The clip is from a May Dispatches and the guy getting the attention is Stephen Green of Christian Voice.
Green rose to prominence in the UK when he protested Jerry Springer The Opera. Having tasted infamy (it became apparent to observers fairly early on Green doesn’t hear the screws rattling around in his head) he got litigious when the BBC aired the opera. It’s a long story, but basically the short version is he wound up getting an archaic blasphemy law struck down.

The case is a key test of whether the laws of blasphemy are compatible with free speech, as enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Liberty, the human rights group, has intervened in the case and will argue that free speech protects the secular, sacred and profane alike — and that people should see free speech and conscience rights as running together.

But the case will also be a fresh test of whether blasphemy should exist as a criminal offence at all. Liberty will also argue that the offence should not be recognised in English law at all — because of its lack of sufficient legal certainty as held by the Irish Supreme Court in a case in 2000. The Council of Europe also recommended in June this year that blasphemy should be decriminalised, as has the Law Commission, in a working paper in 1981 and in its final report in 1985.

The chief reason cited for abolition is that blasphemy applies only to Christianity and the Council of Europe is concerned that members of a particular religion should be neither privileged nor disadvantaged by the criminal law.

The difficulty is Green brought the case against two individuals then BBC Director-General Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday of Avalon Promotions. The High Court refused to hear the case in December 2007, and the blasphemy law was abolished by the House of Lords in March.

While all this was winding it’s way through the system Stephen Green kept quite busy protesting all sorts of things that went against the voice in his head.

Because he took two individuals through the legal system he has been ordered to pay costs - 90 thousand pounds.
He is not a sympathetic figure, authoritarian zealots rarely are, and his repeated attempts to be David against Goliath has generated a counter-petition to have him pay up, polarized against his petition to be let off the hook. ‘Sod off’ may feed his persecution complex, his pleas aren’t going to pay the bill.

He genuinely doesn’t appear to grasp cause and effect, while he has an uncanny ability to garner publicity, I think the only world Steven Green appears to understand is Steven Greens world. Richard Bartholmew takes a fair look at his press release.


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