Comments on: Australian $cientologists call for censorship

By: barriejohn

barriejohn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:00:07 +0000

Perhaps it would be only fair to offer such protection to religion. After all, according to certain “learned gentlemen” it is not lawful to criticize homoeopathy, as we have already seen!

By: Stonyground

Stonyground — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:27:48 +0000

Barriejohn is spot on with his observation on recommendation 3. A rule like that would effectively be a ban on propagating any religion that contains known falsehoods, which I think would be just about all of them.

By: j.r.

j.r. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:31:06 +0000

I wonder how religion would be defined, and whether other activities should be protected from vilification. For instance, I wonder how the “church” of scientology would feel about a law protecting psychiatry from vilification.

By: Monitor

Monitor — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:12:47 +0000

(Clicking on the “Free Expression is No Offence”‘ banner in the sidebar here should take you straight there)

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:26:33 +0000

English PEN had to run a campaiagn against similar laws back in 2005. Check our web pages on ‘Free Expression is No Offence’ for an explanation of the campaign.

By: barriejohn

barriejohn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:08:23 +0000

I think they might well have blown their foot off completely with Recommendation 3! “Restriction on Religious Misinformation and Misrepresentation known or reasonably known to be untruthful…” Doesn’t that pretty well sum up all this Old Mother Hubbard crap?