Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently delivered the James Callaghan Memorial Lecture in which admitted that Britain's current blasphemy laws were "unworkable" and would accept their repeal. At the same time, though, he wants to see the introduction of new laws which would stigmatize and punish "extreme behaviors" — where "extreme" means anything that religious believers perceive as "thoughtless" or "cruel."

Usually when someone calls for restrictions on free speech, they are quick to reassure everyone that they only intend to criminalize a few extreme sorts of expressions while leaving everything else untouched — which means that the laws wouldn't touch most people most of the time. Rowan Williams did just the opposite, though, and was quick to impress upon everyone that he didn't merely mean a few of the most extreme sort of behavior.

The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to religious believers are pretty clear: the intention to limit or damage a believer's freedom to be visible and audible in the public life of a society is plainly an invasion of what a liberal society ought to be guaranteeing; and the obvious corollary is that the creation of an offence of incitement to religious hatred is a way of avoiding the civil disorder that threatens when a group comes to feel that it has been unjustly excluded. ...

The law cannot and should not prohibit argument, which involves criticism, and even, as I noted earlier, angry criticism at times; but it can in some settings send a signal about what is generally proper in a viable society by stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours that have the effect of silencing argument.  Rather than assuming that it is therefore only a few designated kinds of extreme behaviour that are unacceptable and that everything else is fair game, the legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and (even if unintentionally) cruel styles of speaking and acting.

Source: Archbishop of Canterbury

Why should such vague standards be limited to just religion alone? Why not impose legal limits on "cruel" speech in political and philosophical contexts? Why can't I claim that Williams' own comments about free speech are "thoughtless" and thus file a legal complaint against him? Apologists for religious privilege almost always try to carve out special rules that only apply to them and their religious beliefs — never to secular ideologies or beliefs. I think that this is an admission that religion cannot compete — that's why they can't accept an even playing field.

How, exactly, are believers' "freedom to be visible and audible in the public life of a society" damaged? I could understand stopping a person in a small group from using ridicule and abuse to intimidate others into silence, but those dynamics simply do not apply for large, diverse societies today. People have a multitude of options for speaking out. If anyone feels intimidated, it would probably be secular critics of religion who are subjected to harassment and threats from "offended" religious believers. I notice that Rowan Williams doesn’t call for more laws to protect us from his own flock.

Terry Sanderson, president, said that the Archbishop’s speech was a “blatant pitch for new legislation to replace the blasphemy laws that the Government are planning to scrap.” ...“It is as if the prolonged and widespread debate on the recently-introduced religious hatred legislation had never happened,” said Mr Sanderson. “Dr Williams takes us right back to the beginning with his special pleading for the protection of religious feelings – in other words, another form of blasphemy law that would be even worse than the one we’re about to ditch.”

Mr Sanderson pointed out that the Racial and Religious Hatred Act – which had been under consideration for five years - was now on the statute book. “It was enacted only after a great deal of bitter dispute between religious interests and those who feared for free speech,” he said. “There is also now in law a concept of religious aggravation that can be applied to some public order offences. It carries a potential prison sentence of seven years. This is draconian and extreme by any measure – and now the Archbishop appears to want something else.”

Mr Sanderson said that the Archbishop appeared in his speech to be making excuses for those who rioted about the Salman Rushdie case and threatened the author with death. He also seems to think that those who created lethal street protests over the Danish cartoons had a point. “The Archbishop’s speech is, at base, self-serving and dangerously illiberal,” Mr Sanderson said. “We certainly hope that the Government is not now going to bring forward something even more extreme as a quid pro quo for abolishing blasphemy.”

Source: The Times

The correct counter to bad speech is more speech, not to call in the government to punish people for expressing ideas in ways that bother us. I frequently address the writings of anti-atheist bigots here — bigots who, by the way, wouldn’t be in trouble under the sorts of laws Williams is proposing — and I never call for them to be silenced by the state or to be punished by the state for what they say. I think it's sufficient to expose how hateful, dishonest, and ridiculous they are.

Why doesn't Williams propose the same tactics... unless, perhaps, he's afraid that it isn't possible to offer effective count-arguments to secular critics of religion?