"cast of lowlifes"

And here I thought the book would have no relevance to anyone.  As I explain in Chapter Five of Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe, it remains a crime in Canada to publish blasphemous material.  That provision of our Criminal Code, as with so many, is derived from English law - where it appears that free speech is due to get a bit of a workout:

The leader of a small evangelical group went to Britain's High Court on Tuesday in a bid to sue the producers of ``Jerry Springer: The Opera" for blasphemy.

... Earlier this year, a lower court rejected a request to issue summonses against "Springer" producer John Thoday and Mark Thompson, director-general of the British Broadcasting Corp., which televised the show in 2005.  Green's lawyers are asking three High Court judges to allow private prosecution for blasphemous libel.

Evidently the English anti-blasphemy law has been successfully used as recently as 1977.

Comments

[Chris Taylor]

So technically Piss Christ is illegal up here? Awesome.

Does it play favourites with regard to religion, or is it silent on that matter?

Can Scientologists sue if you claim that L. Ron was fruitier than a nutcake?

[Bob Tarantino]

Does it play favourites with regard to religion, or is it silent on that matter?

The text of the Criminal Code is silent on the matter, although the caselaw (which in Canada at least predates the 1940s) clearly only contemplates that "blasphemy" can occur with respect to Christianity - but that's likely a function of the fact that, when blasphemy charges were in the air, Christianity was dominant by orders of magnitude. Which is a long way of saying that there's nothing to prevent the crime from applying to non-Christian religions, though it hasn't been used that way.

So technically Piss Christ is illegal up here?

That's an interesting question. I'm not sure whether it would ground a blasphemy claim, since there's no textual element to it, but I do know that there were cases which considered whether cartoons could be blasphemous (the particular cartoons in question were held to be non-blasphemous, since they attacked the Catholic Church and the Pope, rather than the Christian religion per se). So there'd be at least a plausible argument that it would count.

Can Scientologists sue if you claim that L. Ron was fruitier than a nutcake?

Depends on whether a judge would concede that Scientology qualifies as a religion, I suppose...