A shameful verdict

Jerry Coyne today reports a frightening story from Austria.  The European Court of Human Rights has upheld a lower court's conviction of an Austrian citizen identified only as "Mrs. S" for "defamation" of the Muslim prophet Muhammad -- essentially a conviction for blasphemy.  Exactly what Mrs. S said has not been made public, but it apparently involved criticism (during seminars she gave about Islam) of Muhammad's marriage to one of his wives, 'Â'ishah.  According to the Hadîth, a collection of canonical Islamic texts second in authority only to the Qur'ân itself,  Muhammad married 'Â'ishah when she was six or seven years old and consummated the marriage when she was nine or ten (he would have been 53).  Apparently Mrs. S expressed the view that this showed that Muhammad had pedophilic tendencies, which the courts judged likely to offend Muslims and perhaps stir up anti-Islamic feeling.

Remember, the "facts" here are not in dispute, given that Islam accepts the Hadîth as canonical and thus religious Muslims accept its account of the ages of Muhammad and 'Â'ishah at the time of these events.  Nor does the invocation of pedophilia seem questionable; even if you think there is nothing wrong with it, as a sheer matter of accurate meanings of words, a 53-year-old man having sex with a girl of nine or ten surely constitutes a case of pedophilia.  It was apparently for expressing the view that there was indeed something wrong with this that Mrs. S was convicted of "disparaging religious doctrines".

The penalty -- a fine of €480 -- is not the point here.  The point is that the laws of Austria (and of several other European countries) make it an illegal act to express certain opinions about certain beliefs.  By exactly the same logic, one could justify laws that banned any criticism of Leviticus's condemnation of homosexuality, or of Catholic dogma on abortion and birth control, or even of the inanity of creationism.

A couple of months ago I wrote my definitive post on censorship and the advocates of laws against "hate speech", who do exist in the US.  I pointed out that in practice, in Europe, such laws are used almost exclusively to harass people who call attention to uncomfortable truths about Islam.  If Mrs. S could be convicted, I myself could be convicted dozens of times over for things I've said about Islam and other religions on this blog.  And it's not hard to see how such laws would work in practice in our own country.  There is already a vast constituency of Trumpanzees who hate the media for reporting reality (or "fake news", as they call it), and Trump himself has repeatedly expressed a desire to punish those who criticize him or report uncomfortable facts about him.  In Europe, "hate speech" laws punish those who tell the truth about Islam; in the US, they would punish those who tell the truth about Republicanism.

Read Coyne's post, and be very grateful that we have the First Amendment and courts which -- at least so far -- have been robust in upholding its protections for free expression.