Harry Taylor, an avowed atheist, placed leaflets offensive to religious people in an airport's prayer room. As a result, Harry has been convicted of religiously-aggravated harassment, given a six month suspended sentence and an ASBO.
I want to consider a couple of issues: firstly, were his actions defensible? Secondly, is his conviction defensible? Finally, was the sentence defensible?
Starting with the second question first, I have issues with the concept of religiously-aggravated anything. Surely this creates back-door blasphemy laws? On the flip-side, I support and even encourage the idea of homophobia-aggravated offenses - for example, assault motivated by homophobia.
Why? Assault is, surely, always wrong regardless of the motivation! Should the law have anything to say about motives as opposed to intent? The argument goes that smacking someone in the teeth as a result of a disagreement is one thing, an assault. However, smacking them in the teeth because they are gay is considered by society to be particularly wrong, a hate crime, and this should be dealt with more seriously by the courts.
Likewise, harassment is always wrong, and the harm caused by harassment is significant to the victim. Is this done because of the victim's sexuality? Yes, it is, and I'm certainly aware of cases where it has occurred.
But does it become a hate crime if it's against groups who are, arguably, not minority, disempowered groups? One might argue if it's a Christian group then they don't qualify for protection from hate crimes, but what about Muslims? Sikhs? Hindus? Mormons? Do these groups experience a disproportionate amount of crime because of their religion, or is it more likely to be hate based on their ethnic origin?
The answer to this, for me, is that any group can experience hate crimes if they are the subject of the offences for no reason other than being a member of that group. This is discrimination, and unless that group deserves the discrimination (eg. they're all convicted paedophiles and the discrimination they are claiming is not being allowed to work in schools), discrimination is wrong: we are all equal in the eyes of the law.
So my conclusion here is that having different offences for different groups is unhelpful, and in fact the need to differentiate between the different groups (set of offences A for religious minorities, set B for sexual minorities, set C for ethnic minorities etc...) seems to me to be a well-intentioned form of discrimination. The legal offence is, I think, morally defensible is one considers it to be a universalisable value that all people should be free of discrimination. Whether this requires special legislation is perhaps a different discussion.
So if we accept that hate crimes can, and do, occur, is what he did a hate crime? I am a passionate believer is freedom of expression, and whilst I might not agree with someone's opinion, this doesn't give me the right to silence it; in fact, I would be willing to fight for their right to be heard. I very much like Philip Pullman's response to a man who asked why he was being offensive in relation to his latest book.
Nonetheless, his behaviour was not merely an issue of freedom of expression. He entered private property set aside for a particular purpose and placed the cartoons in there. This isn't merely standing on Hyde Park Corner and holding the cartoons on a placard, it's walking into their church and pinning the cartoons to the noticeboard.
This action crosses the line between freedom of expression and harassment. He didn't set out to express his opinion, he set out to torment people who did not agree with him. This, in my opinion, is wrong. I do not believe his actions are defensible.
Does this constitute harassment? Wikipedia describes harassment as "unwanted conduct which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual's dignity or creating an interrogating, degrading, hostile offensive or humiliating environment". Did his behaviour meet this standard? Arguably he intended to cause offence and to degrade the dignity of religious people.
Having said that, neither do I think it is defensible that it is the victim who gets to choose whether or not they are offended/harassed. I always have a problem with definitions of discrimination in the work place where a person makes an off-hand comment which is taken by another person to be discriminating against some minority status. Whilst it's not appropriate for me as a man to tell a woman that was said wasn't sexist and they should just pull themselves together (any more than it would be appropriate for me to tell a black man it wasn't racist), I do think that the intent of the sender is actually more important than the attitudes and sensitivity of the recipient of the message.
I would prefer a more objective test ("behaviour which the offender knew, or should have known, would cause offence") to the woolly, indeterminate and entirely subjective "behaviour which the victim claims offended them". And in this case, Mr Taylor should have known the behaviour would have caused offence, regardless of the victims taking of offence.
Worse, I think the cartoons were of such poor quality as to be thoroughly childish. The "no more nails" gag is just a bad joke, the "not for women or gays" poster is merely a statement of the assertions of certain religious groups that they have the right to discriminate against other minorities, and the reference to virgins in heaven is a comment on the flourishing of certain forms of fundamentalist and extremely dangerous religiously inspired groups.
I read in one report that the airport chaplain was deeply distressed by the cartoons. Frankly, the chaplain needs to grow up. However, I don't think this changes the fact that it was inappropriate for those cartoons, and for the objections of Mr Taylor, to be heard in a space set aside for those people. After all, I don't want to heard religious apologists in my lounge or on a skeptical podcast (although, if it were, I guarantee the strongest response would be a thoroughly intellectual shredding of the assertions of the religious!).
So, we have accepted that if we accept the principle of hate crimes, the offence itself is legitimate. I think as a society we accept that freedom of expression has boundaries, and that forcing a voice to be heard in a private location is beyond that boundary. Regardless of the test used (subjective or objective), the man should have known his behaviour was inappropriate. Finally, the sentence.
The sentence was six months (suspended) prison sentence, plus an ASBO ordering him not to carry anti-religious leaflets in public.
Without having read the pre-sentencing reports and having more information, I can't comment on the appropriateness of the prison sentence. However, the judge, by suspending the sentence, effectively said, "If you don't repeat the offence, you won't serve the time"; it was a strongly worded warning.
The second was the ASBO. Now, I think there are problems with ASBOs in general - making something a criminal offence which is otherwise not a legally proscribed behaviour (although it may be socially proscribed) seems to me to be extraordinarily illiberal, and the evidence to date is that they don't work either. But what this does in this case is limit Mr Taylor's freedom of expression further than the offence suggests is necessary.
Mr Taylor is prevented from carrying leaflets (as opposed to cartoons) in public (as opposed to in private places) for whatever intended purpose (as opposed to intending to cause offence). This, to me, is problematic, and I think it was disproportionate to the nature of the offence. A much more appropriate ASBO might be one which prevented Mr Taylor from entering the prayer room at the airport. After all, it's not the ideas which need protecting (religious ideas may be as good or bad as scientific or political ideas, and they should be subject to the same criticisms), but people may well need protection.
So, from my point of view, Mr Taylor was justifiably convicted of the offence, but I am concerned that the sentence goes beyond the offence and criminalises behaviours which are of value to a progressive and liberal society.
One more issue. The subsequent fall out has highlighted this man's atheism. Frequently, religious groups claim that atheists are just as intolerant of the religious as the religious are of the non-believers. The standard response to this is that people have fought wars, killed and persecuted in the name of religion far more than people have done so in the name of atheism (I can think of hundreds of examples of the former and very very few of the latter).
However, this is the first modern example of someone deliberately setting out to diminish the freedom of people because the person was an atheist and objected to people holding religious belief. Atheism is not anti-theism or antireligion, it's simply a rejection of the existence of gods. It would be a shame if the response from the atheist and secular groups and individuals had the effect of legitimising Harry Taylor's behaviour, despite the legitimate concerns which may exist around the sentence.
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