move, however, appear small.

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