ABSTRACT
In reflecting the changing concerns of society at large, blasphemy in England has mutated from a criminal mechanism designed to ensure religious conformity, through brief status as an issue of national security to become, from the late nineteenth century onwards a matter for the scrutiny of public opinion. The last of these phases has made the offence, and society's attitudes to it, more responsive than ever to social and cultural climates of change. This chapter will discuss this last phase with particular reference to two cases; each of these occurring at either end of this period. The first of these, the celebrated Freethinker case, R v Ramsay and Foote (1883), was fundamentally important in altering the case law of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.2 Arguably it was from this moment that the intrinsically tight relationship between Church and State found its bounds loosened sufficiently to allow liberal secular opinion to
expand. However, reasons for studying the second of these cases in a comparative context is precisely the reverse of the reasons for studying the first. This case, the equally-celebrated Gay News case of 1977 and 1978, similarly altered the law, but in this instance restored the law to the condition it was in before the Foote case.3 This latter judgment and its assumptions about the finite and indissoluble nature of religion and religious belief closed the door to endlessly liberal progressive legal interpretations of culture and cultural development which had otherwise characterised the twentieth century. But it also demonstrated how responsive a law like blasphemy is to issues that centre around public opinion relating to bad behaviour and precisely how such opinion might be harnessed and manipulated.
