“The bill will make it punishable, for example, to burn the Quran or the Bible in public. It will only aim at actions in a public place or with the intention of spreading in a wider circle,” Hummelgaard said
Hummelgaard told a news conference that the recent protests were “senseless taunts that have no other purpose than to create discord and hatred.”
I agree with Hummelgaard. Those “protests” are used to create hatred. Even though it is also for me not comprehensible how people can be so sensitive about this, we all know the reaction it provokes. And even though we don’t agree and comprehend those feelings, we can still respect those feelings and just not senselessly create disruption. And hey… You can still burn as many Qurans in your private oven as you want.
“The bill will make it punishable, for example, for people of the same sex to kiss in public. It will only aim at actions in a public place or with the intention of spreading in a wider circle,” Hummelgaard said
I agree with Hummelgaard. Those “protests” are used to create hatred. Even though it is also for me not comprehensible how people can be so sensitive about this, we all know the reaction it provokes. And even though we don’t agree and comprehend those feelings, we can still respect those feelings and just not senselessly create disruption. And hey… You can still kiss as many people of the same sex in private as you want.
This isn’t an exaggeration: a few weeks ago in Ottawa we had anti-LGBT protests where rainbow flags were burned down – guess who was there? And while many of us were offended and appalled, nobody was threatened or beheaded in response, and we didn’t have politicians trying to pass a new law forbidding the burning of rainbow flags either.
The whole point of this is that in Europe we have fought for centuries in order to establish liberal democracies where freedom of speech and the separation of church and state are enshrined. We must not appease extremists who achieve change with threats of violence. There is a name for that.
In a democracy the act of burning a book, or a flag, is a canary in the coal mine: you know there is trouble when it dies.
The message is simple: we don’t threaten people who have different ideas.
you do realize that the people burning lgbt flags now, will burn lgbt people, or whoever they think to be lgbt, if they get the chance to?
Destroying symbols of a group is a step in the escalation to killing people of that group. Source: two millenia of antisemitism in europe. First you attack the symbols, then the places and finally the people.
The common thread between both is religious extremism.
How is this blasphemy law different from the draconian anti-LGBT or anti-abortion laws in the USA? BOTH ARE JUSTIFIED with purely with religious feelings/opinions.
We can not have a modern society where people feel strongly about religion. And there is really no point in appeasement of fundamentalists - they don’t want a compromise they allays want it all.
yeah, clearly the compromise needs to be burning symbols of a group in public to stir hatred and violence against that group. That is totally the reasonable compromise. Clearly the people wanting the right to burn things in public are not fundamentalist, after all basically everyone burns a Quran, or Torah or Bible for breakfast amirite?
Look at the real-world consequences of mocking Islam, of drawing prophet Muhamed, or burning the Qur’an.
Compare them with the real-world consequences of mocking any other religion (or atheism), or burning their “sacred” books.
Are they comparable? Who is then the oppressor, and who is the oppressed?
The intent is secondary to the effect. If certain muslim people cannot put their religious sensibilities BELOW the secular human rights of their fellow country men, they LITERALLY need to leave. They are literally bad for us, and our social, secular order. EXACTLY like the hardcore christians are bad for human rights in the USA.
