Backward glance - By Corinna Adam. Originally published in the New Statesman, 15 July 1977. Selected by Brian Cathcart
"I simply had to protect Our Lord," Mrs Mary Whitehouse told me, in the Old Bailey coffee-bar, on the first day of the blasphemy trial. And indeed one of the more curious sights during an extraordinary legal week was that of Mrs Whitehouse and a small group of friends regularly huddled in silent prayer in the main concourses of the Central Criminal Court.
Whether or not in answer to prayer, or in response to the judge's summing up, this time - with the majority verdicts of guilty against Gay News Ltd and its editor Denis Lemon - Mrs Whitehouse has won the first round. The Lord alone knows on what flank she will next find it necessary to protect Him. (The James Kirkup poem, describing homosexual acts between a Roman centurion and Christ after the crucifixion, entitled 'The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name', would be equally blasphemous, we were told, had it appeared in The Times or the New Statesman - which last printed a poem by Professor Kirkup a year ago.) Nor can anyone tell how other people will use the verdict for their private purposes.
For what has happened, in effect, is that the law of blasphemy has been redefined by Judge King-Hamilton - even though, in the long legal submissions during the case, he said he had no intention of making any new law. It is a law which most people would think outdated - the last prosecution was over 50 years ago - and discriminatory in that it applies only to Christianity and probably only to the established Church. The metaphors were complementary: Mr John Mortimer QC, for the editor, spoke of 'blowing dust off old law books' to bring the case. Judge King-Hamilton riposted with the contrast between 'opening a window to let air into a stuffy Victorian room' and opening all doors and windows and causing a draught 'with all its attendant dangers'. Metaphors everywhere. Mr Geoff Robertson, for Gay News Ltd, interpreted the poem as one man's symbolic view of how a particular group of outcasts - i.e., homosexuals - could approach Christianity and hope for salvation. (He did it so well that even Mrs Whitehouse admitted she was moved, and had to think hard to realise how wrong he was, and 'probably inspired by Gay Christians anyway'.) Mixed metaphors, too. When sentencing Mr Lemon, Judge King-Hamilton expressed his hope that, as a result of the case, the 'pendulum of public opinion would swing back towards a more healthy climate'.
It took two days, while the jury sat outside in sublime (or more likely puzzled and irritated) ignorance, for the defence to submit, first, that the offence of blasphemous libel had been subsumed by the Public Order Act of 1936 and the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. No, said the judge, it had not. The law was still on the books. Then could they bring expert evidence, theological or literary? No, on both counts. The judge said, with what seemed absolute certainty, that the issue was a very simple one. The poem spoke for itself. He did not relish the prospect of the jury being 'side-tracked' by disputatious theologians. One felt he was deliberately lining himself up on the side of the ordinary chap against trendy intellectuals. At one point, he kindly told the jury (five women, seven men, two of them black) the latest Test score. Cricket is listed among his recreations in Who's Who - but then, so is 'the theatre'.
However, where many lawyers feel Judge King-Hamilton has, after all, redefined the law, is on the question of intent; that there must be an intention to blaspheme. (Blasphemy, briefly, involves vilifying Christ and the Christian religion, and outraging believers in, or sympathisers with, the faith, in a manner tending to cause a breach of the peace.) In the old cases, intention was of the essence: in the case of R. v. Gott in 1921, the defendant had publicly proclaimed that he had been found 'three times guilty'. He wanted to shock, and he did cause a breach of the peace. Ladies in the street waved umbrellas at him and shouted 'disgusting, disgusting'. In this case, some misguided Gay News supporters, despite being asked not to do so by the defendants, had handed out leaflets in the street defaming Mrs Whitehouse. One of them wore a variety of dresses, and a number of crucifixes round his neck. He took a pint of beer off me in the local pub and I don't think even an eyebrow was raised in more than mild amusement.
Nevertheless, the world inside the Old Bailey is a closed and different world, and Judge King-Hamilton's ruling on what constituted a 'tendency to cause a breach of the peace' was precisely the same when the jury came back to ask for guidance on it as it had been in his summing-up. He relied largely on Mr Justice Avory's ruling in R. v. Gott - that it would be 'the instinct of any man worthy of the name to thrash a man or a woman' who sent him an abominable libel through the post. Gott sought his secular martyrdom, and was sentenced to nine months' hard labour, shortly after which he died. Lemon was refused permission to say that he had not intended to offend: his nine months' sentence is a suspended one, and he intends to fight it, if necessary, beyond the Appeal Court and the House of Lords 'to Europe'.
'Intent' will be one of the issues on which the defence will appeal, and so will the disputed question of a 'tendency to cause a breach of the peace'. Here the defence blame - if that is the right word - Mr Justice Wien's ruling in the case of Goldsmith v. Private Eye for criminal libel, when he excluded the breach of the peace clause as an essential element. Presumably the defence will also mention the latest Royal Commission on the Press, which recommends that private prosecutions against the press should be abolished in cases of blasphemous libel, as well as in those of seditious and criminal libel. (If anyone has forgotten, this prosecution was initiated privately by Mrs Whitehouse, and given Crown backing by Mr Justice Bristow last December. She is still called 'the Prosecutor'; Gay News and Denis Lemon have been ordered to pay all the prosecution costs.)
These are questions for the long term, for other rounds of the battle, for other seemingly endless discussions on the meaning and limits of freedom. It is clear enough where Mrs Whitehouse stands - and, indeed Judge King-Hamilton, who 'could not imagine...a more scurrilous profanity'. Most of us, I suppose - Gay News included - are a bit less sure of ourselves. One especially interesting feature of this case was how united the observers - and in particular the press - were against the prosecution, and in particular against Mr John Smyth's conduct of the case.
Of course the press benches are parti pris where the freedom of the press is in question. One of our heroes is Clarence Darrow; one of our texts the Scopes case, when he defended a teacher accused of corrupting children's minds with the Darwinian theory of evolution. This case, though, involved Christianity, homosexuality, and obscenity. It was a perfect trio for the prosecution, who could imply, though not state, that the defendants were not just blasphemers but filthy-minded deviants as well. But not one of us, from an extreme disbeliever to a devout Catholic, welcomed the verdict. As far as we were concerned, the prosecution had, at the least, deliberately introduced irrelevancies to discredit the character of the paper.
The chief of these, of course, was paedophilia. The gay movement is very divided on sexual love for children. Some feel they have enough troubles of their own; some are disgusted by it. Others, though, feel sympathy for paedophiles as comparable outcasts. It seems that Gay News prints articles by paedophiles because they cannot hope for a hearing elsewhere. It is a subject most people (like Margaret Drabble, giving character evidence for the paper) find distressing and distasteful. But Mr Smyth was given great leeway to reiterate the number of articles on the subject Gay News had published. Some impression, some nasty taste, must surely have been left.
Children are always brought into cases similar to this one - obscene publications cases, usually. In 1964 Mr Justice Stable ruled that we could not have the standards of what we read set by those of a 'well brought-up girl of 14'. But Mr King-Hamilton went back further, to the classic Lady Chatterley question, and asked Margaret Drabble whether her sons read Gay News. Her 16-year-old, she said, had read the poem. 'And the 12-year-old?' A charming smile. 'I'm afraid he never seems to read anything...'
Lost, I'm afraid, on the jury who emerged looking as though they had been through a compulsory group therapy session and all of whom, unprecedentedly, turned up next day to hear the sentences. It must have been hard for anyone to hold out against Judge King-Hamilton's brief and very determined summing-up, his emphasis on the fact that it should not matter to them whether it was a bad law. (Which it is.) At one point, in the defence, it was said that it was perhaps blasphemous to think that Christ needed the legal protection Mrs Whitehouse sought to give him. And we heard, of course, the worthy chestnut from the judge to the jury: 'This is not a court of morals, this is a court of law.' This week, that excellent definition seemed totally inapt.
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