This article is relevant to AQA A2 Unit 4, WJEC LA4 and OCR A2 Unit G153.
Blasphemy was defined as the offence of outraging and insulting the religious beliefs of a Christian. It was rarely prosecuted — there appear to have been only five prosecutions between 1883 and 1922 and after this there was doubt as to whether the offence still existed. Lord Denning, in a lecture on freedom under the law in 1949, confidently declared the offence of blasphemy to be ‘a dead letter’. However, several decades later the offence re-emerged in a highly publicised case concerning an erotic poem in the publication Gay News.
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