News that gymnast Louis Smith has been suspended by his governing bodyfor mocking Islam is so 2016. I don’t want to bang on about the auto?satirical state we’re in, but this is basically the blasphemy law being revived by British Gymnastics. It’s certainly one in the eye for parliament, which abolished the offence of blasphemy in 2008 – but perhaps those outplayed politicians can now retaliate by arbitrarily changing the scoring system for the uneven bars.
Indeed. It seems that the dhimmitude reaches to the world of gymnastics. One cannot make fun of Islam. Blasphemy laws by the back door. That, frankly, is outrageous. No religion should be above mockery. No belief system should be beyond offence. Freedom to speak, to mock, to ridicule is far too precious and is of vastly greater importance than the thin skins and ideology of the ROP.
Islam is merely another stupid belief system rooted in the moronic idea that we are ruled by supernatural beings. That might have made sense in the early middle ages. We should have grown out of such idiocy by now.
Curiously for a Guardian journo, Hyde is right. The British Gymnastics Association should be hanging its collective head in shame.
I wonder if they’d have done the same if someone had insulted the Catholics. I’d bet not…
I bet you could insult Christianity all the live-long day, and they’d never utter a peep…
Some of us remember Dick Emery with his ridiculous toothy vicar, Dave Allen’s sketches about the Pope and his Pope-mobile, the comical Christians of “All gas and gaiters” and “Oh Brother!” etc. Nobody took offense, Catholics and Protestant laughed along with it all. Now we have whiny, miserablist PC po faces pandering to un English, joyless, so called religion again. We had abandoned taking offense about the Christian religion centuries ago. Now we have another middle eastern fundamentalism which demands to be pandered to like it was still the middle ages, thanks to this mad political class.
I dunno about that. Do you remember when ‘Life of Brian’ was released? (My favourite movie of all time, as it happens). There was a hell of a stink from the religious nutters. Or when John Lennon said that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus?
Water under the bridge now, but ruffled a few feathers at the time.
Malcolm Muggeridge…
It did indeed….but they were (rightly) ignored.
I have a piece of kit that I use when I have to do kneeling down jobs around the house. It is basically a piece of carpet stapled onto a square of plywood. I have always referred to it as my prayer mat. Do I get a fatwa?
I’m not sure who I have the most contempt for, the permanently offended Islamists or the spineless twats who bend over backwards not to offend them. Anyway, every time the Islamists kick off about some real or imagined sleight against their risible religion, they demonstrate that they know as well as I do what a pile of cack it is.
Me, it’s the spineless twats, every time. They don’t realise that the noisy minority are indeed a minority, and I expect the rest wish they’d shut up as much as we do!