We should be protecting the right to religious freedom

This article originally appeared in the New York Post on Sept. 1, 2023.

In a now-familiar script, activists engage in well-publicized controversial expression critiquing or disparaging a religion, meeting with global condemnation and outrage, perhaps violence or threats.

Then, parliamentarians, heads of state and religious leaders press for legal changes to ensure that such expression is punished now and forbidden in the future. 

Sometimes they fail, and free speech lives to fight another day. But this time they’ve succeeded. 

Denmark has collapsed under the pressure, and signaled its intent to criminalize, at minimum, desecration of holy books.

This capitulation isn’t just a blow against the right to blaspheme: Denmark’s leaders have opened the door to greater restrictions on religious and political expression — a door notoriously difficult to shut again once opened.

We won’t make the world less hateful by legislating away its dissenters, and those considering new restrictions on blasphemy should think critically about why governments that regularly silence their critics are such resolute proponents of them.

Danish officials stated their plans to criminalize Koran burnings in late August after a spate of controversial incidents in Denmark and Sweden and increasingly heated protests and deteriorating relations with Iraq, Morocco, Turkey and other countries. 

On Aug. 25, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it “intends to criminalize improper treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community,” specifically singling out the public burning of holy books like the Koran or Bible as an example. 

Make no mistake: This is effectively a blasphemy law, one that seeks to shelter religious symbols the Danish government considers sufficiently holy from criticism it deems insufficiently civil. 

But in a free, secular society, it’s not the government’s role to pick and choose which belief systems deserve protection from grievous offense, and what criticisms against them are “improper.” 

Worse, more than just expression about religion is at risk.

UN Human Rights Council gets it wrong: Prosecuting blasphemy won’t stop religious discord, but it will silence dissent

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Last month, two men stood outside a mosque in Stockholm and proceeded to tear pages out of a Quran and set the book on fire in front of a crowd of onlookers.

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The ministry has also suggested it may intervene when other “countries” and “cultures” are insulted in a manner that “could have significant negative consequences for Denmark.”

The announcement is a disappointment, but it’s not exactly a shock amid mounting pressure to criminalize speech — pressure not just from individual politicians across the world, but from global institutions including the United Nations. 

By 28 to 12, the UN Human Rights Council in July passed a resolution calling on states to “address, prevent and prosecute acts and advocacy of religious hatred.”

The resolution, while non-binding, signaled an alarming victory for states, including  Pakistan and China, that seek to entrench authorities’ ability to punish dissenters and codify the state’s position on religious — and often political — matters, all with the seeming approval of the international human rights community. 

Weeks later, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a group of 57 member states that is the “collective voice of the Muslim world,” issued its own resolution demanding “the immediate cessation, and criminalization” of Koran burning and legal action against online speech insulting religious “institutions, holy books and religious symbols.” 

What began as a debate over the right to burn a holy book won’t end as such a narrow one.

Between the UNHRC’s demand for prosecution of the vaguely phrased “acts and advocacy of religious hatred” and the OIC’s call for bans on even more vague “insults” to religious institutions and symbols, the global push to censor and prosecute religious offense is growing.

All while the will to protect the right to critique and, yes, even insult religion wanes away.

One person’s act of religious hate is another’s political protest — as the many feminists, secularists, educators and LGBT-rights activists who have been censored under blasphemy laws would attest. 

Many understandably see book-burning, especially of a holy book, as upsetting and offensive by many.

But what may be advertised as a crackdown on religious “hate” will inescapably also target dissenting speech against religious bodies that are undeniably large, influential and often explicitly political institutions.

There is no way to impartially ban the allegedly “hateful” desecration of a holy item without also forbidding, for example, opponents of Iran’s morality police from destroying a headscarf or activists from painting rainbow halos on the Virgin Mary.

One person’s act of religious hate is another’s political protest — as the many feminists, secularists, educators and LGBT-rights activists who have been censored under blasphemy laws would attest. 

Other free nations should see Denmark’s decision as a cautionary tale, not as a role model.

We won’t make the world less hateful by legislating away its dissenters, and those considering new restrictions on blasphemy should think critically about why governments that regularly silence their critics are such resolute proponents of them.